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:
“What a long strange trip it’s been.”
—Robert Hunter, U.S. rock lyricist. “Truckin’,” on the Grateful Dead album American Beauty (1971)
“The only law was that enforced by the Creek Lighthorsemen and the U.S. deputy marshals who paid rare and brief visits; or the “two volumes of common law” that every man carried strapped to his thighs.”
—State of Oklahoma, U.S. relief program (1935-1943)
“The cemetery of the victims of human cruelty in our century is extended to include yet another vast cemetery, that of the unborn.”
—John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla)