Spring Grove Cemetery: The City of the Dead That Invented the Park

Spring Grove Cemetery was founded in eighteen forty-five, and within a generation it had changed how Americans thought about public green space. The change was the work of one man, a Swiss landscape architect named Adolph Strauch, who was hired as superintendent in eighteen fifty-five and proceeded to invent what he called the lawn plan.

Before Strauch, American cemeteries looked like Victorian parlors moved outdoors: dense with monuments, iron fences around individual plots, headstones crowding each other, every family staking out its claim. Spring Grove under the previous design followed this pattern. Strauch found it incoherent and ugly. He began removing the iron fences. He leveled the ground between plots into continuous grass. He arranged the monuments so they rose from turf rather than from individual enclosed lots. He planted trees and shrubs as part of a designed landscape rather than as accidental growth. He created a lake.

What he produced was a garden that happened to contain graves, rather than a graveyard that happened to have some plants. The lawn plan spread to cemeteries across the country and eventually influenced the design of urban parks. Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed Central Park in New York and parks in dozens of American cities, studied Strauch's work at Spring Grove before developing his own approach to landscape design.

Spring Grove covers more than seven hundred acres. It contains more than four hundred different tree species, making it one of the more significant arboreta in the Midwest. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-six, and named a National Historic Landmark in two thousand seven. The dead who are buried there include Civil War generals, industrialists, German immigrant brewery founders, and three Ohio governors.

The gates are open to the public. It is not a museum. People are still buried there.