Rock Creek Cemetery is open daily - including holidays - from 8:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m. The cemetery office is open from 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. Monday - Friday. The office is closed on all holidays.

In September 1719, longtime parishioner, Colonel John Bradford, donated 100 acres of land to St. Paul's Episcopal Church. This land became what is known today as Rock Creek Cemetery.

The Church itself occupies a prominent knoll opposite the entrance gate toward the center of the cemetery. The cemetery is superimposed upon and around the old church yard. It was designed and laid out in the mid-19th century in the fashionable picturesque rural cemetery manner.

In the 1830s, the church decided to expand the parishioners' burial ground to serve the people of the city of Washington and with an act of Congress in 1840 established the cemetery as a public burial place.

Even though, the burial grounds were in use in the early 1700's, the old inscriptions on the early graves are few in number. Of those which currently are legible show a handful of burials in the late 1700's and early 1800's.