Rock Creek Cemetery


Rock Creek Cemetery is an cemetery with a natural and rolling landscape located at Rock Creek Church Road, NW, and Webster Street, NW, off Hawaii Avenue, NE, in the Petworth neighborhood of Washington, D.C., United States. It is across the street from the historic Soldiers' Home and the Soldiers' Home Cemetery. It also is home to the InterFaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington. On August 12, 1977, Rock Creek Cemetery and the adjacent church grounds were listed on the National Register of Historic Places as Rock Creek Church Yard and Cemetery.

History

The cemetery was first established in 1719, under the British colony of the Province of Maryland, as a churchyard within the glebe of St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Rock Creek Parish. Later, the Vestry decided to expand the burial ground as a public cemetery to serve the city of Washington, D.C., which had acquired the cemetery, within its district boundaries as established in 1791, formerly, being a part of the state of Maryland, and formally established through an Act of Congress in 1840.
An expanded cemetery was landscaped in the rural garden style, to function as both a cemetery and a public park. It is a ministry of St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Rock Creek Parish, with sections for St. John's Russian Orthodox Church and St. Nicholas Orthodox Cathedral.
The park-like setting of Rock Creek Cemetery has many notable mausoleums, sculptures, and tombstones. The best known is the Adams Memorial, a contemplative, androgynous bronze sculpture seated before a block of granite that was created by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Stanford White. It marks the graves of Marian Hooper 'Clover' Adams and her husband, Henry Adams, and sometimes, mistakenly, the sculpture is referred to as Grief. Saint-Gaudens entitled it The Mystery of the Hereafter and The Peace of God that Passeth Understanding.
Other notable memorials include the Frederick Keep Monument, the Heurich Mausoleum, the Hitt Monument, the Hardon Monument, the Kauffman Monument that is known as The Seven Ages of Memory, the Sherwood Mausoleum Door, and the Thompson-Harding Monument.

Sculptors of works in the cemetery

Numerous fine works by unknown sculptors also exist in the cemetery.

Interments

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Carmel Offie

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  • Thomas Nelson Page, First Families of Virginia descendant, attorney, ambassador to Italy, and Southern writer
  • William Paret, sixth Episcopalian Bishop of Maryland
  • Rosalie Mackenzie Poe, sister of Edgar Allan Poe
  • Terence Powderly, longtime leader of the Knights of Labor
  • Robert Prosky, Polish-American actor

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  • John B. Raymond, American politician
  • Isidor Rayner, American Democratic politician, member of the Senate
  • George Washington Riggs, American banker, founder of Riggs Bank
  • William A. Rodenberg, American politician
  • Frederick Rodgers, United States Navy rear admiral
  • Tim Russert, American journalist, host of Meet the Press

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  • Alexander Robey Shepherd, American politician, governor of District of Columbia from 1873 to 1874
  • Thetus W. Sims, American politician and a member of the United States House of Representatives for the eighth congressional district of Tennessee from 1897 to 1921
  • Upton Sinclair, American author, Pulitzer Prize winner
  • Ainsworth Rand Spofford, American journalist and publisher, sixth Librarian of the United States Congress from 1864 to 1897
  • Harlan Fiske Stone, Chief Justice of the United States
  • Paulina Longworth Sturm, daughter of Alice Roosevelt and granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt

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  • Abner Taylor, American politician
  • George Taylor, American attorney and Democratic politician
  • Thomas Weston Tipton, U.S. Senator from Nebraska
  • Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams, Russian-American writer and journalist

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