The famous grave that moved

1931 – 28 APRIL 2024 · HIGHLAND CEMETERY TO CEDAR GROVE

The move: For ninety-three years the most visited grave in South Bend stood in Highland Cemetery, on Portage Avenue in the city: Knute Rockne's, where six of his own players carried him in April 1931. Its fame was a working pilgrimage, and the university's own magazine recorded its mechanics — Sylvester Cashen, a South Bend man who began tending the plot for Rockne's sister in 1999, describes stopping at least twice a month for some twenty years, and coming on the Monday after every home game to pick up what the weekend's pilgrims left. Fans left cigars at the grave, and the former headstone was said to bear their burn marks. On 28 April 2024 the grave moved: Rockne's remains, with his wife Bonnie's, were exhumed and reburied at Cedar Grove Cemetery, on Notre Dame's own ground across the city line — the famous grave leaving the city whose cemetery had kept it for ninety-three years, printed with its geography stated, as the Famous Locations section states it.

Sources:

1. The Famous Locations section of this history — the grave's Highland Cemetery years (the 1931 burial, the six players, the pilgrimage and its leavings, the cigars and the headstone's burn marks, Cashen's tending from 1999, in Notre Dame Magazine's Strong of Heart and a Notre Dame Insider column of the move's week) and the move of 28 April 2024 to Cedar Grove.