A Walk Through Oak Grove Cemetery

Our exploration of the historic burial sites of Grand Rapids will continue on September 12 & 13, at one of the oldest, and certainly the smallest of city cemeteries, Oak Grove Cemetery.

Though today situated in the midst of the busy, and thoroughly developed southeast end of the City of Grand Rapids, our walk into Oak Grove Cemetery will provide a brief look at what much of southern Kent County looked like more than a century and a half ago. When the cemetery was first opened, as the Paris Township Cemetery probably about 1839, all of the land that surrounded it was forested, and then only beginning to be opened up by early arrivals for farming purposes.

Among those early arrivals were members of the family of Daniel Guild, brother of the first pioneer to settle in Grand Rapids, Joel Guild. The first burial at Oak Grove, in the year of its founding, was for Daniel’s young daughter, Harriet, who died at the age of two years, in 1839. Over the next ninety-five years, some fourteen members of the extended Guild family would rest at Oak Hill, including both of Harriet’s parents and many of her siblings.

In style and appearance, Oak Grove closely resembles Fulton Street Cemetery, founded only the year before. Actually more graveyard than cemetery, Oak Grove repeats the strongly geometric lines and layout found at Fulton Street, and is filled with many burials of the earliest Paris township residents, mostly farmers and small businessmen and their families. Oak Grove lacks the large or elaborate markers and memorials found at Oak Hill and Greenwood cemeteries, both because the vogue for the ostentation of late-Victorian cemetery art had not yet arrived, and because many of the residents of Paris Township, which we know today as the City of Kentwood, lacked the inclination and the means to install markers of this type.

Still, the markers and headstones left by the area’s early residents, and those who came later, are filled with arresting messages and symbols, along with surprising information about the lives that they led, and what mattered most to them.

Please plan to join the members of the Grand Rapids Historical Society, on Saturday, September 12 at 10:00 a.m., or Sunday, September 13, at Noon, for a walk through Oak Grove Cemetery, led by local historian and author, Thomas R. Dilley. This event is open to all interested members of the public without charge.

Oak Grove Cemetery is located at the northwest corner of Kalamazoo Avenue, and 28 th Street, in Grand Rapids. Entry to the cemetery is off of Kalamazoo Avenue, next to the Grand Rapids Fire Station. Signs will guide you to the location.

Copies of Mr. Dilley’s recent book, The Art of Memory, The Historic Cemeteries of Grand Rapids, Michigan, will be available for purchase at a discounted rate, for the benefit of the Society.