Rock Creek Cemetery — also Rock Creek Church Yard and Cemetery — is an 86-acre (350,000 m2) cemetery with a natural rolling landscape located at Rock Creek Church Road, NW, and Webster Street, NW, off Hawaii Avenue, NE in Washington, D.C.'s Michigan Park neighborhood, near Washington's Petworth neighborhood. It is across the street from the historic Soldiers' Home and the Soldiers' Home Cemetery.
It was first established in 1719 as a churchyard within the glebe of St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Rock Creek Parish. The Vestry later decided to expand the burial ground as a public cemetery to serve the city of Washington and this was established through an Act of Congress in 1840.
The expanded Cemetery was landscaped in the rural garden style, to function as both cemetery and 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 Latvian Church.
Rock Creek Cemetery's park-like setting has many notable mausoleums and tombstones. The best known is Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Stanford White's Adams Memorial, a contemplative androgynous bronze sculpture seated before a block of granite. It marks the graves of Marian Hooper “Clover" Adams and her husband, Henry Adams, and is sometimes mistakenly referred to as Grief. Saint-Gaudens called 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, known as The Seven Ages of Memory, the Sherwood Mausoleum Door, and the Thompson-Harding Monument.
On August 12, 1977, Rock Creek Cemetery and the adjacent church grounds were added to the National Register of Historic Places as Rock Creek Church Yard and Cemetery.
Read more about Rock Creek Cemetery: Notable Interments, Sculptors With Work in The Cemetery
Famous quotes containing the words rock, creek and/or cemetery:
“The steel decks rock with the lightning shock, and shake with the
great recoil,
And the sea grows red with the blood of the dead and reaches for his spoil
But not till the foe has gone below or turns his prow and runs,
Shall the voice of peace bring sweet release to the men behind the
guns!”
—John Jerome Rooney (18661934)
“It might be seen by what tenure men held the earth. The smallest stream is mediterranean sea, a smaller ocean creek within the land, where men may steer by their farm bounds and cottage lights. For my own part, but for the geographers, I should hardly have known how large a portion of our globe is water, my life has chiefly passed within so deep a cove. Yet I have sometimes ventured as far as to the mouth of my Snug Harbor.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“I am a cemetery abhorred by the moon.”
—Charles Baudelaire (18211867)