Keystone Cemetery (Mountain View Cemetery)

Keystone Cemetery, also recorded as Mountain View Cemetery, sits along Cemetery Road off Highway 16A above the old gold-mining town of Keystone in Pennington County, South Dakota. It was established in 1900, in the years when Keystone was a booming hard-rock mining camp in the Black Hills, and the land is associated with an early deed connected to the Harney (now Black Hills) National Forest. The grounds hold roughly 450 to 650 documented burials.

The cemetery is best known today for a geographic distinction: it is frequently described as the only cemetery in the world with a clear, direct line of sight to the carved faces of Mount Rushmore, which lie just to the southwest. The monument's sculptor and workers lived and worked in and around Keystone during the 1927-1941 carving period, and a number of those workers are buried here after dying in later years.

Notable burials include David Swanzey, an early Keystone figure who helped promote the naming of Mount Rushmore and who married Carrie Ingalls, sister of author Laura Ingalls Wilder. Miners, cowboys, and Rushmore carvers fill the older rows, alongside a handful of colorful local characters whose tall tales became part of Keystone lore.

The cemetery remains an active, publicly accessible burial ground maintained for the Keystone community. Its hillside setting, period grave markers, and the framed view of Mount Rushmore make it both a historic site and a quiet overlook.

Importantly, the popular claim that the cemetery holds workers who died during the carving of Mount Rushmore is not accurate: no workers were killed during the actual construction of the monument. Workers who carved Rushmore and were later buried here died in subsequent years of other causes.