City Cemetery

Raleigh's oldest public cemetery, City Cemetery occupies 7.46 acres east of downtown. It began in 1798 as a four-acre burying ground divided into four squares, with separate sections for city residents, strangers and African Americans. Later annexations brought it to its present size. About 2,100 burials are recorded, with death dates from 1795 to 2006. Graves are laid out east-west within family plots, many bordered by granite walls or cast-iron fences. A cast-iron fence originally made for Capitol Square was re-erected around three sides in 1898, and two granite mausolea date from the 1840s and about 1850. Monuments include headstones, box-tombs and obelisks, some carved by the Scottish stonecutter William Stronach, who came to build the State Capitol. The cemetery was listed for its social history and for one of North Carolina's finest collections of nineteenth-century funerary sculpture. Burials include governors, newspaper editors, ministers and early Raleigh families.