Cave Hill Cemetery

About this property

Cave Hill Cemetery is a 296-acre (1.20 km2) Victorian era National Cemetery and arboretum located at Louisville, Kentucky. Its main entrance is on Baxter Avenue and there is a secondary one on Grinstead Drive. It is the largest cemetery by area and number of burials in Louisville. Cave Hill was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. Cave Hill National Cemetery, containing military graves, is also on the National Register, added in 1998. Chartered in 1848, Cave Hill was logged for construction on what was William Johnston's Cave Hill Farm, a rural property some distance east of Louisville. Johnston, who died in 1798, had built the first brick house in Louisville on the grounds circa 1788. City officials had purchased part of the land in the 1830s in anticipation of building a railroad through it and a workhouse was built there. The railroad was built elsewhere, and the land was leased to local farmers. In 1846, Mayor Frederick A. Kaye began investigating the possibility of developing a rural or garden-style cemetery on the grounds. While rural cemeteries were an extremely popular style at the time, utilizing natural topography to build an "untouched, rural" environment, Cave Hill was not initially laid out to be a rural cemetery. It was when Hartford, Connecticut civil engineer Edmund Francis Lee was hired that the plan changed: Lee saw the "undulating hills, promontories, and basins as perfectly suited for landscaping the rural aesthetic." The Cave Hill Cemetery Co. was chartered in February 1848, and the cemetery was dedicated on July 25, 1848. Reverend Doctor Edward Porter Humphrey delivered the dedicatory address and elaborated on the idea of the garden cemetery, noting, among other things, that ". . .Reason and taste suggest that [this cemetery] should be decorated appropriately by the beautiful productions of our great Creator. . ." Before the era of large municipal parks, it was common for cities to promote a garden cemetery as a green oasis and recreation destination, and Louisville was no exception. Leading up to Cave Hill's formal dedication on July 25, 1848, the Louisville Daily Courier promoted this idea with multiple articles singing the praises of rural cemeteries. Wrote the Courier, "ladies and gentlemen of the city, visit these grounds on the day of consecration, and see the beauties of the place." This movement simmered with the opening of nearby Cherokee Park in 1892. After administrators sold several acres of land for the burial of Union soldiers during the Civil War, local Confederate supporters purchased nearby land as well. Several deceased patients from the Brown General Hospital and other nearby army medical facilities were interred in Cave Hill Cemetery.

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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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