Organized in 1897, Alta Loma Cemetery served the ranching and farming community of Alta Loma, a town site established in 1893 by the Alta Loma Investment and Improvement Company of Colorado; its name means "High Land" in Spanish. In 1894 William Skirvin led the first party of settlers to the new town and is buried here. Although land was set aside for cemetery use when Alta Loma was established, the company did not present the deed to the town for this property until 1897, the year of the first burial, the infant son of the Stobart family. Those buried here include members of early pioneering families who raised longhorn cattle in the area, residents of nearby settlements, and community and business leaders, immigrants, teachers, preachers, and veterans of military conflicts dating to World War I. The Alta Loma Cemetery Association, organized in 1904, continues to maintain the burial ground, whose features include curbed plots, vertical stones, false crypts, grave slabs, and statuary. After Santa Fe incorporated Alta Loma into its city limits in 1978, the cemetery remained one of the few surviving vestiges of the vanished settlement and a record of its once thriving community.