Spring Grove Cemetery sits about six miles from downtown and occupies 750 acres of land, making it the second-largest cemetery in the United States according to the nonprofit’s website.
The original idea for the graveyard came about through an 1844 meeting of the Cincinnati Horticultural Society, which developed a cemetery association that would attempt to create a more beautiful resting place for the dead—and their living family and friends—than the occasionally slovenly treated church cemeteries that dotted the city.
I’ve always found a stoic sort of comfort in cemeteries. Something about the solitude offered by the gravestone and tomb-lined paths, tied in with the comforting silence of the tall tree boughs above and soft earth below, has entranced me from a young age. In fact, when my partner and I were deciding where to go after undergrad, Cincinnati was the obvious choice for many reasons, but I’d be lying if I said Spring Grove Cemetery wasn’t one of the deciding factors in the city’s favor. You see, I believe you can learn a lot about a city’s culture and society by how it treats its dead; and if my beliefs are correct, then Cincinnati’s culture and society may just be unique to the rest of the country.
On a recent trip to the sprawling necropolis, I encountered five monuments that I felt shined a singular and fascinating light on to the city’s history.
Goforth Family Monument
Perhaps the oldest gravestone at Spring Grove Cemetery, the resting place of Judge William Goforth and his wife Catharine, reveals an often omitted piece of local, state, and national history.
Born in Philadelphia in 1731, William Goforth would go on to marry Catharine Meeks (b. 1744) in New York City in 1760. Fifteen years later, at the age of 44, Goforth would enlist in the Continental Army to fight in the Revolutionary War. Following his resignation in 1776, he was elected to the New York Legislature for two years.
In 1789, William and Catharine relocated to the town of Columbia—at the site of the modern-day Columbia-Tusculum neighborhood—in the Northwest Territory. Catharine is listed as a “pioneer Cincinnati woman” in the journal of Charlotte Ludlow Risk, who wrote, “The women whose husbands and fathers were among the early settlers of Cincinnati united in a bond of friendship.”
William would go on to be appointed as one of the first judges of the Hamilton County Court of Common Pleas, elected to the Northwest Territory House of Representatives, and chosen as a delegate to the Ohio state constitutional convention in 1802. A progressive Democratic-Republican, Goforth voted against the expansion of slavery into Ohio, and for the suffrage of the state’s Black and mixed-race male population.
Goforth would go on to die five years later in 1807. Catharine would later die in Covington in 1827. They had nine children, including their eldest son, who was also named William; and would become an influential Cincinnati figure in his own right.
The couple’s grave is a fascinating sight; a vague lump of crude stone at the base giving way to a clearer obelisk or column at the top. Four sides of the monument depict bas-relief carvings of recognizable grave-art, including such early 19th century motifs as Death and the Maiden. The base of the grave also includes Masonic imagery, honoring their son William Goforth’s role in the society.
McIlvaine Family Monument
Charles McIlvaine, born in Burlington, New Jersey in 1798, played a vital but overlooked role in the sustained survival of the United States.
A graduate of Princeton, McIlvaine was an Episcopal bishop who served as chaplain for the U.S. Senate in 1822, the same year he married his childhood friend Emily Cox. The couple would go on to have five children.
At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, McIlvaine was asked by President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William H. Seward to travel to the United Kingdom and convince Parliament against recognizing and assisting the Confederacy following the Trent Affair. In London, McIlvaine was much beloved. According to the 7th edition of the National Cyclopedia of American Biography, Queen Victoria and Edward VII, then the Prince of Wales, held the bishop in especially high regard, with the prince even visiting him at his Cincinnati home.
McIlvaine died in 1873 in Florence, Italy. After his death, Bishop Gregory T. Bedell wrote, “In form, features, and presence, he was a prince among men.” Emily had his body transferred across the Atlantic, and would later pass in 1877 in New York City. The two are buried together.
The McIlvaine monument’s most interesting feature is the life-sized bust of the late bishop, which sits in a small hollow near the top of the grave. Beneath it are two Bible quotes, one for each of the bodies buried there. Though it is faded, Emily McIlvaine’s reads: “Thine eyes shall see the King in His beauty.”
Dexter Family Mausoleum
English-born Edmund Dexter was a liquor merchant during the early and middle parts of the 19th century, like many in the city at the time. Eventually, he built an economic empire by selling whiskey. In March of 1829, he married Mary Ann Dellinger in Cincinnati. The couple would go on to have six children. Edmund died in 1862, and Mary Ann in 1875.
Their eldest son, Charles Dexter, was born in January of 1830. In 1865, Charles hired famed architect James Keys Wilson (designer of other Cincinnati landmarks like the Wise Temple on Plum Street and the John S. Baker House on Madison Road) to construct a family crypt. The beautiful product was finished in 1869 and “cost $100,000 at the time,” according to Douglas Keister of Forever Legacy— a modern price tag of almost $2.1 million.
After the completion of the mausoleum, Charles had his father’s body disinterred and placed in one of the 36 catacombs beneath the upper chapel. When his mother died in 1875, she was likewise entombed.
“Today, 20 of the catacombs are occupied,” docent liaison and historian Debbie Brandt explained. The others will remain permanently empty, as the structure is considered unstable due to the deterioration of the building materials.
The Gothic structure is clearly inspired by the medieval churches of the United Kingdom and Europe; and features, among other qualities, a set of flying buttresses mirrored on both sides of the crypt. In a strange turn of architectural events, these are the only symmetrical flying buttresses in Cincinnati.
The Tree Monument
The eye-catching grave of the Tree Monument is painstakingly crafted to look like a dead tree, a style that was fairly popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While these types of monuments were usually distributed by the Woodmen of the World association starting in 1890, research doesn’t indicate that any of the interred were employed in the lumber market. In fact, Leopold Zoeller, the potential patriarch, is relatively unaccounted for in any Cincinnati records.
One possible Leopold Zoeller is found in Williams Cincinnati Directory from 1886. That simply marks him as a “laborer” living at 387 East 3rd Street. Zoeller is recorded in the 1870 Federal Census living at the same address with his older brother Adam and their widowed mother Elizabeth.
There are other people listed on the leaves and vines of the stone; some seemingly unrelated. The many names on the monument include Herings and Pattersons, as well as Zoellers.
The most likely possibility is this: the Tree Monument reflects what life was like for immigrant families that didn’t hit it rich like the Dexters. Instead of a towering basilica, a simple and yet stalwart carved stump bears the names of multiple people—all potentially related, or simply close enough in life to be close in death.
Johnny Appleseed Memorial
Local legend has it that this is the site of Johnny Appleseed’s grave. Local legend, however, is wrong.
Johnny Appleseed, born in Massachusetts in September of 1774 as John Chapman, was an early arborist who dedicated his life to growing and spreading apple trees. Many of the details in his life are hard to extract from the myths that now surround him, but what can be found is compelling.
Chapman spent much of his time in the Northwest Territory, including modern day Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. He was a follower of Emanuel Swedenborg’s New Church philosophy, a branch of Christian Restorationism that sought to return the modern church to its ancient practices and roots, and he’s first accounted for in New Church pamphlets in the United Kingdom.
Chapman died in March of 1845 in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The location of his grave is still in dispute in that city.
At Spring Grove Cemetery, though, we know exactly where to find a remnant of John Chapman. Dedicated in 1968, Dayton-based artist Robert Koepnick’s six-foot-tall bronze statue depicts an agrarian, Hermes-esque Johnny Appleseed, with his caduceus-like apple branch staff pointed skyward, and a book—perhaps a copy of Emanuel Swedenborg’s “Heavenly Mysteries”—in his other hand.
The statue beckons us, like the other great and small tombs and graves that dot the rolling green hills and quiet pond banks of Spring Grove Cemetery, to think of the city in a mythopoetic sense; to imagine a place where tall tales rub shoulders with everyday folks in an age long past, yet not long ago at all.
