OKI Wanna Know is the feature where we uncover answers to the questions that can haunt you. This week, we visit one of Cincinnati's oldest institutions.
Jan Frick of Deer Park was visiting some relatives in Walnut Hills.
"I'm intrigued by the chapel in Walnut Hills Cemetery. You can see protective screening over stained glass windows," she says. "That makes me wonder if maybe the inside has been preserved as a church, and if the building is ever open to the public or used in any way?"
The chapel is in the southwest quadrant of the cemetery on Victory Parkway. Above the door, are the German words for Chapel and Crypt, in stained glass.
The Walnut Hills Cemetery superintendent says the building was originally a lot smaller, including just the rounded part on the back end built in 1842.
"That was a crypt with steel doors. It was to house the deceased during the winter months," Tom Bittner says. "Back then, everybody dug by hand, and if the ground's frozen, you can't do anything with (the bodies)."
Bittner says the original storage racks are in there, along with a sled that was used to transport coffins.
The chapel was added 50 years later. It was badly damaged during rioting in 1968.
"It's basically storage right now but there are, up on the walls, old German script — probably scripture, things of that nature that were hand-painted on the walls," he says. "(It's) just absolutely gorgeous. A couple of the velvet curtains are still there."
Unfortunately, some parts of the floor have given way, so it's not really safe now. Bittner says the cemetery board started talking a couple of years ago about what to do with it.
"We do plan on renovating, and using it for weddings (and) small services," he says. "Whatever we do, it has to fit the period of when that building was actually placed. It's not going to be all new, shiny bells and whistles."
Jan Frick's relatives, Daniel and Charles Glossner, are buried in the Walnut Hills Cemetery, but she says she's had some trouble finding them. The brothers brewed beer in Over-the-Rhine in the mid-19th century.
"They made quite a good lager beer, I understand, but there's no marker on their spot at all,” she says. “I'm wondering if there ever was one."
Bittner says the absence of a headstone or other marker isn't unusual.
"A lot of folks didn't do that back in the day," he says. "The majority of our burials from 1800 through 1905 to 1910 are unmarked."
There could be any number of reasons for the lack of a headstone, ranging from families being larger because members died younger, to people moving around a lot more then.
Bittner confirms Charles is buried there, but the cemetery has no record for Daniel Glossner.
He might still be there though. Walnut Hills Cemetery covers 70 acres today.
When it was incorporated in 1843, it was only five acres. Then it was known as the Second German Protestant Cemetery.
Bittner says the name was changed in 1941 to avoid confusion with the First German Protestant Cemetery, which was the final resting place of people including veterans of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812.
First German Protestant Cemetery
The First German Protestant Cemetery was also called the Avondale Cemetery. It's no longer there, but was situated at what is now the 3600 block of Reading Road.
It had another, unofficial name: The cholera cemetery. Cincinnati had several cholera epidemics in the 19th century, each claiming thousands of lives.
"Of the recorded 583 burials that took place there, roughly 112 of them were from 1849 alone."
That's the year cholera killed about 5% of Cincinnati's population.
Bittner says the First German Protestant Cemetery closed in either 1864 or 1874, depending on which source you believe, and some of the occupants were transferred to the Second German Protestant Cemetery.
"There is no trace of the cemetery. Nothing to signify under the baseball diamond that's there (now), that there are bodies there. It was thought at the time that even touching the bones could spread the cholera germ and start another cholera epidemic."
That's not the only place in Cincinnati that used to be a cemetery. Not by a long shot.
But, that's something we'll dig into on a future OKI Wanna Know.
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