Cave Hill Cemetery and Arboretum
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Cave Hill Cemetery and Arboretum is a 296-acre Victorian era National Cemetery and arboretum located at 701 Baxter Avenue, Louisville, Kentucky. It is open daily to the public from 8:00 AM to 4:45 PM (weather permitting). Its main entrance is on Baxter Avenue and there is a secondary one on Grinstead Drive.
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[edit] History
Cave Hill was chartered in 1848 on what was William Johnston's Cave Hill Farm, then a rural property some distance east of Louisville. City officials had actually purchased part of the land in the 1830s in anticipation of building a railroad through it, and a workhouse was built there. The railroad was built elsewhere, and the land was leased to local farmers.
In 1846, Mayor Frederick A. Kaye began investigating the possibility of developing a garden-style cemetery on the grounds, a popular concept at the time. Hartford, Connecticut civil engineer Edmund Francis Lee was hired, who planned a cemetery with winding paths, graves across the tops of hills, and lakes and ponds in the valleys. The Cave Hill Cemetery Co. was chartered in February 1848, and the cemetery was dedicated on July 25, 1848.
After administrators sold several acres of land for the burial of Union soldiers during the Civil War, local Confederate supporters purchased nearby land as well. The grounds were expanded and remapped in 1888 to their modern size of nearly 300 acres.
The signature Baxter Avenue entrance was completed in 1892. The Corinthian-style building includes a 2,000 pound bell in its clock tower. The Grinstead Drive entrance was opened in 1913. Originally Beechurst Sanitarium was located near this entrance, but it was torn down in the 1930s.
The middle fork of Beargrass Creek runs through Cave Hill, and a fork of it roughly divides the cemetery in new (eastern) and old (western) sections. There are also two large man-made lakes.
The cemetery currently features more than 500 species of trees and shrubs, and contains monuments and graves of three Union generals.
[edit] Interments
- J. Graham Brown, builder of the Brown Hotel
- George Rogers Clark (Revolutionary War leader), Section P, lot 245
- Meriwether Lewis Clark, Jr. (founder of the Kentucky Derby) Section A, lot 699
- Patty Smith Hill (composer of "Happy Birthday to You") Section G, lot 96
- Matthew Harris Jouett (painter) reinterred in 1893 to Section c, lot 30
- George Keats (brother of poet John Keats) reinterred 1879, Section O lot 73
- Alice Hegan Rice (author) Section Q, lot 107
- Harland Sanders ("Colonel Sanders") Section 33, lot 57
- James Speed Lawyer and attorney general under Abraham Lincoln, Section P, lot 681
- James Breckenridge Speed, industrialist and philanthropist
- Henry Watterson (and his father Harvey Magee Watterson)
- Enid Yandell (sculptor), Section O, Lot 396
- Mia Zapata, lead singer of the underground, punk-blues band, The Gits
Politicians
- James Guthrie, 19th century US Senator and Secretary of the Treasury
- John McKinley, Former senator and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court
- James Biddle Eustis, Louisiana Senator
- Frederic Mosley Sackett, Senator and Ambassador to Germany
- David Meriwether, Senator, Governor of New Mexico
- Thruston Ballard Morton, Served in both houses of Congress
- Augustus E. Willson, Governor of Kentucky
Louisville Mayors
- Andrew Broaddus
- John C. Bucklin reinterred in 1856 to Section M, lot 346
- William O. Cowger
- John M. Delph
- Charles R. Farnsley
- Bruce Hoblitzell
- John Joyes
- Frederick A. Kaye
- Neville Miller
- William S. Pilcher
- E. Leland Taylor
- Wilson W. Wyatt
Confederate soldiers
- Over 200 confederate soldies are buried in Section O. The original wooden grave markers have since been replaced by stone ones.
There were about 118,000 people interred by 1998.
[edit] Documents
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[edit] References
- Thomas, Samuel W., Cave Hill Cemerery: A Pictorial Guide and Its History, Cave Hill Cemetery Company, Louisville, Kentucky 1985
- The Political Graveyard (Jefferson County, Kentucky). Retrieved on 2006-05-20.
[edit] See also
- History of Louisville, Kentucky
- List of attractions and events in Louisville
- List of botanical gardens in the United States
- Louisville in the Civil War
[edit] External links
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