Linden Grove Cemetery, Covington

Linden Grove Cemetery sits on a hillside in Covington, Kentucky, overlooking the Ohio River and the Cincinnati skyline just across the water , a prospect that gave the grounds a contemplative grandeur from the start. The cemetery was founded in eighteen forty-two by the trustees of the nearby Western Baptist Theological Institute, a seminary that trained Baptist ministers. From its first season of operation, the trustees made a decision unusual for a nineteenth-century border-state institution: they allowed burials regardless of race or religion.

The grounds were formally dedicated in September of eighteen forty-three, after roads were laid, a pond was constructed, and hundreds of trees and shrubs were planted. It was conceived in the tradition of the rural cemetery movement then sweeping American cities , the idea that a cemetery should be a park, a place for the living to walk among the dead and reflect on mortality and civic continuity. By eighteen fifty-eight more than two thousand burials had already taken place.

The list of notable people buried at Linden Grove reads as a compressed history of Northern Kentucky's civic life. Thomas Kennedy, the original landowner of Covington itself, is here. Four United States Congressmen are buried at Linden Grove, including John G. Carlisle, who served as Speaker of the House, United States Senator from Kentucky, and Secretary of the Treasury under President Grover Cleveland , one of the more consequential political careers to emerge from this corner of the country.

Linden Grove was added to the National Register of Historic Places in two thousand one. Its many thousands of burials span nearly two centuries of life on the Ohio River's southern bank , a record of who came, who stayed, and who shaped this place.