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"The original City Cemetery was on the lake front, and was considered a health hazard due to overcrowding and water-borne diseases. The bodies were moved to nearby Graceland in the town of Lake View, with the old city cemetery becoming what is now Lincoln Park.
Graceland is on the north side of Chicago, with its main entrance at the corner of Clark and Irving Park roads, extending north and east from that point. Graceland's office is just inside the main gate at the southwest corner. Within, free maps and pamphlets are available, as well as a $7 book published by the Chicago Architecture Foundation, A Walk Through Graceland Cemetery."
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"A private cemetery since its beginning, Graceland was established in 1860 by Thomas Bryan, a lawyer with a successful Chicago practice. He purchased its original 80 acres and received a perpetual charter from Illinois in 1861, and soon hired prominent landscape architect H.W.S. Cleveland to plan its park-like ambiance.
With Bryan as president of the cemetery company, many prominent Chicagoans joined the board of managers, including the city’s first mayor, real estate entrepreneur William Ogden. Many other wealthy Chicagoans became members and purchased large family lots and “landscape rooms.” Still an active cemetery, even today Graceland can accommodate a few more Chicago families who want to join this prominent pantheon.
Originally, Graceland’s southern boundary – now Irving Park Road – was two miles outside Chicago’s city limits, in the town of Lake View. After some negotiation with the town’s residents, Graceland expanded eastward and northwest to encompass its present size of 119 acres.
Long famous as the “Cemetery of Architects,” Graceland Cemetery even owes its design and exceptional natural beauty to two 19th century landscape architects.
It began with a plan by landscape architect Cleveland, which, in the 1870’s, saw the cemetery’s paths and plots uniformly sodded, and the fenced and curbed plot boundaries eliminated. This helped created the Victorian park style atmosphere that soon was enhanced by Ossian Simonds. When Graceland grew to its present size, Simonds innovative design used native plants to create the cemetery’s pastoral landscape, which today makes it one of the most beautiful places in Chicago for residents and tourists to visit.
Today, Graceland is owned and operated by the Trustees of the Graceland Cemetery Improvement Fund, a not-for-profit trust. Revenues provide for maintenance of the grounds and the monuments and tombs therein.
The Cemetery is open to all to visit, and its architectural masterpieces, local history and beauty are the magnets that attract people to Graceland. While architects from the traditional to the father of skyscrapers and modern masters take center stage, you’ll find that Graceland also holds fascinating stories of private eyes and public figures, baseball and boxing greats, merchants and inventors and other unique individuals."
Notable burials at Graceland
The mausoleum of Potter Palmer and Bertha Honoré PalmerDavid Adler, architect
John Peter Altgeld, Governor of Illinois
Philip Danforth Armour, meat packing magnate
Mary Hastings Bradley, Author
Fred A. Busse, mayor of Chicago
Daniel H. Burnham, architect
Members of the William Deering family
Augustus Dickens, brother of Charles Dickens (he died penniless in Chicago)
George Elmslie, architect
Marshall Field, businessman, retailer, whose memorial was designed by Henry Bacon, with sculpture by Daniel Chester French.
Bob Fitzsimmons, Heavyweight boxing champion
Melville Fuller, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court
Elbert H. Gary, judge, chairman of U.S. Steel
Bruce A. Goff, architect
Carter Harrison, Sr., mayor of Chicago
Carter Harrison, Jr., mayor of Chicago
William Holabird, Architect
Henry Honore, businessman
William Hulbert, president of baseball's National League
Jack Johnson, Heavyweight boxing champion
Fazlur Khan, structural engineer
Getty Tomb for Cary Eliza Getty, designed by Louis Sullivan, 1890
William Kimball, Kimball Piano and Organ Company
John Kinzie, Canadian pioneer, first white settler in the city of Chicago
Cornelius Krieghoff, well known Canadian artist
Frank Lowden, Governor of Illinois
Marion Mahony Griffin, architect
Cyrus McCormick, businessman, inventor
Nancy “Nettie” Fowler McCormick, businesswoman, philanthropist
Joseph Medill, publisher, mayor of Chicago
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, influential photographer, teacher, and founder of the New Bauhaus and Institute of Design IIT in Chicago
Walter Netsch, architect
Richard Nickel, photographer, architectural historian and preservationist
Ruth Page, dancer and choreographer
Bertha Palmer, philanthropist
Francis W. Palmer, newspaper printer, U.S. Representative, Public Printer of the United States
Potter Palmer, businessman
Allan Pinkerton, detective
George Pullman, inventor and railway industrialist
John Wellborn Root, architect
Louis Sullivan, architect
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, architect
Howard Van Doren Shaw, architect
Frederick Wacker, politician
Kate Warne, first female detective, Allan Pinkerton employee
Daniel Hale Williams, African-American surgeon who performed one of the first successful operations on the pericardium