Colorado isn’t alone in celebrating its 150th anniversary this year.

In Longmont, Mountain View Cemetery has spent the past century and a half serving as the final resting place for members of the local community. As it marks 150 years since its establishment in 1876, the cemetery is preparing for a busy Memorial Day weekend.

On Monday, the cemetery at 620 11th Ave. will be the gathering place for a ceremony honoring United States military service members who died. The ceremony at 11 a.m. is the last of three Longmont-area ceremonies Monday morning that will commemorate departed veterans.

Getting the 40-acre property ready for Monday is stressful, said Travis Haselbush, the cemetery’s general manager. In a Times-Call article from 1975, the cemetery’s manager at the time said that Mountain View got 5,000 visitors every Memorial Day weekend. Today, the weekend is still the cemetery’s busiest time of the year in terms of visitation, Haselbush said.

Haselbush explained that his job is to make sure the cemetery grounds look “as nice as possible,” a task that includes managing the roughly 170 burial services that take place each year. Still, Haselbush is glad to see visitors come to the cemetery to walk around, get some exercise or watch birds.

“We enjoy seeing people come in because we do put a lot of effort into making it look nice,” he said. “We do it for the families that are buried here, but we also enjoy people coming in and just enjoying it, as well.”

Rather than surround the grave sites with shrubs and flowers, cemetery management keeps the design minimalistic, giving visitors room to appreciate the headstones, Haselbush explained. In addition to graves and the mausoleum, some cemetery residents are held in a columbarium — a structure that stores urns with cremated remains.

The cemetery grounds aren’t limited to hosting burials, Memorial Day visits and holiday wreath-laying ceremonies. Sometimes, people just want to take a photo with Harry J. Potter’s headstone. Fans of the fantasy book and film series have made the pilgrimage to the space in Mountain View that bears the name of the fictional wizard down to the middle initial.

“We’ve memorized where that stone is because we actually have people come searching for it,” Haselbush said. “They somehow hear a rumor that there’s a Harry J. Potter, so they want to see the stone.”

The cemetery is governed by five directors with lifetime appointments: Steven Freeman, Larrick French, Al Manley, Kirsten Palmer and William Thorvaldson. As the board president, Thorvaldson works with his fellow directors to oversee cemetery operations and capital improvements.

Just under 22,000 people are currently interred at Mountain View Cemetery. Resting there are individuals who shaped Longmont’s history, from members of the Hover family to early settlers of the region. Recently, the number of services per year has been split almost evenly between cremations and full-body burials, Thorvaldson said.

“Slowly but surely over the past several years, the number of cremations has increased pretty significantly,” Thorvaldson said.

Mountain View was incorporated as a nonprofit cemetery on Dec. 21, 1876. Colorado had become a state in August of that year. The cemetery’s oldest recorded burial was also in 1876 for a man named John Owen.

“We’ve served the city of Longmont and all of the surrounding area for 150 years,” Thorvaldson said. “That’s pretty amazing.”

Jana Lohmeier, the cemetery’s office manager, shared that she’s been seeing a new type of frequent cemetery visitor.

“I feel like I’m noticing a renewed interest in genealogy, especially with younger people,” she said. “I get a lot of younger people calling to find out where their family members are buried.”

The cemetery has had its share of ups and downs throughout the decades. Vandalism has plagued the grounds for years; the Times-Call reported instances of people tipping over or breaking gravestones in 1974, 1978 and 1979. In 2013, vandals damaged a statue of a Civil War soldier in the cemetery. A replica now stands in its place.

There are nearly 2,000 open spaces for anyone considering burial or urn storage at the cemetery. Interment at Mountain View is available to Longmont residents as well as people who don’t live in the city.

Looking ahead, the cemetery has around 5 acres that might get developed in the next couple of years so staff can sell spaces in that area; right now, that portion of the west side of the cemetery is a dirt field. Mountain View also owns 35 acres along U.S. 287 across from Foothills Gardens of Memory cemetery. That property can be used for more burials if the 11th Avenue location runs out of space.

The fact that Mountain View Cemetery is a nonprofit and isn’t owned by a city or corporation, Lohmeier said, is unique.

“I kind of think it’s a gift to a city, honestly,” she said. “The community gets the benefit of a really nice city cemetery, but the city doesn’t have to maintain it or do anything. So I do think it’s very precious to a community to have a cemetery like this.”