Oak Hill Cemetery is a 110-acre designed landscape that has served the community since 1853. Its present location reflects the influence of the Rural Cemetery Movement of the mid-1800s, which advocated park-like burial settings outside the city instead of small urban graveyards. Its physical characteristics reflect Romantic Period design elements such as asymmetrical, irregular landforms, exotic tree species, and meandering paths leading to serene vistas, while Classical and Baroque style monuments of marble, sandstone, or limestone commemorate the deceased. A significant counterpoint to Romanticism came with the 1864 burial of 572 Union and 30 Confederate soldiers in a closely packed grid pattern on a gently sloping but otherwise unadorned plot of land. In the latter decades of the 19th century, Late Victorian and Neo-classical architectural styles prevailed in ornamentation on markers and monuments, with fully sculpted figures and objects, incised details reminiscent of the Eastlake style, Gothic influences, and colored granite appearing more frequently. Preferences for natural landscaping in the cemetery's early period gave way to a more garden-like setting, and the Western Addition, platted in 1903, along with the northern half of Oak Hill, appears to have been designed according to Adolph Strauch's Landscape Lawn Plan, which emphasized smaller monuments, more open placement, broad sweeps of lawn, and the removal of clutter and fences around individual graves. The landscape contains approximately 63,000 burials, including a sandstone marker from 1816 that was reburied from an urban graveyard, as well as a Civil War burying ground, two early 1900s ponds, winding drives and pathways, 966 trees of 60 different species scattered across wide expanses of lawn, and a recently constructed veterans memorial near the entrance. The entirety is surrounded by a brick wall, and the site is crowned by a French Renaissance-inspired administration building designed by local architects Harris and Shopbell. Now surrounded by a mix of twentieth century residential and commercial buildings, Oak Hill Cemetery retains a sense of the past in its monuments and design and conveys a pastoral serenity for both the living and the dead.