Oak Grove Cemetery

Oak Grove Cemetery covers about 15 acres in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Boston landscape gardeners Copeland and Cleveland laid it out in 1854 as a romantic park, with winding avenues and paths named for plants, and it was consecrated in June 1855. Later additions toward Washington and Grove Streets kept the original curving plan. Granite gate piers survive on Washington Street, and a Romanesque granite memorial to businessman George R. Bradford, built in 1903-1904, marks the likely site of a planned chapel. The cemetery is believed to be the first joint work of Robert Morris Copeland and Horace W. S. Cleveland, two early American landscape architects. It also represents the nineteenth-century move away from crowded churchyards toward landscaped burial grounds. Buried here are painters Fitz Hugh Lane and John Henry Twachtman, opera singer Emma Abbott, sea captains, local benefactors and baseball player Ralph Perkins. Vandalism and neglect have damaged monuments and plantings.