Woodland Cemetery in Quincy, Illinois, on bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River, became a resting place for many leaders from an earlier time and for many of Abraham Lincoln's personal and political friends, including Henry Asbury, Nehemiah Bushnell, Orville and Eliza Browning, Jackson Grimshaw, William A. Richardson, and Archibald Williams. Asbury, Bushnell, Orville Browning, Grimshaw, and Judge Williams practiced law and knew Lincoln from the early days, while Eliza Caldwell Browning shared the longest female friendship in Lincoln's life, recorded on her gravestone as a thirty-year friendship. Asbury, Bushnell, Browning, Grimshaw, and Wood helped found the Republican Party in Illinois and later advanced Lincoln's cause in gaining the presidency, and Richardson, though he later split politically with Lincoln, remained a friend. The cemetery is also the final resting place of Wood, Quincy's founder and the twelfth governor of Illinois. Quincy’s oldest active cemetery, Woodland was planned in 1846 by John Ward on land he would provide the city, and it is distinctive for preserving the topography that existed when settlers first arrived and when Lincoln visited Quincy. Its grounds once included a Civil War hospital and the U.S. National Military Cemetery of Quincy, established in 1858 in the northwest portion of the grounds. Woodland also holds the graves of many of Quincy's pioneers, cholera victims, abolitionists, soldiers, and leaders, including many of state and national historical significance. Thousands of Lincoln's troops trained or were quartered in Quincy, and the first of three camps named Camp Wood stood just east of Woodland Cemetery on the Adams County Fair grounds. The Sixteenth Illinois Regiment, including many well-known local citizens and their future commander General James Morgan, was organized and mustered into service there in May 1861, with headquarters at the center and ten companies scattered along the outer edges, a layout drawn by Doctor William Githens, first assistant surgeon, on the back of a letter. Eight additional units mustered in at this camp during the Civil War, and many soldiers who left from Quincy camps returned by riverboat to be cared for in Quincy's five military hospitals, one of them located in Woodland Cemetery.
