There is a question worth asking before we get into any of this: when is the end of something also the beginning?
El Paso is a city built on layered history, stories stacked on top of stories, names etched into the land long before the railroad ever arrived. And few names are more foundational to what this city became than the one resting at the entrance of Concordia Cemetery: Juana Maria Ascarate Stephenson. The First Lady of Concordia. The woman without whom the story of one of the most legendary cemeteries in the American West never begins.
Who Was Juana Maria Ascarate?
Juana Maria Ascarate was born in 1800 into Spanish aristocracy, and not just any aristocracy. Her family ranked among the most elite in the El Paso del Norte region. The Ascarate name carried serious weight. For their military service to the Spanish Crown, the family had been granted land tracts totaling thousands of acres, and Juana stood to inherit all of it: the land in the Corralitas area, the cattle, the silver mining interests. She was, in every sense of the word, a powerful woman before she ever became anyone’s wife.
Someone at the Concordia Heritage Association once put it simply: the numbers on a tombstone matter, but the dash between them matters more. That little dash is a whole life lived. In Juana’s case, the numbers and the dash deserve equal attention.
A Love Story With a Little Controversy
Here is where things get interesting. In 1828, Juana Maria Ascarate married Hugh Stephenson, a trapper and trader born in Kentucky who had made his way from Concordia, Missouri down into Chihuahua to work the trade routes. Think of it as the classic story of a princess choosing the regular joe over the prince. In other words, Hugh Stephenson found himself a very wealthy partner…