Rock Creek Church Yard and Cemetery

About this property

Rock Creek Cemetery is an 86-acre (350,000 m2) cemetery in the Petworth neighborhood of Washington, D.C., located across the street from the historic Soldiers' Home and the Soldiers' Home Cemetery. It also is home to the InterFaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington. On August 12, 1977, Rock Creek Cemetery and the adjacent church grounds were listed on the National Register of Historic Places as Rock Creek Church Yard and Cemetery. The cemetery was first established in 1719 in the British colonial Province of Maryland as a churchyard within the glebe of St. Paul's Episcopal Church within the Rock Creek Parish. Later, the vestry decided to expand the burial ground as a public cemetery to serve the city of Washington, D.C., which had acquired the cemetery within its boundaries as established in 1791. The cemetery was formally recognized and established through an Act of Congress in 1840. An expanded cemetery was landscaped in the rural garden style, to function as both a cemetery and a public park. It is a ministry of St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Rock Creek Parish, with sections for St. John's Russian Orthodox Church and St. Nicholas Orthodox Cathedral. The park-like setting of Rock Creek Cemetery has several notable mausoleums, sculptures, and tombstones. The best known is the Adams Memorial, a contemplative, androgynous bronze sculpture seated before a block of granite that was created by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Stanford White. It marks the graves of Marian Hooper Adams and her husband, Henry Adams, and sometimes, mistakenly, the sculpture is referred to as Grief. Saint-Gaudens titled it The Mystery of the Hereafter and The Peace of God that Passeth Understanding. Other notable memorials include the Frederick Keep Monument, the Heurich Mausoleum, the Hitt Monument, the Hardon Monument, the Kauffman Monument that is known as The Seven Ages of Memory, the Sherwood Mausoleum Door, and the Thompson-Harding Monument. William Ordway Partridge, Kauffmann Memorial, also known as Seven Ages or Memory, 1897 Adolph Alexander Weinman, Spencer Memorial, after 1919 Numerous fine works by unknown sculptors also exist in the cemetery. Cleveland Abbe (1838–1916), prominent meteorologist John James Abert (1788–1863), chief of the Corps of Topographical Engineers William Stretch Abert (1836–1867), Union Army officer Henry Adams (1838–1918), writer, descendant of two U.S. presidents; grave is marked by the Adams Memorial Clover Hooper Adams (1843–1885), Washington hostess and accomplished amateur photographer, wife of Henry Adams; grave is marked by the Adams Memorial Alice Warfield Allen (1869–1929), mother of the Duchess of Windsor, Wallis Simpson

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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