History in stone at Forest Lawn Memorial Park cemetery

The state’s largest cemetery, for size and souls, dates to 1886 with its first burial — of the previous landowner.

It was the first in Omaha professionally designed.

It’s part of the Nebraska Statewide Arboretum and a bird sanctuary.

The need was foreseen in 1883 by one of Omaha’s pioneers, real estate magnate Byron Reed.

“Prospect Hill is within the corporate limits and too near the center of population to be available for a permanent cemetery,” he said at a City Council meeting. “The rapid growth of the city within the past few years proves this beyond question.

“It will be necessary to discontinue all transient burials at Prospect Hill within the coming year and unless other facilities are provided by that time the public will be put to inconvenience.”

Expansion of Prospect Hill was out of the question, he said. The adjoining land was more valuable for development.

The Nebraska Legislature helped the city think big for its next general-population cemetery. In 1885, it increased the number of acres a cemetery association could own from 100 to 320.

West of Florence was the farm of Irish-born John H. Brackin. He came to Omaha by way of Ohio, traveling across Iowa with future Omaha banker Augustus Kountze. Brackin was in retailing in downtown Omaha while farming his preempted land of rolling hills and wooded areas.

The Forest Lawn Cemetery Association bought that land after its formation in 1885 and made Bracklin a trustee. James B. Brown was association president, Jacob Denise chairman of the board, Simeon T. Josselyn treasurer and Eben K. Long the clerk.

Other trustees were Herman Kountze (Augustus’ brother and a co-founder of what is today First National Bank of Omaha), William R. Bowen, Charles H. Brown, Orlando S. Wood, Arthur P. Wood, John A. Creighton, John J. O’Connor and James Forsyth.

After touring the site with Bracklin, an Omaha Bee reporter gushed about the land’s attributes:

“(A) rolling expanse of level land broken by the hills and valleys which serve and furnish diversity to add to the beauties of the landscape. There are about 90 acres of tree growth on the land, consisting of oak, elm, walnut and other varieties.

“The location is high and dry, and from the various spurs of the hills one commands views of the Nebraska fields and forests on the west and of the Iowa bluffs and prairies on the east, which for grandeur of sweep and scenery, is unsurpassed.

“It is not at all an exaggeration to say that there could be no site better adapted for the city of the dead, so far natural as attributes are concerned, when art shall have cooperated to tone the rough beauties of lawn and woodland and to supply the few missing points of a perfect landscape, there will be in all of the broad land of America no more beautiful resting place for the dead.”

Enter Joseph Earnshaw of Cincinnati, the artist of Forest Lawn. Among his works is Hollywood Forever, the final resting place for many a Tinseltown celebrity.

Earnshaw spent six weeks in the fall of 1885 laying out Forest Lawn. In the age of horse and buggy, he had the foresight to make the roads wide enough for today’s two-way vehicular traffic.

His final site visit might have been May 1886, when the trustees opened lots on the most southeasterly eight acres. Lakes were built from a stream that meandered through the grounds.

For his efforts, Earnshaw received $2,800. And picked up another project here. South Omaha hired him to design Spring Lake Park.

Brackin was the first interred at Forest Lawn. At the time of his death in March 1886, he was working for the Union Pacific and had moved to California for his health, only to succumb from the aftereffects of a bad cold.

Note that Forest Lawn wasn’t ready for burials. Breckin’s first gravesite was at Prospect Hill, where his wife and two children were buried.

On Sept. 18, 1886, his remains were moved to Forest Lawn as its first burial along with those of his family. Brackin left a request when he went to California that he be buried near an old oak tree on an elevation near the southern limit of the land he farmed.

The city’s Typographical Union was the first organization to purchase a lot. Less than two months after the Brackins’ re-interment, Forest Lawn’s first gravesite service was for printer W.J. Clary on Nov. 12.

C.Y. Craig oversaw Forest Lawn’s construction and was its first superintendent, serving until his death in 1926. So respected was he that that Omaha renamed a street in Florence for him after annexing its northern neighbor.

In 1909, he recalled the Clary burial:

“Clary’s mother was heartbroken and her grief was great added to by the lonely and God-forsaken look of the spot where the grave was dug. Not a tree or a shrub was anywhere near the grave, not even a blade of green grass. It looked an unfit place to bury any human being. The mother’s anguish was as keen that many were compelled to walk away from the scene, myself among others.”

Incidentally, the dates of the Brackin and Clary burials are blurred to make incorrect the state historic marker placed at the cemetery during its centennial in 1985.

Andrew Larsen was the first to be cremated in the state, in 1913, and the funeral for A.J. Manderson the first held in the cemetery’s chapel.

The crematory, now retired, and the chapel, returned to service, date to the early 1910s. Omaha architect John McDonald and general contractor Walter Peterson collaborated on the 40-by-60-foot marble-exterior chapel that was built over the crematory. The chapel was renovated in 1990.

The cemetery’s original gate was at 40th and Forest Lawn Avenue. The road followed Spring Creek to 30th Street. The road first was paved in 1909. Streetcars ran to the cemetery from 1905 to 1947 — in early years they went inside the gate — before giving way to bus service.

That gate was closed in the 1980s when the cemetery relocated its offices and entrance to the west side off Mormon Bridge Road.

Those who remember the east gate also may recall the many peony sellers for Memorial Day along the avenue and the Minne Lusa Greenhouse near 30th Street.

The burial list is a who’s who of the city — Kountzes, Paxtons, Barkers, Storzes, Joslyns, Kiewits, Doorlys, Hitchcocks and so many more. Many of the gravesites and their monuments are along the north drive, from which branches off Kountze Circle and its overlook of Forest Lawn’s earliest resting places.

Who’s not buried there? Byron Reed. He kept his plot at Prospect Hill.

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