Lake View Cemetery

At a glance

Overview

Lake View Cemetery is a private, nonprofit garden cemetery of about 285 acres between Euclid Avenue and Mayfield Road, lying across the borders of Cleveland, Cleveland Heights and East Cleveland. It was organized on July 28, 1869, by a group of Cleveland businessmen led by Western Union founder Jeptha H. Wade, who wanted a scenic burial ground in the style of Boston's Mount Auburn and Cincinnati's Spring Grove; Adolph Strauch of Spring Grove laid it out on wooded ridges and ravines cut by Dugway Brook. After President James A. Garfield was assassinated in 1881 he was buried here, and his tomb, a 180-foot sandstone tower designed by George Keller, was dedicated on May 30, 1890. The cemetery nearly went bankrupt around 1888 to 1892, recovered under president Henry R. Hatch, and added the Tiffany-decorated Wade Memorial Chapel (1901) and John D. Rockefeller's granite obelisk (1899). Its Italian stonecutters helped found the Little Italy neighborhood next door, and its burials include Rockefeller, Eliot Ness (a cenotaph), baseball player Ray Chapman and disc jockey Alan Freed.

The name

Judge Charles Taylor Sherman, one of the founding trustees, chose the name Lake View Cemetery. The founders had wanted a site on the lake shore but found none suitable; the ridge they bought instead rises toward the Portage Escarpment high enough to look out over Lake Erie. (source)

Native American history

Nothing site-specific is recorded about Native people on the cemetery grounds. The land lies east of the Cuyahoga River, where Native title was given up in the Treaty of Greenville in 1795; it was then in East Cleveland Township. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History describes Late Woodland camps on steep ridges above the Cuyahoga, Rocky and lower Chagrin valleys, spring camps along the old lakeshore ridges and creek headwaters, and, from about A.D. 1200, the villages of the Whittlesey Tradition in the Cuyahoga valley. Those villages were abandoned by about 1640, and the area had no permanent settlement until groups of Wyandot or Ottawa moved in from Detroit in the mid-1740s. Which later nation, if any, descended from the Whittlesey people is not known.

• Treaty of Greenville cession east of the Cuyahoga: treaty, All Western Reserve land east of the Cuyahoga River, including the future cemetery, 1795

Stories

A tomb for a murdered president

James A. Garfield, born in a log cabin in Orange Township in 1831, served only 200 days as president before Charles J. Guiteau shot him at a Washington railroad station on July 2, 1881; he died on September 19. Soldiers guarded his body in a temporary tomb at Lake View while a committee headed by Jeptha Wade, with Rutherford B. Hayes and John D. Rockefeller among its members, raised money for a monument. The committee sent notice of a design competition to the United States, England, Germany, Italy and France, and chose George Keller of Hartford, Connecticut. Work began on October 6, 1885, and the 180-foot memorial was dedicated on May 30, 1890. The memorial holds the tombs of Garfield and his family. (source)

Faces hidden in the stone

The Garfield Memorial's five bas-reliefs show Garfield as schoolteacher, statesman and president, with more than 108 life-size figures. In an interview, architect George Keller said the crowds in the panels include real people: Chief Justice Waite, General Sherman, Rutherford B. Hayes, Chester Arthur, John A. Logan, Carl Schurz and James G. Blaine. Sculptor Caspar Buberl also slipped in himself, the architect, his own assistant and the foreman of the plaster casters at the Perth Amboy terra cotta works. Inside, the mosaic artist worked in a portrait of Keller's infant daughter. (source)

The cemetery that nearly went broke

Lake View's founders sold bonds to buy land and laid out ponds, roads and bridges faster than they sold lots. By 1888 the cemetery owned about 300 acres but had sold only about 14 percent of it, owed $432,980, and had quietly borrowed from a bank to keep paying bond interest. When it paid only part of the interest due, bond prices collapsed from above par to $50 to $75, and angry bondholders threatened to sue the trustees. By 1892 the grounds were badly neglected, with unmowed sections and rutted dirt roads. A refinancing plan needed 90 percent of bondholders to agree, and it passed only after Harry A. Garfield, the dead president's son and a lawyer for some of the bondholders, spent months writing to them. (source)

Moving Rockefeller's obelisk

John D. Rockefeller bought a family plot near the Garfield Memorial before 1882 and in 1898 ordered a granite obelisk from Barre, Vermont. The shaft alone was 51 feet 9 inches tall and weighed about 80 tons, the largest granite shaft then quarried in the United States, and the Nickel Plate railroad had to build special cars to carry it. It reached Cleveland on February 11, 1899. House movers using horses and a windlass took until June just to drag it up the Mayfield Road hill and halfway through the cemetery. It was hoisted into place on September 12, 1899, before a crowd, and Rockefeller was buried beneath it in 1937. (source)

The stonecutters of Little Italy

Joseph Carabelli, a northern Italian stonecarver who came to the United States at 20 in 1870, moved to Cleveland in 1880 and opened the Lake View Granite and Monumental Works on Mayfield Road beside the cemetery. He encouraged other Italian sculptors and stonecutters to settle near his shop, and by 1885 a large Italian enclave had grown up. By 1892 the neighborhood at the cemetery's southwest corner was known as Little Italy, home to immigrants who worked as groundskeepers at Lake View or carved its headstones and memorials. (source)

The gravediggers' strike of 1947

In the spring of 1947, 63 members of the AFL Arborists' and Landscapers' Union walked off the job at Lake View. The strike ran from April to July and delayed the burial of more than 100 people, whose bodies had to be kept in Wade Chapel while talks stalled. Picket lines went up until a Cuyahoga County judge banned them in early June, citing the cemetery's "sacred obligation to bury the dead," which let the cemetery hire replacement workers. The strikers settled for a raise of 4 cents an hour, 6 cents less than they had first asked. (source)

Timeline

• 1795: The Treaty of Greenville ends Native title to Western Reserve land east of the Cuyahoga River, including the future cemetery site. (source)
• 1869: About 30 Cleveland businessmen meet on May 24 at the invitation of Jeptha Wade, Henry B. Payne and Joseph Perkins to plan a new cemetery. (source)
• 1869: The Lake View Cemetery Association is organized on July 28 with Jeptha H. Wade as president. (source)
• 1869: Liberty Holden, riding along Euclid Avenue, spots the wooded, hilly land that becomes the cemetery; landscape architect Adolph Strauch of Cincinnati's Spring Grove is hired to lay it out. (source)
• 1870: Civil War captain Louis Germain DeForest becomes the first person buried at Lake View. (source)
• 1880: Italian stonecarver Joseph Carabelli opens the Lake View Granite and Monumental Works on Mayfield Road beside the cemetery, drawing the Italian craftsmen who start Little Italy. (source)
• 1881: President James A. Garfield, shot July 2 in Washington, dies September 19 and is placed in the cemetery's public vault on September 26. (source)
• 1882: Crowds visiting Garfield's temporary tomb lead to newspaper complaints and to admission tickets for the grounds. (source)
• 1883: The Garfield Memorial Committee picks the highest point in the cemetery for the president's tomb in June. (source)
• 1885: Construction of the Garfield Memorial, designed by George Keller of Hartford, Connecticut, begins on October 6. (source)
• 1888: Heavy spending on land and improvements with slow lot sales leaves the cemetery near bankruptcy, and it pays only part of the interest on its bonds. (source)
• 1890: The Garfield Memorial is dedicated on May 30 before President Benjamin Harrison, former President Rutherford B. Hayes and the Garfield family. (source)
• 1892: With help from Garfield's son Harry, an attorney for some bondholders, a refinancing plan wins bondholder approval; financial recovery begins in 1893. (source)
• 1896: Henry R. Hatch becomes president and modernizes the cemetery's finances, records and engineering. (source)
• 1899: John D. Rockefeller's granite obelisk, hauled by horse and windlass from the railroad on Mayfield Road since February, is raised on September 12. (source)
• 1901: Wade Memorial Chapel, built in memory of Jeptha H. Wade with a Tiffany-designed interior, is completed. (source)
• 1903: The first automobile funeral procession takes place at Lake View. (source)
• 1915: The cemetery's old wooden office burns on January 28, destroying maps and plans, and president Hatch dies suddenly on May 20. (source)
• 1918: Lucretia Garfield, who died March 13, is entombed beside her husband in the memorial's crypt on March 21. (source)
• 1923: The Garfield National Monument Association hands the memorial to the cemetery in late October, and the 10-cent admission fee ends. (source)
• 1937: John D. Rockefeller dies and is buried beneath his family obelisk, the tallest marker in the cemetery. (source)
• 1940: Unused land is turned into community victory gardens to help the war effort. (source)
• 1947: A strike by 63 union gravediggers from April to July delays more than 100 burials; bodies are held in Wade Chapel. (source)
• 1973: The Garfield Memorial (April 11) and Wade Memorial Chapel (June 18) are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. (source)
• 1978: A flood-control dam on Dugway Brook, about 90 feet high and 500 feet wide, is completed inside the cemetery as the first project of the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District. (source)
• 1985: The Garfield Memorial, closed in 1984 for restoration helped by a $500,000 federal grant, is rededicated on Memorial Day. (source)
• 1986: The Lake View Cemetery Foundation is founded to raise money for the historic structures, plantings and education programs. (source)
• 2016: On May 7, about 400 people watch Alan Freed's son Lance unveil a granite monument showing Freed on one side and a jukebox on the other, near Wade Chapel; it becomes the permanent resting place of the disc jockey's ashes, removed from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014. (source)
• 2020: The scaffolding comes down from the Garfield Memorial after a multimillion-dollar restoration that repointed its mortar and cleaned its sandstone exterior for the first time. (source)
• 2019-2020: The cemetery marks its 150th anniversary with two years of events. (source)

Sources

• en.wikipedia.org: Lake View Cemetery
• en.wikipedia.org: James A. Garfield Memorial
• en.wikipedia.org: Alan Freed
• case.edu: lake view cemetery
• case.edu: garfield monument
• case.edu: western reserve
• case.edu: prehistoric inhabitants
• clevelandhistorical.org
• clevelandhistorical.org
• clevelandhistorical.org
• lakeviewcemetery.com: history
• freshwatercleveland.com: LakeView150091219
• cleveland.com: alan freed father of rock