Swan Point Cemetery


Swan Point Cemetery is a historic rural cemetery located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Established in 1846 on a 60-acre plot of land, it has approximately 40,000 interments.Image:RI Governor Elisha Dyer Jr grave Swan Point Cemetery.jpg|thumb|250px|right|Grave of Rhode Island Governor Elisha Dyer Jr.
WWW Official Site

History

The cemetery was first organized under the Swan Point Cemetery Company, with a board of trustees. In 1858, a new charter was developed to make the cemetery administration non-profit, and it was taken over by a group known as the Proprietors of Swan Point Cemetery. In 1886, landscape architect H. W. S. Cleveland was hired to redesign the area. It is a cemetery park with its design inspired by the landscape of the first rural garden cemetery in the United States, Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Among the first to make use of a tract of land within the cemetery was the First Congregational Society. They moved several interments from older plots in Providence to Swan Point. Over the years additional land acquisition has expanded the cemetery to, and is still open to new interments today.
The Swan Point Cemetery is widely considered to be the most prominent cemetery in Rhode Island due to the number of well known citizens of the state buried there. There are more governors, senators and congressmen buried there than any other cemetery in Rhode Island.
Swan Point Cemetery was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977. It is one of the two largest cemeteries in Providence with the other one being the North Burial Ground.
Image:Lovecraft tombstone.jpg|thumb|250px|right|Gravestone of H. P. Lovecraft

Notable interments

Swan Point has the burials of many notable Rhode Island figures: