Greenmount Cemetery opens in front of you, one of the most historically significant burial grounds in America and the final resting place of Baltimore's most prominent citizens, along with one of the most notorious figures in American history. Greenmount Cemetery was established in 1838 in the rural garden cemetery tradition that Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts had established — a landscape designed as a park for the living as well as a burial place for the dead, with winding paths, picturesque plantings, and elaborate monuments. The cemetery's residents include dozens of figures central to Baltimore and American history: Johns Hopkins, the merchant who endowed the university and hospital that bear his name; William and Henry Walters, the art collectors whose collection became the Walters Art Museum; and scores of Civil War generals, politicians, and industrialists.
But the most notorious grave belongs to John Wilkes Booth, the actor who assassinated Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865. Booth was shot while resisting capture twelve days later; his body was buried in a federal prison and later released to his family, who interred him here in an unmarked grave within the family plot. The grave is unmarked by request — the family sought to prevent it from becoming a shrine — but it is within the Booth family section.
The cemetery's elaborate Victorian monuments, Gothic chapel, and mature tree canopy make it one of the finest surviving nineteenth-century landscapes in the city.