Over 150 acres in The Avenues make up the Salt Lake City Cemetery, where about 120,000 people are buried. This is one of the largest city-operated cemeteries in the United States, covering over 150 acres and crisscrossed by 9.5 miles of roads. Approximately 120,000 persons are buried here, among them many religious leaders and politicians, particularly leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The very first burial took place on September 27, 1848, when George Wallace buried his child, Mary Wallace. The following year, in 1849, George Wallace, Daniel H. Wells, and Joseph Heywood surveyed 20 acres at this site for the area's burial grounds. When Salt Lake City was incorporated in 1851, those 20 acres officially became the Salt Lake City Cemetery with George Wallace as its first sexton.
You may notice the single British Commonwealth war grave here, that of a Canadian Army soldier of World War I. Stand a moment and imagine the decades this ground holds: the careful streets, the names and dates etched in stone, and the steady stewardship of a city-operated place of memory. Notice the markers stretching along those 9.5 miles of road, holding this cemetery's long memory in stone.