Elmwood Cemetery (Memphis, Tennessee)
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For other places with the same name, see Elmwood Cemetery.
Elmwood Cemetery is the oldest active cemetery in Memphis, Tennessee. It was established in 1852 as one of the first rural garden cemeteries in the South.
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[edit] Origins
The garden cemetery movement had been inspired by Frenchman Père Lachaise, and the original garden cemetery was opened in 1804 in Paris.[1] The movement gained popularity in the antebellum United States. A committee of fifty Memphis men developed plans for a beautiful and dignified final resting place for the dead amid towering trees and winding paths and lanes. They envisioned that this would also be a park for the living as well, where family outings, picnics, and social gatherings could occur. It was meant to be a place where beautiful gardens were tended and individual monuments celebrated life and death.
Eventually, seventy thousand people were buried at Elmwood Cemetery, with space still remaining for some twenty thousand more. Beneath the cemetery's ancient elms, oaks, and magnolias lie some of the city's most honored and revered dead. Flowering dogwoods and crepe myrtles are interspersed with Memphis history, those famous and infamous, loved and feared. The cemetery's gardens include the Carlisle S. Page Arboretum. There are veterans of every American war, from the Revolution forward. There are people from every walk of life and culture, including mayors of Memphis, governors of Tennessee, U.S. senators, generals, madams and murderers and, of course, perfectly ordinary citizens.
[edit] Civil War burials
More than 1,000 Confederate soldiers and veterans are buried in Confederate Soldiers Rest, located in the cemetery's Fowler Section. Many other Confederates are buried elsewhere in the cemetery. The first burial in Confederate Soldiers Rest was William (Thomas) Gallagher on June 17, 1861, and the last interment was John Frank Gunter on April 1, 1940. Among the Confederate generals buried there is James Patton Anderson, a former U.S. Congressman who commanded the Army of Tennessee in 1862, and William Henry Carroll, a brigadier-general in the Confederate States of America.
Union soldiers also were buried at Elmwood in the 1860s, but almost all were removed in 1868 and reinterred in Memphis National Cemetery. Two Union generals, William Jay Smith and Milton T. Williamson, remain at Elmwood. [2]
[edit] Yellow Fever burials
Memphis suffered periodic epidemics of yellow fever, a mosquito-borne viral infection, throughout the 19th Century. The worst of the epidemics occurred in the summer of 1878, when 5,150 Memphians died. Some 1,500 of the victims are buried in four public lots at Elmwood. Among them are doctors, ministers, nuns, and even prostitutes who died while tending to the sick.[3]
[edit] Visiting Elmwood
Elmwood Cemetery is located at 824 South Dudley Street, 0.4 miles south of Crump Boulevard. [4] The cemetery grounds are open from 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. CST seven days a week.
[edit] References
- History of Elmwood Cemetery
- Civil War burials at Elmwood Cemetery
- List of individuals buried in Confederate Soldiers Rest at Elmwood Cemetery
