The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
Lindenwood Cemetery, at 2324 West Main Street, is Fort Wayne's famous burying ground — famous, unusually, for its landscape. On July 5, 1859, the cemetery's trustees bought 175 acres for $7,627.50 and had the ground laid out by John Chislett, the superintendent and landscape gardener of Pittsburgh's Allegheny Cemetery, on the English picturesque principles that defined the rural-cemetery movement: winding drives, ornamental plantings and ground composed as a park. It is sometimes described in passing as Olmsted-designed; the National Register nomination says otherwise — the design is Chislett's, and from December 1859 the cemetery's superintendent and supervising landscape architect was John Doswell, trained at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Lindenwood was dedicated in June 1860, replacing the old Broadway Cemetery as the city's principal ground. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on February 17, 1978. Its 1895 Romanesque Revival chapel and 1884 iron gate survive; with more than 74,000 burials it was once the largest cemetery in Indiana and is now the second largest, after Indianapolis's Crown Hill.
The burials make it a who's who of the city's first century and a half, and they are entered here in one line each, with their full records in the People chapter: Samuel Hanna, the canal-era merchant prince; Jesse L. Williams, the canal engineer; Allen Hamilton, the banker for whom the county's library system is named; Hugh McCulloch, Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury; Colonel George W. Ewing; Paul Frank Baer, America's first ace of the First World War; Art Smith, the skywriting pioneer; Eliza George, the Civil War nurse known as Mother George; Colonel Sion S. Bass, who fell at Shiloh; Governor Samuel Bigger; and Isaac De Groff Nelson of the Fort Wayne Sentinel. To walk Lindenwood with the register nomination in hand is to walk the city's founding generations in one ground — which is precisely what its founders designed it for.
Sources: National Register of Historic Places nomination, Lindenwood Cemetery (listed February 17, 1978, reference 78000043) — trustees' purchase July 5, 1859, $7,627.50, 175 acres; John Chislett layout; John Doswell superintendent from December 1859; Quest Club paper on Lindenwood burials (74,104 interments); the People chapter of this history for the named burials.