Sphinxes, stone trees, Cincinnati icons: Exploring Spring Grove Cemetery

Spring Grove is as much an arboretum, history museum, sculpture garden and park as it is an active cemetery. 

Its miles of roads wind past lakes, mausoleums, unusual trees and the graves of people whose names are still scattered across Cincinnati: Kroger, Graeter, Fleischmann, Moerlein, Shillito and Procter and Gamble among them. Spring Grove Cemetery and Arboretum, located at 4521 Spring Grove Ave., comprises 733 acres and is the second largest cemetery, acreage-wise in the United States. 

“You could spend all day here,” Spring Grove docent Cheryl Tallman told CityBeat during a recent tour. “I’m a retired math teacher. I used to be a math nerd. Now I’m a history nerd.”

Spring Grove’s story begins amid a less picturesque chapter of Cincinnati history.

During the cholera epidemics of the 1830s and 1840s, the city’s roughly 25 small, church burial grounds struggled to keep pace with deaths. At the epidemic’s worst, Tallman said, Cincinnati was losing around 100 people per day. At that time, businessman Peter Neff lost his wife and Tallman said he didn’t want to bury her in one of the local burial grounds that were quickly becoming overcrowded. 

Neff joined other Cincinnati businessmen in pursuing a landscaped, rural cemetery modeled after examples elsewhere in the United States and Europe. Salmon P. Chase wrote the articles of incorporation as a non-denominational cemetery and the group of businessmen bought 220 acres for the original plot. 

The first burial took place in 1845 and Spring Grove eventually became a destination in its own right.

Visitors once arrived by horse and buggy and used a small carriage house to freshen up before entering the grounds. It later became a ticket office during a period when the cemetery was so popular that admission was restricted. That building can still be found at the entrance today. 

“People would ride their bikes down here,” Tallman said. “I mean, they really treated the cemetery as a park, but they also were very reverent to their dead.”

Even Abraham Lincoln visited Spring Grove. 

In 1855, while still a traveling lawyer, Lincoln came to Cincinnati for a patent case. 

“The person he was staying with said, ‘come on, we got to come to Spring Grove. It’s the place to see and to be seen,’” Tallman said. “So this, of course, was before he was president. It’s a pretty amazing thing.”

More than 170 years later, wandering the cemetery remains part of the appeal.

Monuments may be what catches the eye first, but reading the names quickly turns a walk through Spring Grove into a crash course in Cincinnati history.

Bernard Kroger, founder of the Kroger grocery chain, is buried there. So are Louis Graeter, founder of Graeter’s Ice Cream; Brewer Christian Moerlein; Cincinnati Zoo founder Andrew Erkenbrecher; Skyline Chili founder Nicholas Lambrinides; Procter & Gamble co-founders William Procter and James Norris Gamble; and David Frisch, founder and namesake of Frisch’s Big Boy.

There are department-store names that once dominated Cincinnati shopping: John Shillito, Henry Pogue and George McAlpin.

Nicholas Longworth Sr., Cincinnati’s first millionaire, is there, as is his great-grandson Nicholas Longworth III, who became speaker of the U.S. House and married Alice Roosevelt, daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt.

Spring Grove doesn’t have a U.S. president buried on its grounds, but has connections. Ulysses S. Grant’s parents, Jesse Root and Hannah Simpson Grant, are buried there. Alphonso Taft, father of President William Howard Taft, is there. So are relatives of other presidents.

Chase has one of the cemetery’s more understated resting places considering the resume attached to it.

Chase served as Ohio governor, U.S. senator, Lincoln’s Treasury secretary and chief justice of the United States. Or you might recognize his name from Northern Kentucky University’s Salmon P. Chase College of Law. His grave went unmarked for decades before a sarcophagus was eventually installed.

There are lesser-known names with equally good stories.

Ernst Huenefeld patented and manufactured a glass oven door. Gordon Barrett Miller wrote the “Uh-oh, SpaghettiOs” jingle.

Martha M. Stone survived the Titanic. 

Aside from the notable names that might catch someone’s eye, one of the easiest ways to explore Spring Grove is to start looking for things that don’t immediately make sense.

Take the clock on the 1863 historic office building. It has a face, but no hands.

Why?

“No reason to keep track of time,” Tallman said. “You’re here forever.”

Nearby are eight-sided stars representing the Star of Bethlehem and a carved “Green Man,” a symbol of rebirth. Lions incorporated into the building aren’t merely decorative either, they’re part of the gutter system, with rainwater pouring from their mouths. 

That symbolism becomes a scavenger hunt throughout Spring Grove.

Visitors can find extinguished flames symbolizing death, anchors representing faith, broken chains representing lives ending and tree-shaped monuments whose severed trunks symbolize lives cut short.

Spring Grove has about 40 of those “tree stones,” each different from the next. One of the most elaborate ones belongs to the family of Jacob Fritz, a Cincinnati butcher.

Its carvings include grapes, a Bible, a padlock and chain, an anchor, a snake, a squirrel, a hand holding an ax and even what appears to be a sausage grinder, a nod to Fritz’s profession.

“They all have something about their own family, which makes it really special,” Tallman said.

Some mysteries remain unsolved. Even Spring Grove’s docents debate whether the woman atop the Fritz monument represents Germania or Columbia and whether another carved figure is St. Boniface.

Then there are the impressive mausoleums.

The Fleischmann family, yes, of Fleischmann’s Yeast, has a private mausoleum resembling the Parthenon in Greece.  

The Groesbeck mausoleum takes its inspiration from ancient Egypt. William Slocum Groesbeck, a congressman who served as an attorney for President Andrew Johnson during his impeachment trial, is entombed in a structure designed to resemble a sphinx, complete with paws, haunches and a head.

But Spring Grove’s most visibly notable mausoleum may be the Dexter Mausoleum.

The Gothic Revival structure resides beside a lake with flying buttresses modeled after European cathedrals. Below its chapel are catacombs. Plans once called for a mechanical elevator, elaborate stained glass and pews, but Tallman said that family litigation prevented the mausoleum from being completed as once envisioned.

A steeple once stood atop the mausoleum. According to Tallman, lightning struck it and blasted it into the lake.

It’s still there.

“Everybody takes pictures of the Dexter,” Tallman said.

Not every Spring Grove story is as grand.

One monument depicts a dog lying down. Beneath one paw is a broken chain, symbolizing the death of an 8-year-old boy. Visitors still leave dog biscuits and sticks near the dog’s mouth.

Elsewhere, 333 Civil War soldiers are buried in concentric circles around upright cannons on three burial mounds. Spring Grove donated the land for the soldiers in 1862, and today more than 5,000 veterans are buried throughout the cemetery.

It would be easy to get distracted by the people buried at Spring Grove that you miss what’s growing above and around them. Spring Grove is also an arboretum, and its landscape is central to what makes the cemetery feel unlike a conventional cemetery. 

Landscape architect Adolph Strauch helped transform what had been swampy terrain by using lakes to control the site’s natural springs. The cemetery today has 14 lakes and a landscape built around long-ranged views rather than rows upon rows of upright headstones.

The grounds contain champion trees, including an Ohio champion dawn redwood and cedar of Lebanon. The dawn redwood arrived at Spring Grove around 1948, according to Tallman. There’s also a national champion September elm.

One white oak is estimated to be around 400 years old.

In spring, another spectacle emerges: roughly 10,000 tulip bulbs planted in one flower bed alone.

The wildlife isn’t exactly shy, either.

During a tour, you might encounter geese, woodchucks, butterflies, turkeys and swans Glenda and Dale. Look into the lakes and you may spot enormous carp whose dorsal fins have earned them a nickname.

“We call them our sharks,” Tallman said.

Despite its long history, Spring Grove is still an active cemetery. That distinction shapes how Spring Grove presents itself. 

“You know, even though this is a place of burial, I never feel sad here,” Tallman said. “I know we’re so respectful that these are all people’s loved ones.”

There are 45 miles of paved roads in Spring Grove. Colored stripes help drivers find their way back out, a useful feature in a place where one interesting monument inevitably leads to another.

Guided tours offer a way to make sense of it. The cemetery has tours built around history and heritage, tree stones and other themes, and the tour season generally runs from mid-April through October.

But there’s also something to be said for simply wandering. Follow a road because a mausoleum caught your eye. Stop at a lake because you saw a swan. Hunt for the mermaid monument. Find a stone tree. Look for those familiar Cincinnati names.