Rose Hill Cemetery

Rose Hill Cemetery is a 50-acre burial ground on the Ocmulgee River in Macon, Georgia, planned in 1840 when the city council set aside the tract. Simri Rose, a newspaper editor and horticulturist, designed it and oversaw the clearing, importing shrubs and trees. His layout used a Doric-style arched entrance gate, a broad avenue to a bluff above the river, about five miles of carriage ways and footpaths, springs, a stream, a pond and plantings of roses. It was modeled on the idea of Mount Auburn in Boston. Family lots hold monuments, some carved by Italian or American sculptors, and some cost as much as $15,000. Masonic, Odd Fellows and Jewish sections lie within the grounds, along with a hillside of about 600 Confederate and Union graves. The nomination values the cemetery as a rare surviving example of picturesque landscape gardening, at a time when most such work was on private grounds, and as a collection of fine 19th-century sculpture reflecting Macon's history.