Rock Creek Cemetery — also Rock Creek Church Yard and Cemetery — is an 86-acre cemetery with a natural rolling landscape located at Rock Creek Church Road, NW, and Webster Street, NW, off Hawaii Avenue, NE in Washington, D.C. 's Michigan Park neighborhood, near Washington's Petworth neighborhood. It is across the street from the historic Soldiers' Home and the Soldiers' Home Cemetery. It is also home to the InterFaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington. It was first established in 1719 as a churchyard within the glebe of St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Rock Creek Parish. The Vestry later decided to expand the burial ground as a public cemetery to serve the city of Washington and this was established through an Act of Congress in 1840. The expanded Cemetery was landscaped in the rural garden style, to function as both cemetery and 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 Latvian Church. Rock Creek Cemetery's park-like setting has many notable mausoleums and tombstones. The best known is Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Stanford White's Adams Memorial, a contemplative androgynous bronze sculpture seated before a block of granite. It marks the graves of Marian Hooper “Clover" Adams and her husband, Henry Adams, and is sometimes mistakenly referred to as Grief. Saint-Gaudens called 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, known as The Seven Ages of Memory, the Sherwood Mausoleum Door, and the Thompson-Harding Monument. On August 12, 1977, Rock Creek Cemetery and the adjacent church grounds were added to the National Register of Historic Places as Rock Creek Church Yard and Cemetery.
Area (m2)
340720.707661
Year of construction
1719
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