Rock Creek Cemetery

Rock Creek Cemetery is an 86-acre (350,000 m2) cemetery with a natural and rolling landscape located at Rock Creek Church Road, NW, and Webster Street, NW, off Hawaii Avenue, NE, in the Petworth neighborhood of Washington, D.C., across the street from the historic Soldiers' Home and the Soldiers' Home Cemetery. It also is home to the InterFaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington.

Rock Creek Cemetery
Rock Creek Cemetery in September 2008
Rock Creek Cemetery is located in the District of Columbia
Rock Creek Cemetery
Rock Creek Cemetery is located in the United States
Rock Creek Cemetery
LocationWebster Street and Rock Creek Church Road, NW, Washington, D.C., U.S.
Coordinates38°56′52″N 77°0′47″W
Area84.2 acres (34.1 ha)
Built1719
Architectural styleGothic Revival
NRHP reference No.77001498[1]
Added to NRHPAugust 12, 1977

On August 12, 1977, Rock Creek Cemetery and the adjacent church grounds were listed on the National Register of Historic Places as Rock Creek Church Yard and Cemetery.

History
The Adams Memorial was designed by famed sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens as a gravestone for Clover Adams, who died by suicide in 1885. A replica sits in the National Portrait Gallery.
The mausoleum's interior at Rock Creek Cemetery

The cemetery was first established in 1719 in the British colonial Province of Maryland as a churchyard within the glebe of St. Paul's Episcopal Church within the Rock Creek Parish. Later, the vestry decided to expand the burial ground as a public cemetery to serve the city of Washington, D.C., which had acquired the cemetery within its boundaries as established in 1791. The cemetery was formally recognized and established through an Act of Congress in 1840.

An expanded cemetery was landscaped in the rural garden style, to function as both a cemetery and a 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 Orthodox Cathedral.

The park-like setting of Rock Creek Cemetery has many notable mausoleums, sculptures, and tombstones. The best known is the Adams Memorial, a contemplative, androgynous bronze sculpture seated before a block of granite that was created by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Stanford White. It marks the graves of Marian Hooper Adams and her husband, Henry Adams, and sometimes, mistakenly, the sculpture is referred to as Grief.[2][3] Saint-Gaudens entitled 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 that is known as The Seven Ages of Memory, the Sherwood Mausoleum Door, and the Thompson-Harding Monument.[4]

Sculptors of works in the cemetery

Numerous fine works by unknown sculptors also exist in the cemetery.[5][6][7]

Notable interments

A
  • Cleveland Abbe (1838–1916), prominent meteorologist
  • John James Abert (1788–1863), chief of the Corps of Topographical Engineers
  • Henry Adams (1838–1918), writer, descendant of two U.S. presidents; grave is marked by the Adams Memorial
  • Clover Hooper Adams (1843–1885), Washington hostess and accomplished amateur photographer, wife of Henry Adams; grave is marked by the Adams Memorial
  • Alice Warfield Allen (1869–1929), mother of the Duchess of Windsor, Wallis Simpson
  • Doug Allison (1846–1916), baseball player
  • Frank Crawford Armstrong (1835–1909), Confederate general
  • Timothy P. Andrews (1794–1868), Union Army general and paymaster-general of the United States Army (1862–1864)
  • James B. Aswell (1869–1931), educator and member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1913 to 1931

B
Gravesite of Emile Berliner and family members

C
  • Camille Chautemps (1885–1963), prime minister of France
  • Edward Clark (1822–1902), Architect of the Capitol
  • Catherine Cate Coblentz (1897–1951), writer, wife of William Coblentz
  • William Coblentz (1873–1962), physicist, notable for pioneer contributions to infrared radiometry and spectroscopy
  • William Eleroy Curtis (1850–1911), journalist, diplomat, and advocate of Pan-Americanism

D
  • Evelyn Y. Davis, (1929–2018), American activist shareholder.[8]
  • S. Wallace Dempsey (1862–1949), Republican politician
  • Hubert Dilger (1836–1911), American Civil War artillerist, captain in the Union Army, Medal of Honor recipient
  • Gerald A. Drew (1903–1970), United States ambassador to Haiti and Bolivia
  • Amanda Ruter Dufour (1822–1899), poet

E
  • Susan Ann Edson (1823–1897), personal physician to President James A. Garfield[9]
  • Henry Jackson Ellicott (1847–1901), sculptor and architectural sculptor[10]
  • Matthew Gault Emery (1818–1901), mayor of Washington, D.C., from 1870 to 1871
  • Henry Ellsworth Ewing (1883–1951), arachnologist[11]

F
  • Charles S. Fairfax (1829–1869), Virginia-born California politician who was entitled to the British title 10th Lord Fairfax of Cameron
  • Stephen Johnson Field (1816–1899), Associate justice of US Supreme Court
  • Peter Force (1790–1868), politician, U.S. Army lieutenant in the War of 1812, newspaper editor, archivist, and historian, who served as the twelfth mayor of Washington, D.C., and whose library of historical documents became the first major Americana collection of the Library of Congress
  • Israel Moore Foster (1873–1950), Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives
  • James Edmund France (1906–1920), brother of the co-founder of NASCAR
  • William H. French (1815–1881), major general during the American Civil War and the Mexican War

G
Gravesite of Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor
  • Julius Garfinckel (1872–1936), merchant, founder of Washington department store, Garfinckel's
  • Harry Post Godwin (1857–1900) Chief Editor of the National Republican, Washington Star
  • Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor (1875–1966), president of the National Geographic Society, Hubbard Bell Grossman Pillot Memorial

H
  • Mary Berri Chapman Hansbrough (1872–1951), poet and painter
  • John Marshall Harlan (1833–1911), Supreme Court associate justice, known as the "Great Dissenter"; wrote the lone dissenting opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson
  • Patricia Roberts Harris (1924–1985), ambassador, first African-American woman to serve in a presidential cabinet
  • George L. Harrison (1887–1958), banker, insurance executive, and political advisor during World War II
  • Patricia McMahon Hawkins (1949–2021), diplomat
  • Frank Hatton (1846–1894), U.S. postmaster general and editor of the Washington Post
  • Christian Heurich (1842–1945), German-born American founder of Heurich Brewery (1871–1954)
  • Samuel Billingsley Hill (1875–1958), U.S. representative from Washington and member of the United States Board of Tax Appeals (now the United States Tax Court)
  • William Henry Holmes (1846–1933), known for scientific illustration of the American West, his role in the controversy over the antiquity of humans in the Americas, and leadership at the Smithsonian Institution

J

K
Gravesite of Oliver Hudson Kelley
  • Samuel H. Kauffmann (1829–1906) newspaper publisher
  • Oliver Hudson Kelley (1826–1913), a founder of the Order of the Patrons of Husbandry (The Grange)
  • Angela Jurdak Khoury (1915–2011), Lebanon's first female diplomat and esteemed member of the Lebanese delegation to the United Nations.
  • Sergei Kourdakov (1951–1973), a former KGB agent and defector from the Soviet Union to Canada

L

M

N
  • Elizabeth Norment (1952–2014), actress

O
  • Carmel Offie (1909–1972), Central Intelligence Agency official

P

R
Gravesite of George Washington Riggs
  • John B. Raymond (1844–1886), politician
  • Isidor Rayner (1850–1912), Democratic politician, U.S. senator from Maryland
  • George Washington Riggs (1813–1881), banker, founder of Riggs Bank
  • William A. Rodenberg (1865–1937), politician
  • Frederick Rodgers (1842–1917), United States Navy rear admiral
  • Basil (Rodzianko) (1915–1999), Bishop of Orthodox Church in America Diocese of the West
  • Tim Russert (1950–2008), journalist, host of Meet the Press

S
Gravesite of Upton Sinclair

T
  • Abner Taylor (1829–1903), politician
  • George Taylor (1820–1894), attorney and Democratic politician
  • Florence Calvert Thorne (1877–1973), labor activist
  • Thomas Weston Tipton (1817–1899), U.S. senator from Nebraska
  • Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams (1869–1962), Russian-American writer and journalist

V
Gravesite of Charles Doolittle Walcott
Grave of Burton K. Wheeler
  • Tran Van Chuong (1898–1986), South Vietnam's ambassador to the U.S., appointed by Ngo Dinh Diem
  • Willis Van Devanter (1859–1941), U.S. Supreme Court associate justice
  • Gore Vidal (1925–2012), author and playwright, next to his companion of 50 years Howard Austen.[13]

W
  • Charles Doolittle Walcott (1850–1927), Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution
  • Paul Warnke (1920–2001), diplomat, assistant secretary of state from 1966 to 1969; SALT Negotiator and Director of the Arms Control and disarmament Agency under President Clinton
  • Sumner Welles (1892–1961), diplomat, undersecretary of State from 1937 to 1943
  • Burton K. Wheeler (1882–1975), Democratic politician and U.S. senator from Montana
  • James Alexander Williamson (1829–1902), Union Army general during the American Civil War, Medal of Honor recipient
  • Richard L. Wilson (1905–1981), journalist
  • William Windom (1827–1891), U.S. representative, senator, secretary of the treasury (under James Garfield & Benjamin Harrison)
  • Otis Wingo (1877–1930), U.S. representative from Arkansas's 4th congressional district, 1913–1930
  • Willie Wood (1936–2020), football player
  • John Vines Wright (1828–1908), U.S. representative from Tennessee, member of the Confederate Congress, judge of the Tennessee Supreme Court[14]

Y
  • Helen Yakobson, (1913–2002) academic and professor at George Washington University[15]

See also

References
  1. "National Register Information System". National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service. March 13, 2009.
  2. Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Saint-Gaudens, Augustus" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 25 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 5.
  3. "1886 The Adams Memorial". Archived from the original on 2008-05-09. Retrieved 2008-06-29.
  4. "Cultural Tourism DC". CulturalTourismDC.org. Archived from the original on 2007-10-09. Retrieved 2008-01-12.
  5. Goode, James M. The Outdoor Sculpture of Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C., 1974 pp. 343–352
  6. Kvaran, Einar E., Cemetery Sculpture in America, unpublished manuscript
  7. Marion, John Francis, Famous and Curious Cemeteries, Crown Publishers Inc., New York, 1977 pp. 78–80
  8. Flitter, Emily (2018-11-07). "Evelyn Y. Davis, Shareholder Scourge of C.E.O.s, Dies at 89". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2022-07-18.
  9. "Dr. Susan Edson Buried". Washington, DC: The Evening Star. 15 November 1897. p. 13. Retrieved 27 November 2017.
  10. "H. J. Ellicott Dead". The Baltimore Sun. 1901-02-12. p. 2. Retrieved 2024-05-01 – via Newspapers.com.Open access icon
  11. "Henry Ellsworth Ewing, 1883–1951". Journal of Economic Entomology. 44 (2): 270. 1951. doi:10.1093/jee/44.2.270.
  12. United States Congress. "Thetus W. Sims (id: S000441)". Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.
  13. McGrath, Charles (1 August 2012). "Gore Vidal dies at age 86". Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Halifax Media Group. Retrieved 3 July 2014.
  14. "Wright, John Vines". Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. Retrieved 2022-10-04.
  15. "Support Yakobson". Gwu.edu.
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