A Tale of Two Cities-of-the-Dead

By Gabriel Foster

This is Part 2 of the history of Mount Hope Cemetery. If you haven't read the first part make sure you go back and read it!

Americans increasingly held reminders of death at arm’s length as the 19th century ended. It was rare now for families to prepare their dead for burial, a duty now taken by the professional undertaker or funeral manager to be done out of sight until it was time for the service. (1) Small simple markers lying flat on the ground became more popular than the elaborate and personalized monuments, being less visible reminders of death on top of being easier to maintain. Strolls among the graves were seen as morbid as public parks, which took many inspirations from cemeteries, became the alternative for recreation.

A new park had been desired in Urbana for some time, and in 1902 the city assigned Street Commissioner Thomas L. Leal to turn the Old Urbana Cemetery into one. Burials in the Old Urbana Cemetery ceased in 1870 when the city council adopted Mount Hope as the city’s burying ground (2), but most of the graves remained. Leal spent the next year identifying remains and contacting families to determine their wishes for relocating the graves. Some were transferred to cemeteries in the surrounding townships, but over 100 bodies were reburied in Mount Hope, mostly in donated lots. In 1903 Colonel Samuel Busey and Mary Busy deeded the cemetery land to the city for the park, and those who could not be identified or had no family to contact remained with their marker buried above them. With the creation of Leal Park, Mount Hope was the only major cemetery left in the Champaign-Urbana area.

Fig 1: Champaign County News Article

Taken from the Illinois Digital Newspaper Archives

The Mount Hope Cemetery Association

In 1903, care for Mount Hope passed into the hands of Fred Atkinson, an English landscape gardener who had been the superintendent of grounds at the University of Illinois. He purchased Mount Hope from Elizabeth Falls for $17,000, intending to “devote his entire attention to beautifying the grounds” and “make Mt. Hope Cemetery one of the most beautiful places in Illinois." (3) Feeling the cemetery was in good hands, Ida and Mary Falls deeded the land for a new addition, named East Lawn, the same year. Despite Atkinson's passion and expertise, managing and caring for Mount Hope, now 52.5 acres, remained an impossible task for one person.

Fig 2: Plat map of Mount Hope by Godfrey Sperling. Red area indicates the East Lawn addition.

Courtesy of Champaign County Historical Archives.

In 1905, Atkinson issued an announcement in the newspaper expressing his intention to sell the cemetery. The announcement laid bare his frustration with the neglect of lot owners and the general indifference of the city towards their dead.

It is said that the condition of the burying ground of any community is a very fair index of the refinement and intelligence of that community. I believe the people of the Twin Cities would hardly care to be judged by their cemetery. (4)

However, he admitted that even if restored to its full beauty, Mount Hope would lack the features of a modern cemetery that the community deserved, including a water system, a small chapel, and a receiving vault for bodies awaiting burial. The money and effort required to upgrade the cemetery were beyond his means and he announced the formation of the Mount Hope Cemetery Association.

Officially incorporated on April 11, 1906, the Mount Hope Cemetery Association was organized as a non-profit to make the care of the city’s oldest and only cemetery a more public endeavor and avoid the issues that led to the cemetery's past decline. The Association's director, president, and chief financier was F.B. Vennum, president of the Illinois Title and Trust Co. Bank. He purchased the remaining interests held by Atkinson and the Falls family for $50,000, transferring them to the Association immediately after. (5) The organization's directors included several prominent businessmen from established families, such as David Busey, Captain T.J. Smith, and F.K. Robeson, who had ancestors interred at Mount Hope.

Funding the modernization was the primary concern of the Association. Lot prices ranged from $24 to $750, depending on their location. All lots sold in the East Lawn area would all be “perpetual care lots”, from $300 to $500, but with one-third of the money added to an endowment fund. (6) This fund, which Association shareholders also personally invested heavily in, would accrue interest to pay for the maintenance of the cemetery in perpetuity. The old lots remained unprofitable, but an average-sized lot could be endowed for about $100 and benefit from perpetual care. To avoid accusations of mishandling funds, the endowment was managed separately from the Association, none of which went towards member’s salaries. (7)

Fig 3: Stone by a headstone marking it for perpetual care. Photograph by Gabriel Foster.

Almost immediately after the transfer of land to the Mount Hope Cemetery Association, the superintendent, A.H. Havard, got underway upgrading the streets and water supply. By November $1950 had already been spent and a further $15,000 and several years were expected to be required to bring the promised offices, chapel, and vault. (8)

Mount Hope had an unprecedented amount of capital supporting it now, but many people didn’t trust a cemetery owned by a corporation of old-money capitalists to operate it in the public interest. Dissatisfaction with the past management of the cemetery lingered and now this Mount Hope Association was asking higher prices for burial space while saying most of the improvements were still years away. What choice did people have?

New Mount Hope Cemetery

On October 18, 1906, six months after the Mount Hope Cemetery Association was formed, another cemetery company was incorporated: the New Mount Hope Cemetery Association. Directed by Frank J. Webster, Warren G. Kennard, and Wesley King, the cemetery was established to compete directly with Mount Hope. (9) Webster, the president, also directed the advertising, marketing New Mount Hope as the alternative for CU’s citizens who were dissatisfied with Mount Hope’s past management and skeptical of the lofty promises of the Association’s directors. The New Mount Hope Cemetery Association bought about 10 acres between the original cemetery’s west side and 4th Street. According to Atkinson, he sold the land to Kennard to raise funds for the improvement of Mount Hope, unaware he would be a competitor. (10) Starting with $50,000, New Mount Hope hired Eugene Bondinot from Danville to design the new landscape, and the winter was spent transforming the property. (11) The first lots were sold at a flat $50 for a 10’ by 10’ piece of land, affordable and straightforward compared to Mount Hope’s wide range of prices. Burials began in 1907.

Fig 4: Plat map of New Mount Hope Cemetery/Roselawn by Godfrey Sperling.

Courtesy of Champaign County Historical Archives.

In addition to undercutting lot prices, the Mount Hope Cemetery Association was worried New Mount Hope’s name was being used to trick customers away from them. The new cemetery was accused of exploiting and undermining the reputation of Champaign’s most venerable cemetery, and over the winter unkind rumors about New Mount Hope spread. Webster responded loudly in the April papers, claiming New Mount Hope received offers to buy it out in an article taking up nearly a quarter of the page, saying:

"While we have been insulted, through the newspapers, at various times regarding Connecting Drives, Removal of Hedge, Mortgages, Low Ground, Salaried Officers, Laid Out for Speculation, to Become Trading Property and then a Cornfield, Perpetual Care, etc., we have never made a reply to one of these remarks. We realize the sentiment and public feeling and the necessity of a modern cemetery. New Mount Hope is controlled by citizens, whose aim is, not to rob the public for ground for the burial-of the dead." (12)

The article then insinuated that Mount Hope was burning greenery and leaving soot-covered monuments uncleaned while officers pocketed the endowment funds. It ended by offering reburials to New Mount Hope for free, monuments included.

The feud escalated when the old hedge at the boundary between the cemeteries was torn up in the middle of the night, and New Mount Hope’s roads were connected to the original Mount Hope’s. (13) The hedge was replaced by a barbed wire fence, which was also torn down. It was then replaced by a 10’ high stone barricade, which was disassembled within hours of it being erected. Webster freely admitted that he ordered the barriers to be torn down, having threatened to do so since December.

In May 1907, the Mount Hope Cemetery Association filed an injunction against Webster and his partners against the use of “Mount Hope Cemetery” in their name, advertising as being connected to the original Mount Hope, and for tearing up Mount Hope property. (14)

Fig 5: Injunction Writ for The Mount Hope Cemetery Association Vs. Frank Webster et al.

Courtesy of Champaign County Historical Archives.

Webster maintained Mount Hope’s westernmost road, Cypress Street, was platted by Jesse Burt as a public highway and any barrier infringed on the public’s right to access. He also argued that the use of “Mount Hope” in his company’s name didn’t hurt the Mount Hope Cemetery Association’s reputation because it was never known as the name of a "reliable, responsible, careful, considerate, or painstaking cemetery association". The Mount Hope Association accused Webster of organizing funeral processions through their property to New Mount Hope and of tearing out signs and yet another barbed wire fence since the injunction was filed. In New Mount Hope’s amendment to its defense, they said the signs read "This Section Reserved for Colored People" and were placed adjacent to its borders to hinder the sale of New Mount Hope’s lots. (15) The legal dispute wouldn’t resolve for  several years, and during this time New Mount Hope Cemetery started operating under the name Roselawn Cemetery, as it is now known by. 

The competition seemed to affect the day-to-day burial needs of the city very little. Both cemeteries saw regular business, and many people were thankful for the extra space Roselawn offered, allowing families to continue to be buried close to one another even if they weren’t technically in the same cemetery. In 1907, Woodlawn Cemetery was also platted, ensuring no single cemetery would have a monopoly over the care of the Twin Cities’ dead.

Havard provided regular updates in the papers on the progress at Mount Hope, and by 1908, Mount Hope stockholders were $7000 in debt, but improvements were on schedule. The new chapel was reported as “an architectural beauty” made of Indiana boulders and sided with marble. (16)

Against expectations, in 1910 the court dropped the injunction against New Mount Hope Cemetery. However, Mount Hope Cemetery Association swiftly filed an appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court. In the opinion of Justice John P. Hand, the Mount Hope Cemetery Association had control over the streets and lots on the cemetery grounds, even if the cemetery wasn’t their direct legal owner.

Beautiful creations of taste and genius relieve the external gloom and soften the repulsive association of the grave…and it is absolutely necessary, in order to insure regularity, permanence and progress, that these improvements should be under the control of one authority, acting in pursuance of matured and harmonious design. (17)

In January 1911 a remanding order was issued upholding the injunction against New Mount Hope. Kennard and King moved on to new careers and Webster quit the United States along with the cemetery business. He moved to Canada after trading his house and New Mount Hope to Thomas James Paisley for the latter's farm outside Mohamet and a consideration of one dollar. (18)

Fig 6: Urbana Courier-Herald Article

Taken from the Illinois Digital Newspaper Archives

Roselawn and the Arrival of the True Commercial Cemetery

After retiring, T.J. and his wife Grace moved from Mansfield to Champaign in 1911. Both were active members of the First Baptist Church, and Grace was a well-known hostess among several church groups and aid societies, especially the Unity Club. After acquiring ownership of Roselawn, T.J. was content to be a respectable and conventional cemetery owner, running it cleanly, quietly, and with no animosity towards Mount Hope. Bodies were buried, funerals held, lawns mowed, and life and death continued.

On January 7, 1914, Jesse Burt died in Wichita, Kansas. His body was moved back to Urbana to be interred in the Burt family mausoleum. You can learn more about the history of the Burt family and the fate of Jesse’s final resting place in one of Champaign County History Museum’s previous stories: A Buried Mausoleum: The Burt Family in Mount Hope Cemetery.

In 1914, Paisley briefly outsourced management of Roselawn over to the American Necropolis Company out of St. Louis, one of the leading firms in the commercialization of cemeteries. The company had been developing cemeteries across the Midwest since 1905, including Fairlawn in Decatur, and provided them with engineers, landscapers, superintendents, and sales managers on commission. (19) The company was headed by Charles Blackburn Sims, originally a lawyer from Urbana, and one news article suggests it was Sims' fondness for his old home that persuaded him to develop Roselawn, a relatively small cemetery compared to many of the company’s other projects. (20)

Fig 7: View Looking Southeast in Roselawn Cemetery.

Courtesy of Champaign County Historical Archives.

Champaign-Urbana newspapers were immediately blitzed with ads for the new “City of the Dead”. They described Roselawn simultaneously as a beautiful garden and a “scientifically developed perpetual care park”. (21) The ads appealed to men’s sense of family duty and the “cold, calm, business judgement” of a mind not clouded by “the sorrows of bereavement” to entice people to buy lots well before they are needed. (22)  Beyond drumming up new business, the American Necropolis Company did improve the cemetery itself, bringing in an experienced landscape gardener to redesign and beautify Roselawn. A Sunday jitney service was arranged to bring people back and forth from the cemetery, and the brick pillars to mark the entrance were installed. (23) By the end of 1915, Paisley was back in charge of a well-polished cemetery with a slick new slogan: “Perpetual charter, perpetual care”.

T.J. Paisley managed Roselawn until his death on July 6, 1930. After T.J. was buried in his cemetery, Grace sold Roselawn to the University of Illinois. (24) The purchase was intended to stop the expansion of the cemetery onto property the University hoped to develop, potentially including unused lots. Despite this, being surrounded by the University was generally regarded as good for Mount Hope and Roselawn. It provided insulation from the urban growth of Urbana and prevented industrialization from disturbing the peace. Despite the strange situation, the University ran a conventional cemetery, and whatever ambitions the Board of Directors had beyond that never saw fruition. By 1947, the University finally determined its plans for development were impractical and sold the remaining lots it owned to a new Roselawn Cemetery Association. (25)

Fig 8: Paisley Family Lot at Roselawn Cemetery. Photograph by Gabriel Foster.

On the grounds of the original chapel, the current mausoleum, chapel, and office building were constructed in the mid-1960s. With that, the shapes of Mount Hope Cemetery and its sibling Roselawn settled into what they are today. Currently under the same management, the two cemeteries have joined as one and continue to provide the CU community with burials and internment services. Although care for the burial grounds have passed through many hands and seen many changes, they have been continuously shaped by the optimism of Jesse Burt and the belief of the early Champaign County citizens that their cemetery can be a place where fondness for the departed can outweigh the sorrow. As observed by Norris Lateer, owner of Mount Hope and Roselawn from the 60’s through the 90’s, “Regardless of what's buried there, people like to come out and run through memories…They think of the past and the good times they’ve shared.” (26)

Bibliography

1. Greene. Rest in Peace.

2. Gerdes. “Uncovered Gravestones”.

3. “He Purchases Mt. Hope.” Urbana Daily Courier. April 30, 1903.

4. Atkinson, Fred. “Where Dear Ones Sleep.” Urbana Courier-Herald. December 23, 1905.

5. “Will Buy Cemetery.” Urbana Courier-Herald. June 16, 1906.

6. Mount Hope Cemetery Association. Rules of the Mount Hope Cemetery Association. Urbana, IL: Mount Hope Cemetery Association, 1905.

7. Dallenbach, J.D., Savage, J.H., and Dyer, C. “Mount Hope.” Urbana Courier-Herald. August, 27,1907.

8. “At Mt. Hope Cemetery.” Urbana Courier-Herald. November 26, 1906.

9. "First Steps Taken: Champaign Men Incorporate Cemetery Association." Champaign Daily Gazette. October 10, 1906.

10. Mount Hope Cemetery Association Vs. Frank J. Webster, et al., Champaign County Circuit Court Case 4104 (1907).

11. “New Mt. Hope Cemetery.” Urbana Courier-Herald. October 19, 1906.

12. Webster, Frank. “New Mount Hope.” Urbana Courier-Herald. April 24, 1907.

13. Mount Hope Cemetery Association Vs. Frank J. Webster, et al., Champaign County Circuit Court Case 4104 (1907).

14. “Cemetery Men in Court.” Urbana Courier-Herald. May 31, 1907.

15. Mount Hope Cemetery Association Vs. Frank J. Webster, et al., Champaign County Circuit Court Case 4104 (1907).

16. “New Vault and Chapel.” Urbana Courier-Herald. January 8, 1908.

17. Mount Hope Cemetery Association Vs. Frank J. Webster, et al., Champaign County Circuit Court Case 4104 (1907).

18. “Makes Deed to Paisley.” Champaign Daily News. March 1, 1911.

19. Morris, Ann. Sacred Green Space: a Survey of Cemeteries in St. Louis. St. Louis, MO: Missouri State Historic Preservation Office, 2000.

20. “New Cemetery for Champaign.” Champaign Daily News. August 14, 1914.

21.  “To Establish New Cemetery.” Urbana Courier-Herald. August 14, 1914.

22. “Buy When Your Mind is Free.” Champaign Daily News. August 26, 1914.

23. “Make Improvements at Roselawn Cemetery.” Urbana Daily Courier. May 3, 1915.

24. Abraham, Nelson. “Owners Release Roselawn Lots to Uni Trustees.” Daily Illini. July 19, 1930.

25. “Cemetery Lots Sold by UI.” Daily Illini. March 29, 1947.

26. McNulty, Marty. “Silent Hope.” Daily Illini. February 16, 1993.

Image Bibliography

1. "Mount Hope Cemetery (Urbana Township)" Photographs Envelope, Champaign County Historical Archives, The Urbana Free Library, Urbana, Illinois.

2. “Mount Hope Cemetery (Urbana Township)” In Cemeteries of Champaign County: a Location Guide with Plat Maps, A ILLINOIS (Champ) BAS, Page 115, Champaign County Historical Archives, The Urbana Free Library, Urbana, Illinois.

3. Foster, Gabriel. Digital photograph. January 25, 2025.

4. “Roselawn Cemetery (Champaign),” In Cemeteries of Champaign County: a Location Guide with Plat Maps, A ILLINOIS (Champ) BAS, Page 19, Champaign County Historical Archives, The Urbana Free Library, Urbana, Illinois.

5. Champaign County Circuit Court Case 4104 (1907), Champaign County Historical Archives, The Urbana Free Library, Urbana, Illinois.

6. “Trades for Cemetery Site.” Urbana Courier-Herald. Page 5. February 28, 1911. https://idnc.library.illinois.edu/?a=d&d=TUC19110228.2.76

7. “Roselawn Cemetery” Vertical File Folder, Champaign County Historical Archives, The Urbana Free Library, Urbana, Illinois.

8. Foster, Gabriel. Digital photograph. January 25, 2025.