history continued

Along with Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati, Ohio, Greendale Cemetery was part of the Rural Cemetery movement that took place during the 19th century. The movement became popular after 1831 when the Nation’s first rural cemetery, Mount Auburn, was dedicated in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Rural Cemeteries, popular from about 1831 through the 1870s, were a departure from earlier tradition in which most burial grounds were either family plots located on private homesteads or on land associated with religious institutions. Rural cemeteries were located away from urban centers and acted as combined public gardens, parks, and burial grounds. Their designs reflected the picturesque garden theories of the English and French including indigenous and ornamental plantings, elaborate sculpture and gravemarkers, and winding roads and paths that followed the natural topography. Like Mt. Auburn and Spring Grove, Greendale Cemetery was established as a rural cemetery with design elements of the picturesque and romantic periods.