The History of Oakwood Cemetery

The rural cemetery movement was a response to the Puritan ethic of pre-determined destiny prevalent in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries in New England and Upstate New York. Early village and church burial grounds contained hundreds of marble or slate stones placed in straight rows and engraved with stern epitaphs promoting the notion that one’s place in heaven or hell was pre-determined. 

As the 19th century progressed, towns grew to cities, and population increased proportionally. For reasons of public health and overcrowding, burial grounds began to be located outside of population centers and no longer on church grounds. There weren't public parks, art museums, or botanical gardens in American cities at this time.

Proponents of this new rural cemetery movement believed that people should be laid to rest in beautiful park-like settings, where ornamental plantings, beautiful fences, and sculptural gravestones reflected the deceased’s personality, their accomplishments on earth, and their expectation of glory in heaven. This landscape would ease the pain of bereaved relatives, who could be comforted by the thoughts of their loved ones being forever memorialized in a peaceful and scenic environment. 

Designed with romantic vision based on English landscape gardening, rural cemeteries were consciously laid out to provide sanctuary, solitude, quiet, adornment, and beauty. It was common, especially on Sundays, for whole families to picnic in rural cemeteries “taking long walks in the peaceful setting, thinking about the past and the future, and keeping a little bit of history alive for themselves.” (Source: Forest Hill Cemetery Committee of Historic Madison, Inc. A Biographical Guide to Forest Hill Cemetery)

The rural cemetery movement followed closely on the heels of the optimistic religious revival movements of the 1830s and the writings of American authors such as Thoreau, Hawthorne and Emerson. Artists commissioned to create tombstones as sculptures embraced cemeteries as settings for public display of their work. In fact, the rural cemetery movement laid the groundwork for grand public parks such as Central Park in New York City and the development of American landscape architecture.

By the mid-1840s, the City of Troy had developed from a commercially based town along the banks of the Hudson River to an increasingly industrial city. Troy’s population rapidly increased due to the demand for labor in the iron and bell factories of South Troy and the burgeoning collar and cuff industry north of the downtown area of the city.  Industrialists and entrepreneurs formed a growing and substantial upper class, willing to patronize art, libraries, civic improvements like orphanages and hospitals, and a rural cemetery.

Troy’s first burial ground was established in 1796. Located on the corner of Third and State Streets, portions of that burial ground were given to the First Baptist Church and the Quaker Meeting House for use by those respective congregations. Two other burial grounds, the Troy Cemetery located on the southeast slope of Mount Ida (now Prospect Park) and the Mount Ida Cemetery on Pawling Avenue, rounded out the principal non-sectarian city burial grounds. The Rev. Peter Havermans, founder of the earliest Catholic parishes, established Catholic burial grounds by the 1860s. Two Jewish burial grounds were established on the eastern outskirts of the city in the last quarter of the 19th century. 

By September 1848, when land was purchased by the Troy Cemetery Association purchased for Oakwood Cemetery, Troy and Lansingburgh had an established upper class with sophisticated taste and a burgeoning middle class ready to spend money on purchasing family “plots.” 

Cemetery trustees selected a site comprising 150 acres of land just north of Troy and east of the Village of Lansingburgh on an escarpment with views of the foothills of the Adirondacks to the north, the Cohoes Falls to the west and the Helderberg Mountains and Hudson River Valley to the south. They commissioned Philadelphia landscape engineer J. C. Sydney to lay out the curvilinear roads, plots and plantings. Sydney utilized the abundance of natural water sources to create the many ponds and waterfalls that enhance the landscape of Oakwood. 

In 1871 the Troy Cemetery Association purchased an additional 150 acres adjoining the original property. Landscape architect John Boetcher introduced a wide variety of rare shrubs and plants, many of which survive today, to the Oakwood landscape. 

Many of Troy’s wealthier families purchased plots in strategic locations commanding some of the finest views in the cemetery, hiring architects and artists to design and build their family mausoleums and sculptures to enhance the final resting place of their family members. Hundreds of remains were also re-interred from old Troy Cemetery on Mount Ida and the old burial ground on Third Street, which by 1875 became the site of Troy’s first City Hall.