Greenwood Cemetery (Birmingham, Michigan)


Greenwood Cemetery occupies on Oak Avenue between Greenwood and Lake Streets, west of
Old Woodward Avenue, in Birmingham, Michigan. The gently rolling landscape contains over 3,000 graves; 650 date from the nineteenth century. The grounds display a plethora of limestone, marble, cast zinc and granite monuments. An iron fence with low stone piers flanking the entrance fronts the cemetery. In 1885 the Greenwood Cemetery Association was established to maintain the burial ground. When the Association was dissolved in 1946, the city of Birmingham assumed the ownership and maintenance of the cemetery.

History

The oldest section of Greenwood Cemetery comprises land purchased from the federal government by Dr. Ziba Swan of Albany, New York, in 1821. The first interments on this one-half-acre parcel, set aside by Swan for a cemetery, occurred in 1825, when Polly Utter and her daughter Cynthia were murdered by Imri Fish, a mentally ill War of 1812 veteran who was boarding with the family.
Twenty-one years later twenty-one local citizens, including Dr. Ebenezer Raynale, a member of Michigan's first senate, purchased the cemetery property and an additional one and one-half acres from Swan. Martha Baldwin, founder of the Ladies' Library Association, organized local women into a group that in 1885 incorporated as the Greenwood Cemetery Association. Between 1846 and 1904 the cemetery was enlarged three times, increasing in size to. In 1946 the city of Birmingham took over the operation of the cemetery. Side Two was created in 1825 on the property of Dr. Ziba Swan.

Notable interments

Greenwood Cemetery contains the remains of some of Oakland County's earliest pioneers and most prominent citizens. Birmingham's only American Revolutionary War veteran, John Daniels, was buried here in 1832. He had moved to Michigan with his wife when he was in his 80s. Dr. Swan was interred in 1847.
Additional interments include: