Riverside Cemetery

Riverside Cemetery is a 68-acre rural cemetery just south of Oswego, New York, designed in 1855 by Burton A. Thomas for the Oswego Rural Cemetery Association. Thomas worked with the hilly, glacial terrain, creating winding carriage roads, grassy footpaths, two small lakes crossed by stone bridges, and plantings of maples, spruce and pine. Notable features include the 1906 Page Memorial Chapel, a Gothic Revival stone building by Fielding Mantle of Philadelphia with Tiffany Studios windows, an 1875 receiving vault, a 1925 Colonial Revival superintendent's residence, service barns, mausolea and many monuments. About 17,000 graves are present. The cemetery was created when older burial grounds in Oswego were filling up and the city's canal and railroad trade had produced wealthy families who expressed their status through lots and monuments. The period from 1855 to 1940 marks its main development, ending when large mausolea were no longer built.