Census Of The Cemeteries.
Cleveland's Cities of the Dead Contain Over 150,000 Souls
The following is an excerpt by Cynthia Turk from an article in the Plain Dealer 3 September 1900.
There are 152,123 people buried in the cemeteries of this city. . .
The twenty-six cemeteries were carefully canvassed from Woodland avenue cemetery with its 40,000 inhabitants, to the Edeltein cemetery on Fremont street with its total of three inhabitants. In some cases it was impossible to get accurate figures as no accurate records had been kept. The county, however is probably more close than the enumeration of the living . . .
[The census showed] that Cleveland held seventh place among the cities of the country, with a population of 381,786. There are twenty-six cemeteries in Cleveland. . . The municipality, under the direct supervision of the director of charities maintains five of this number, and in them are buried more than half of the total deceased population.
Erie street cemetery is the oldest, and Woodland cemetery the largest of the city cemeteries, the former having been laid out when the land east of Erie street was forest, and the cemetery itself was considerably outside the city limits. The latter burying place contains 40,386 bodies, a veritable city of the dead. Erie Street cemetery has a population of 17, 969, and has about reached the limit of its capacity. Harvard Grove, Monroe and West Park cemeteries contain, together, 26, 574 graves, which makes a total of 84,924 for the burying grounds maintained by the city, a sum considerably more than half the whole population of the municipalities of the dead. The Catholics have four cemeteries containing about 45,050 bodies. Three of them are for general use, the fourth, St. Mary's is for the exclusive use of the parish of that name. The records of the latter are incomplete and an accurate census cannot be obtained.
Lake View and Riverside have about the same population. The latter leading with 6,885 interments, a lead over the former of 1,305. There are ten Jewish cemeteries in Cleveland. About one to each one of the Jewish societies. Most of them are small burial grounds and no exact records have been kept. It is estimated that there are 3,880 graves in these ten burial grounds.
This leaves five other cemeteries, belonging to different religious organizations. These are the North Brooklyn Protestant, Hungarian, Denison avenue, East Cleveland and St. Mary's polish cemeteries. According to the records of these there are 5,506 persons interred in the five. This makes a grand total of 152,123 residents of the twenty-six cities of the dead in this city.
Naturally, no census can be taken of bodies buried in old cemeteries which have long been out of existence. In most cases when a cemetery was abandoned the bodies were removed to a permanent location. There was once a cemetery on Axtell avenue. The Nickel Plate railroad purchased the ground and the bodies were removed to another location. In the same way the persons who formerly rested in the old burial ground at Doan street and Euclid avenue have been taken to Lake View and the cemetery abandoned. There are probably several such cases of disbanded cemeteries. . . .
SOURCE:
"Census of the Cemeteries," (Cleveland, Ohio) Plain Dealer, 3 Sep 1900, p. 6; "Historical Cleveland Plain Dealer, 1845-1991," NewsBank via Cuyahoga County Public Library (http://www.cuyahogalibrary.org/ : accessed 11 Jun 2015).
|