Pueblo citizen historian one step closer to honoring identities of unmarked graves
Feb. 25, 2026 correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the Roselawn 1891 Foundation will sponsor a storyboard plaque to honor 70 Black Soldiers buried in unmarked graves.
Roselawn 1891 Foundation will sponsor a storyboard plaque to honor 70 Civil War soldiers in unmarked graves, but only one of the soldiers, Hardy Faulkner, was Black, and is a suspected Buffalo Soldier. Citizen historian Ray Brown, who has been researching the over 450 unmarked graves of Black Puebloans at Roselawn, discovered Faulkner’s identity.
PUEBLO, Colo. — Roselawn Cemetery in Pueblo will soon be home to a plaque recognizing 70 Civil War soldiers buried in unmarked graves, one of which is a suspected Buffalo Soldier. The suspected Buffalo Soldier was uncovered through an over a decade long project where citizen historian Ray Brown has been researching the identities of over 450 unmarked graves of Black Puebloans buried in Roselawn.
The Roselawn 1891 Company, a nonprofit that preserves the historic cemetery, voted earlier this month in favor of sponsoring a 18-by-24-inch plaque engraved with each individual's name. The foundation plans to make a storyboard with information about the soldiers and list their death date and age.
“Each life deserves to be remembered,” said Lucille Corsentino, who previously worked in sales at Roselawn Cemetery and now works part-time as a consultant.
The foundation’s efforts to recognize Black history in Pueblo comes at a time when the federal government is removing Black history exhibits about formerly enslaved people and ending Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth as free entry days to national parks. Earlier this month, President Donald Trump shared racist imagery of Barack and Michelle Obama.
The Roselawn 1891 Company will pay for the storyboard honoring the unmarked graves. The foundation is fundraising $1,500 for the plaque.
Efforts to identify the unmarked graves at Roselawn started in 2014 when Corsentino asked Ray Brown for research help at the cemetery.
Brown is a Pueblo citizen historian and Buffalo Soldier reenactor. Corsentino knew that there were Black soldiers buried at Roselawn because of the cemetery’s historical documents but was unsure if they were Buffalo Soldiers.
When Brown went to the local Pueblo library, he learned that the acronym “USCI” on suspected graves of Black soldiers meant “United States Colored Infantry," but it did not indicate Buffalo Soldiers.
Though the reasons behind the name “Buffalo Soldier” are debated — some say Native Americans gave the soldiers this name because their dark, curly hair resembled a buffalo’s coat — the group was composed of Black men in the Ninth and Tenth United States Cavalry in the late 1800s. They were sent to the U.S.-Mexico border, West Point, Hawaii and the Phillipines, but none of the soldiers fought in World War I. Many of the Buffalo Soldiers served as some of the national parks’ first rangers.
“I was very, very excited to think that there might be Buffalo Soldiers buried here at Roselawn Cemetery,” Brown said.
Known in the community as a history buff, Brown, 71, helped local civil rights advocate Ruth Steele with the Martin Luther King Jr. Culture Center when he moved to Pueblo. Before making a home in Pueblo, Brown lived in a farm outside of Fort Lupton, where he first saw reenactors with the Buffalo Soldiers of the American West at the annual Trapper Days parade.
“So I followed them throughout the parade. And when they got off their horses … I walked up to them and said, ‘Hi, I'm Ray Brown, and I want to be a part of your organization,’” Brown said.
What started as a search for Buffalo Soldiers at Roselawn turned into a decade-plus-long research project where Brown identified and uncovered more information about the unmarked graves of Black soldiers in Block 12 of Roselawn Cemetery. Brown said Ancestry.com and Fold3 (a military database) helped him learn more about the people buried in the cemetery, but he was amazed at how long it took him to find information. Brown also found information on Black Puebloan civilians buried in Block 12.
“I'm sure that it’s close to about a million hours,” Brown said, joking about how much time he has dedicated to researching the unmarked graves.
“I have so much information available and in here collected, and my desk in my home is completely filled with stuff. And my wife always complains.”
In the original racist segregation of the cemetery grounds, the then-owners of the cemetery intentionally plotted the African-American graves in the back of the property. The original owners later sold the land in the front of the cemetery, located closer to the river, primarily for financial reasons and because they feared flooding potentially unearthing caskets, Brown said. Now, the plot of unmarked graves is the first section when entering the cemetery.
“It’s almost biblical,” said Rudy Krasovec, the executive director of Roselawn.
A few years after starting his research, Brown accepted a full-time position as the grounds and facilities director at Roselawn in 2020. But it wasn’t until this January that Brown found information that indicated Roselawn’s first buried Buffalo Soldier, Hardy Faulkner.
“Once we found Hardy Faulkner, things just kind of started boiling again, so to speak, and the interest became, you know, piqued,” Corsentino said. This renewed interest is why the Roselawn 1891 Company plans to sponsor the storyboard plaque now, even though Brown’s research has been nearly 12 years in the making.
Brown moved to Pueblo in 2012 to help his daughter when she had her first and only child. Originally from Colorado Springs, Brown lived all over the world — Arizona, Germany, Georgia and Washington — during the late 70s and early 80s while he served as an intelligence officer in the Army. Before moving to Pueblo, he also lived in Brighton, where he helped the Museum of Boulder curate its Black history exhibit. He also portrayed a Buffalo Soldier with the Buffalo Soldiers of the American West.
This year, Brown helped curate exhibits at El Pueblo’s new Black history exhibit that opened Jan. 19. Previously, he created the “Breaking Barriers” display at the Pueblo Weisbrod Aircraft Museum and a display on the Lincoln Home at the Pueblo Heritage Museum.
Brown still walks with the stature and poise of a military officer but talks with the patience of an educator. From 1998 to 2010, he taught high school classes like engineering, graphic arts and video production in Fort Lupton.
Over the past year, Brown used his teaching skill to train Kristy Trahan to continue researching the lives of all of the African-Americans buried at Roselawn, in addition to the work Brown conducted on unmarked graves of Black soldiers. When Trahan first started, she learned how to use Roselawn’s historical documents to find the graves.
“I've kind of graduated,” Trahan said.
Now Trahan spends most of her volunteer time — nearly four hours every Tuesday — at a computer searching Ancestry.com, the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collections, Fold3 and websites on African-American history in an effort to find more information on African-Americans buried at Roselawn.
“Even though I am Black, I didn't really realize that, you know, it's very difficult to identify, actually, correctly, who we are. And it's because of the slave trade,” Trahan said.
Brown said he hopes that collecting research about local Black history will allow others to see people who were important to the struggle and who, ultimately, paved the path for Brown to be successful in military and civilian life.
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