Greenlawn Cemetery was the collective name of the first four public burying grounds in Indianapolis, Indiana, that operated from 1821 to 1931. It was located along the White River just north of what would later become Kentucky Avenue. The burying grounds acted as the initial burial place for some of the first Indianapolis settlers as well as Union and Confederate soldiers who died in Indianapolis. The cemetery was closed to new burials and many of the bodies were relocated after 1890 due to vandalism, grave robbing, overcrowding, encroaching industrialization, and the regular flooding of the White River.Stephen J. Taylor, "Ghoul Busters: Indianapolis Guards its Dead: Or Does It?", Hoosier State Chronicles: Indiana's Digital Newspaper Program (January 24, 2015). Human remains from the old cemetery that had not been relocated were rediscovered in the area during the construction of Eleven Park and the Henry Street bridge, having been concealed by above ground industrialization for several decades.
History Greenlawn Cemetery was developed in 1821 due to increased death rates caused by malaria outbreaks and flooding in the Indianapolis area. Alexander Ralston, the Scottish-American surveyor who had designed Indianapolis with the help of four early citizens of Indianapolis (James M. Ray, James Blake, Daniel Shaffer, and Matthias Nowland) mapped out a cemetery in the original city plans on a plot beyond the southwest end of Kentucky Avenue and near the White River. At the time, this graveyard was known as the Old Burying Ground. Other cemeteries were added around the original plot over the next 40 years. These surrounding cemeteries were known as the New Burying Ground, also known as the Union Cemetery, (added in 1834), the North Burying Ground (added in 1852), and, finally, the Greenlawn Cemetery (added in 1860). All of these interconnected cemeteries ultimately coalesced into the graveyard known as the Greenlawn Cemetery.
Schaffer and Nowland, two of the men who had helped select the site of the Old Burying Ground, were among the first Indianapolis residents interred at the city cemetery. Schaffer died only a week after the site had been picked in 1821 and Nowland died a year later. Black and white residents of Indianapolis alike were buried in the Greenlawn Cemetery, but there is known to have been a segregated section with the remains of Black residents located at the far west end. Alexander Ralston bought a plot of land for himself and his employee, Cheney Lively, who is believed to be Indianapolis's first permanent Black resident and the first Black property owner in the city. Ralston himself was buried in the Old Burying Grounds after his death in 1827, but there was an attempt to move his remains to Crown Hill Cemetery by the public. According to the Indianapolis Locomotive in reference to the Old Burying Grounds, "The old ground was laid out on the foundation of the city, and has been used ever since, graves being dug promiscuously, according to the selections made by the friends of the deceased."
The New Burying Ground was a lot added to the east of the Old Burying Grounds in 1834. It was modeled after the New Haven Burying Ground in Connecticut. The Indianapolis Locomotive newspaper claimed that this new burying ground was "beautifully laid out" and organized into lots that families were able to buy. In the 1830s, headstones were mostly made up of simply carved stone and marble tablets; however, grave markers evolved to be more elaborate in the cemetery after the economic boom that followed the construction of the Madison, Indianapolis and Lafayette Railroad in 1847. With the new materials being brought into the city via the railroad, local stone yards began advertising finer imported stones for grave markers and Indianapolis undertakers such as Weaver and Williams started producing new styles of coffins for consumers. In 1852, Edwin J. Peck, president of the Terre Haute and Indianapolis Railway Company, added the North Burying Grounds on a plot of land with over 250 sections. Finally, the final addition to the collection of graveyard plots was named Greenlawn Cemetery in 1860, a name which became applied to all four burying grounds.
At the time of the American Civil War (1861–1864), Indianapolis was still burying most of the city's dead in Greenlawn, including Union soldiers who died in camps and hospitals near the city. During the war, when the city served as a major transportation hub and as a camp for Union troops, the soldiers who died at Indianapolis were initially buried at Greenlawn Cemetery. Confederate prisoners who died at Camp Morton, a large prisoner-of-war camp north of Indianapolis, were also interred at Greenlawn, but their remains were placed on a strip of land along the Vandalia tracks purchased by the government. By August 1863 Greenlawn was nearing capacity from wartime casualties and facing encroachment from industrial development. To provide additional land for burials, a group of local businessmen formed a board of corporators (trustees) that established Crown Hill Cemetery. That privately owned cemetery, dedicated on June 1, 1864, to the northwest of downtown, borders present-day 38th Street.Wissing, pp. 14 and 17.
In 1866, the U.S. government authorized a National Cemetery for Indianapolis in Section 10 of Crown Hill and made arrangements for the removal of the soldiers from Greenlawn.Nicholas, p. 26 Within a few months the bodies of the Union soldiers buried at Greenlawn had been moved to the National Cemetery. On October 19, 1866, the remains of Matthew Quigley, a former member of Company A, Thirteenth Regiment, became the first of several hundred Union soldiers from Greenlawn to be interred at Crown Hill. By November 1866, the bodies of 707 Union soldiers had been moved from Greenlawn to Crown Hill.Wissing, p. 33. In 1870, the Confederate remains were moved from along the Vandalia tracks to deeper in Greenlawn Cemetery in order to create room for the Vandalia Railroad to build new tracks and an engine house. In 1931 industrial development around Greenlawn Cemetery required the remains of the 1,616 Confederate prisoners to be moved to Crown Hill, where they were interred in a mass grave known as the Confederate Mound in Section 32 of Crown Hill.Wissing, p. 164.
The movement of buried dead was not uncommon in early American history. Crown Hill Cemetery utilized the idea of a permanent resting place in their advertisements as a sales tool to attract potential buyers to their plots.Wissing, p. 35 Several of the individuals buried in Greenlawn were later moved to Crown Hill, including Indiana governors Noah Noble and James Whitcomb.
On December 11, 1889, the Indianapolis Sun described Greenlawn Cemetery as "one of the most dilapidated cemeteries in the state" with fallen tombstones and unkempt bushes hiding the grave markers of those interred. The newspaper article went on to describe the surrounding infrastructure's effect on the cemetery's atmosphere, including noise pollution created by the trains along Kentucky Avenue and the Evansville and Terre Haute locomotive roundhouse. The area also suffered from odors created by a smokehouse, powder mills, and a fruit house. In the 1870s there was also a pork slaughterhouse that bordered the north side of Greenlawn.
Closure
General Ordinance, No. 15, 1890, passed by the Indianapolis Common Council on March 21, 1890, closed Greenlawn Cemetery to all new ground or vault burials. Those who defied this ordinance could have been fined up to $100. In the 1890s, Greenlawn was in a poor state as a result of overcrowding, vandalism, and surrounding industrialization making it a less-than-ideal burying ground. However, with Greenlawn's closure there also came a fear of inequity for lower income plot purchasers due to Crown Hill's higher plot prices. Bodies were being relocated by families with the financial means, the government, and the heirs of Edwin J. Peck (owners of the North Burying Ground) to plots in Crown Hill Cemetery, Floral Park Cemetery, and Holy Cross Cemetery. During the relocation process, it was discovered that some of the graves had been robbed at some point, with the bodies being stolen, likely for use as subjects for examination and dissection at area medical schools.
While many of the bodies were said to have been removed, an indeterminate number remained and there were still plots owned by living purchasers. After the cemetery's closure, there were also legal discussions about turning the area into a park without reinterring the remaining bodies. When the city took over the section of Greenlawn that had been given by Peck, intending to make it a part of their plans for a Greenlawn Park, the Peck's heirs filed a suit for the land. The original contracts for Peck's section of Greenlawn stated that if the land ceased functioning as a cemetery, the property would be returned to Peck's heirs. The remaining bodies in this section were removed to Crown Hill by Peck's heirs.
Site redevelopment
20th century In 1914, part of the cemetery was the site of the city's Federal League Park, used by the Hoosiers baseball team for the next year. The 25,000-seat baseball field was not utilized for long, with the league disbanding in 1915 and the ballpark closing in 1916. The land was then bought by the Indianapolis Traction Terminal Company to construct a freight depot to meet the increasing demands on Indianapolis terminal lines. In 1917, the Diamond Chain Company, a bike chain manufacturer, built an Indianapolis facility over parts of the Greenlawn cemetery at Kentucky Avenue and West Street. This section was originally the Peck Burying ground and was sold to Diamond Chain after the heirs of Edward J. Peck regained ownership of the land. During the building's construction, pieces of bones and gravestones were unearthed. In 1924, the freight depot continued to expand over the Old Burying Ground, leading to a need for more bodies to be removed from the site, the majority of which were reinterred in Floral Park Cemetery in Indianapolis. Over 1,800 of these remains were unidentified.
After the last major Greenlawn reinternment in 1931 consisting of 1,616 Confederate dead moved to Crown Hill Cemetery, the area was considered to be vacant of the last remnants of the cemetery. On October 3, 1931, the Indianapolis News front-page headline announced, "Removal of Confederate Dead from Old Greenlawn Cemetery to Crown Hill Spells Finis for 'The Little Graveyard by the River,' Shrine of Pioneers". However, construction and development in the area over the next several decades led to the continued discovery of human remains, including the unearthing of two graves under the Diamond Chain facility floor in 1999.
21st century In April 2019, Diamond Chain was acquired by the Timken Company, which subsequently closed the 102-year-old Indianapolis facility. In 2022, the site was purchased by Keystone Corporation for $7.6 million. The land was intended to be used for Eleven Park, which would include a new 20,000 seat soccer stadium for the Indy Eleven team as well as 600 apartments, a 200-room hotel, of retail space, and of office space. The Indianapolis Business Journal estimated that the project could cost up to $1 billion with the stadium making up $250 million of the total amount. This project and the city's Henry Street Bridge project, which was planned to be constructed over the Old Burying Ground and New Burying Ground of Greenlawn, led to controversy surrounding the ethics of developing over a poorly excavated and allegedly segregated graveyard.