Graceland Cemetery

Although it may be strange to some people, one of my favorite things to do is walking around cemeteries. In many of them, a lot of interesting artwork and history is in carved into headstones and mausoleums. I like to read the dates on them and try to imagine the lives of the people buried beneath the ground. One of the most interesting cemeteries in the world is Graceland in Chicago. It is located on Clark Street near my old neighborhood and not far from Wrigley Field. My dad, grandparents and other relatives are buried there.

The thing that is so great about Graceland are the many artistic monuments. Many famous Chicagoans are buried there including Marshall Field (the department store czar), Potter Palmer (owned the famous Palmer House hotel in Chicago), Cyrus McCormick (inventor of the mechanical reaper), and Philip Armour (founded Armour Meat Packing). Graceland was established in 1860 and received a perpetual charter from the State of Illinois. The western boundary (Clark Street) was an old Indian trail.

Now I want to describe some of the more interesting monuments. There is a statue of a vine-covered woman by the grave of Eli Williams, who came to Chicago in 1830 and died in 1881. Next, there is the Statue of Death, a bronze figure entitled Eternal Silence. It marks the burial plot of the Dexter Graves family. The hooded bronze figure is grim and forbidding picture of death. Another interesting statue is at the grave of Victor Lawson. It depicts a crusading knight in armor holding a shield. Lawson was a newspaper publisher. He published the Chicago Daily News (no longer in circulation).

Peter Shoenhoffer, a wealthy brewer, had an Egyptian-like pyramid built over his resting place. The pyramid shaped mausoleum is guarded by an angel and a sphinx. The inventor of the Pullman railroad car, George Pullman, has a large monument with a large Doric column. Beneath the monument, he lies in a coffin covered in tar paper and asphalt inside a concrete block the size of a room. Another Egyptian style tomb is that of Martin Ryerson, lumberman. It consists of a mastaba capped by a pyramid.

What I have described here are only a few of the amazing statues and monuments in Graceland. If you visit Chicago, I rank it as one of the must-see sights of this great city.