Mt. Hope Cemetery

Mount Hope Cemetery opened as Lansing's new city cemetery in June 1874 on what had been the John Miller Farm. Between 1874 and 1881, the city vacated the Lansing City Cemetery, on the site that would become Oak Park, and moved roughly 1,000 graves to Mount Hope. Frederick W. Higgins, superintendent of Detroit's Woodmere Cemetery, planned the drives, and Henry Lee Bancroft, Lansing cemetery superintendent and director of parks and recreation from 1914 to 1957, developed the landscape over many years. Its rolling terrain, curving drives, and profusion and variety of monuments reflect mid-nineteenth-century cemetery concepts. In 1878, a large obelisk, the city's Civil War soldier's monument, was dedicated on one of the cemetery's highest points. The cemetery holds the remains of some of the capital city's most prominent citizens as well as some of the least privileged, including industrialist Ransom Eli Olds, pioneer botanist Dr. William J. Beal, two-time Medal of Honor winner and surgeon Dr. George Ranney, state officials, university presidents, Lieutenant Luther Baker, who led the effort to capture John Wilkes Booth, and Lucy Karney, a formerly enslaved African American who died in 1879 at age 117. A section laid out in 1874 for the State Reform School, later the Boys Vocational School, contains the remains of 61 boys who died between roughly 1860 and 1933.

Lansing, Michigan · United States