My very dear friends Kelly & Brad live in Des Moines, and so we go there once or twice a year to visit. Naturally, I find the time to go crawling between bouts of drinking on their deck, and visiting the super cool sculpture garden downtown. (They’ve also got some pretty nice parks, too!)
Woodland Cemetery, the oldest cemetery in Des Moines, is a large, rolling expanse studded with oak trees. Included within it is Emmanuel Cemetery. If you combine them, around 30,000+ people are buried there, with the oldest grave being from 1835. The markers include those of Congressmen, Governors, Medal of Honor recipients, and a whole bunch of Civil War generals. On some of the more famous mausoleums there are QR codes you can scan which will direct you to a short YouTube video about the famous person entombed therein.
Judging by my photos of Woodland taken in November of 2020, I was super interested in the Woodmen of the World stones, having never really seen them before. Likewise the white zinc cast markers. Anyway, the 4 PM autumn light made for some nice shots.
Then there is the cemetery complex that includes Glendale Cemetery, the Jewish Glendale Cemetery, and the Masonic Cemetery. Added together there are over 92,000 graves and cenotaphs (a marker for a person buried elsewhere), the oldest of which is from 1811.
The more famous markers are those of (once again) Senators, Congressmen, and Governors, as well as Medal of Honor recipients, the 33rd Vice President of the US (Henry Wallace, who was VP under Harry S. Truman), a couple of Pulitzer Prize winning photographers (Donald Ultang and John R. Robinson), and a “noted stage, screen, and Big Band star” (Joy Hodges).
This place is HUGE. It is wide open, rolling, and for the most part kind of low on a coolness factor, except for the Masonic Cemetery which has some very impressive statuary and installations.
Comments are closed.