Oak Hill Cemetery

Oak Hill Cemetery is a 110-acre designed landscape that has served the community since 1853. The cemetery and its components demonstrate many architectural styles in its buildings and monuments, cultural movements in its physical organization, and careful management in its planning details. Oak Hill's present location reflects the influence of the Rural Cemetery Movement of the mid-1800s that advocated creating park-like settings for burial sites outside the city in lieu of small urban graveyards. Its physical characteristics reflect Romantic Period design elements such as asymmetrical, irregular landforms, exotic tree species, and meandering paths leading to serene vistas. Typical of he Romantic design, the cemetery uses Classical and Baroque style monuments to commemorate the deceased. Monuments are made of marble, sandstone, or limestone., A significant counterpoint to Romanticism came with the 1864 burial of 572 Union and 30 Confederate soldiers in a closely packed grid pattern. This group of burials is positioned within a gently sloping but otherwise unadorned plot of land. In the latter decades of the 19th century, Late Victorian and Neo-classical architectural styles prevailed in ornamentation on markers and monuments. Fully sculpted figures and objects, incised details reminiscent of the Eastlake style, Gothic influences, and colored granite appeared more frequently during this time., Preferences for natural landscaping in the cemetery's early period gave way to a desire for a more garden-like setting. The Western Addition, platted in 1903, and the northern half of Oak Hill, appear to have been designed according to Adolph Strauch's concept of the Landscape Lawn Plan. This plan emphasized smaller monuments, more open placement, broad sweeps of lawn, and the removal of clutter and fences around individual graves., This historic designed landscape contains, among other things, approximately 63,000 burials including a sandstone marker from 1816 – a reburial from an urban graveyard and a Civil War burying ground. The cemetery also contains two early 1900s ponds, winding drives and pathways, 966 trees of 60 different species scattered across wide expanses of lawn and a recently constructed veterans memorial near the entrance. The entirety is surrounded by a brick wall. Architecturally, the site is crowned by a French Renaissance-inspired administration building designed by the prolific local architects Harris and Shopbell., Now surrounded by a mix of twentieth century residential and commercial buildings, Oak Hill Cemetery retains a sense of the past, in its monuments and its design. In the midst of houses, it conveys a pastoral serenity for both the living and the dead.