Founded in 1838 and now a National Historic Landmark, Green-Wood was one of the first rural cemeteries in America. By the early 1860s, it had earned an international reputation for its magnificent beauty and became the prestigious place to be buried, attracting 500,000 visitors a year, second only to Niagara Falls as the nation’s greatest tourist attraction. Crowds flocked there to enjoy family outings, carriage rides, and sculpture viewing in the finest of first generation American landscapes. Green-Wood’s popularity helped inspire the creation of public parks, including New York City’s Central and Prospect Parks. This tour takes you through some of the monuments of Green-Wood and its famous denizens.

A fundamental role of the cemetery is to ensure a peaceful, final resting place for loved ones. They are also extraordinary living records of our society. Historic cemeteries tell us about design, ideas about mortality and death, and the historical social and political hierarchies of a locality. Especially important is the rural cemetery. Distinct from church graveyards, this is a 19th-century culmination of a movement that began in 18th-century Europe. The rural cemetery drew heavily on early garden aesthetics, embracing classical ideals of a pastoral utopia as embodied in the Greek region of Arcadia. In fact, nascent cemeteries evolved from garden memorials and burials, leading to a revolution in the way Western culture tended to its dead, and forever impacting its landscapes.