- Name: Woodlawn Cemetery
- Location: 44.03530, -91.65940
- Date Visited: May 14, 2022
It was a beautiful spring day when I visted Woodlawn, an amazingly beautiful cemetery with over 17,000 graves, the oldest of which dates back to 1803.
Even more astounding is the earliest birth date of 1757. You typically don’t see birth dates that old in the Midwest. Most of the people who settled this area were born in the first half of the 19th Century. That guy by the way, Steven Taylor, lived to be 100 years old.
Winona is in bluff country in southeastern Minnesota, so the cemetery is topographically astounding, and a bit of a challenge to explore due to the extreme differences in height, and the angle at which they change. But boy was it worth every minute spent there.
Among the more notable graves are a Governor of North Dakota, a silent film star, a Civil War Congressional Medal of Honor winner, and a couple of Congressmen.
One of the coolest markers is this one. Unfortunately I didn’t get the name or names, nor the name of the artist who created it, but I’ve never seen anything like it in any of my many crawls. I’m guessing that it’s cast bronze construction, and it seems to be a depiction of the Garden of Eden, with Adam and Eve and the Tree of Knowledge in the center (pardon me if I’m a little rusty on my Genesis, it’s been a long time since I read that book), along with all the animals of creation surrounding them. You’ll see elephants, emus, and elk, hippopotamus, sloths, leopards, antelope, monkeys, buffalo, giraffes and zebras!
Woodlawn is one I want to visit again.
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