Crown Hill Cemetery: resting place for notable and notorious
Published: Oct 20, 2009
Dotted with trees and beautifully landscaped, historic Crown Hill Cemetery serves as the final picturesque resting place of the great and the ordinary for more than 150 years. Visitors can tour the grounds, taking in the historic graves or just the scenic grounds.
Founded in 1865, the 550-acre cemetery ranks is the third-largest in the United States and serves as the final resting place for more than 190,000 people. The landscape also provides a home for wildlife such as deer, foxes, ground hogs, birds, rabbits, squirrels, opossums and birds.
President Benjamin Harrison is buried in the cemetery, along with his wife and his daughter. So is Colonel Eli Lilly, founder of the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Co. He is surrounded by later generations of the Lilly family. Also interred here is Booth Tarkington, the Indianapolis-born author who won the Pulitzer Prize twice.
Two Olympic Gold medalists — swimmer Frank McKinney Jr., who later became president of Bank One of Indiana, and runner John Woodruff — rest at Crown Hill. Another figure from sports — Carl Fisher, co-Founder of Indianapolis Motor Speedway and developer of Miami Beach, Fla. — was laid to rest there in 1931. Ovid Butler, abolitionist and founder of Indiana's prestigious Butler University, was buried at the cemetery in 1881.
Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley; Hoosier native Howard Garns, the inventor of Sudoku; department store magnate Lyman S. Ayres; Thomas Taggart, U.S. senator and developer of the French Lick Resort; 13 other U.S. senators, three U.S. vice presidents, Baltimore Colts owner Bob Irsay, 11 Indiana governors and many more notables are buried at Crown Hill. You can find a full list at the Notable Persons webpage. Also buried at Crown Hill are the more notorious: bank robber John Dillinger and Dr. Richard Gatling, inventor of the Gatling gun. Yet, most are humble Hoosiers, like Lucy Ann Seaton, a young mother who died of tuberculosis and became the very first burial on June 2, 1864.
The so-called Confederate Mound on the cemetery's north side provides the final resting place for 1,616 Confederate prisoners of war who died at Camp Morton, which was located at what now is 22nd and Delaware streets. They were reburied at Crown Hill in 1931. The Crown Hill National Cemetery, 1.4 acres within Crown Hill Cemetery, contains more than 2,000 soldiers from several wars — including 707 Union soldiers who were reburied there.
Crown Hill Cemetery conducts 90-minute public tours twice a month from March until November. Tours cost $5 for adults, $4 for those aged 55 or older and $3 for students. No reservations are required for public tours. Crown Hill also will schedule private group tours, with a minimum fee of $50 per tour. For more information, check online or call Marty Davis at (317) 920-2644.
If you'd like to take a self-guided tour, use this map to the more renowned graves.
- by Ivonne Rovira, Indianapolis Reporter for HelloMetro
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