Established in 1857.



"Source: Wisconsin Historical Society"
A castle-like, wooden Gothic Revival gatehouse, built in 1897, marks the entrance to Milwaukee's oldest remaining Roman Catholic cemetery. Stepped gables, crenelated parapets, and denticulated cornices give the building a sense of upright angularity. But a subtler curvilinear motif softens the structure, in the parapets and Palladian window, and culminating in the gatehouse's round-arched entranceway.

Inside, are seventy-five acres of park-like rolling hills and mature trees, planned according to the romantic ideals of nineteenth-century landscape design. Like nearby Forest Hills Cemetery, it served as a popular picnic spot before the establishment of city parks in the 1890s. The stone monuments scattered throughout comprise one of the state's best collections of nineteenth-century funerary art. Many of Milwaukee's early civic leaders are buried here, their tombs often marked by handsome monuments, such as the pyramidal mausoleum for druggist Lawrence McMahon and his wife.

An exquisite brick Romanesque Revival chapel tops "Jesuit Hill," a grassy knoll rising a hundred feet above the surrounding terrain. Crypts beneath the chapel were reserved for important Roman Catholic clergy, but only one burial ever took place there. Instead, local Catholic clergy were interred on the hillsides around the chapel, giving Jesuit Hill its name. The chapel's dignified octagonal tower is the cemetery's focal point. Both the gatehouse and chapel were designed by Erhard Brielmaier, who designed St. Josaphat's Basilica and whose firm designed more than eight hundred churches nationwide between 1880 and 1920.