Oak Hill Articles - Montgomery InGenWeb Project

Twenty years ago Oak Hill cemetery was a farm not unlike other farms in this neighborhood, except like other farms it had its own individuality in its surface conformation. To-day it is a beautiful city of the dead with winding roads, whispering evergreens, and dotted with monuments of marble and granite and tablet stones, emphasizing the line in Gray's elegy, "The paths of glory lead but to the grave." Washington Irving has said: "There is one sorrow from which we refuse wholly to divorced that is sorrow for the dead." Again the same gentle writer says "Who can standby the grave, even of an enemy, and not feel a compunction of conscience that he ever should have warred against the handful of dust that sleeps beneath?" The sentiment uttered by another writer will set a cord vibrating in every sensitive heart: "The ground where sleep the remains of dear friends, in which the ashes of kindred mingle, is, indeed, hallowed ground." The better feeling of our natures has ever gone out in sympathy with the idea of its being consecrated ground. How true it is that we "refuse to be wholly divorced from sorrow for the dead." It is true that an individual is but as a bauble on the wave yet, linked as we are by the ties of consanguinity and friendship, death always comes an unwelcome visitor, and few are the new made graves upon which fall no tears. How Oak Hill has grown! How many are quietly sleeping here, and not a week passes but what more silent occupants are brought to sleep on its beautiful slopes, for "There is no fireside, howsoe'er defended. -But hits one vacant chair." These and many more thoughts and memories came to us yesterday in a silent ramble with a few friends in that beautiful city of the dead, so near to our beautiful city of the living. The crowning glory of Oak Hill would be the erection of a handsome soldiers' monument in an oval eighty-feet in diameter each way on the most sightly spot reserved for this purpose. It should be erected to the memory of the patriotic boys of Montgomery county who laid down their lives as a sacrifice on the altar of our Union. A rich, grateful and patriotic county should not do less. The mere suggestion should be an inspiration for positive action. If the voices of affection would but speak it would be done. - thanks to Kim H, a cemetery (especially OH) guru