Karel Vaclav Janovsky (1876 – 1962) emigrated from Bohemia at the age of 14. He used “Johns” as an Anglicized surname but over time (and likely due to finding the tight-knit Bohemian community in Chicago) used both names to the point that he hyphenated them on the family mausoleum. He married first wife Mary Theresa […]
3 September 1856 – 14 April 1924 Sullivan was a massively influential architect whose work was foundational in both the birth of the skyscraper and in the Chicago School of architecture. He was a mentor of Frank Lloyd Wright and inspired many of the architects who would later be known collectively as the Prairie School. […]
As it says over the door, the Balaban Mausoleum was built “In Memoriam to Ida Balaban Katz,” the sister of the founders of Balaban and Katz, the iconic movie palace moguls. The mausoleum was designed by Rapp and Rapp, the same architects who designed the Chicago Theater which still stands as a highly recognizable icon […]
This stunning monument marks the Cummings family plot in the Fairlawn section at Graceland. Patriarch Columbus R. Cummings (1834 – 1897) — another of the Gilded Age tycoons whose monuments dot the cemetery’s landscape — came to Chicago from New York as a young man and went to work for Potter Palmer (whose spectacular monument […]
27 February 1849 – 5 January 1900 Ernst is another one of those Victorian rags-to-riches stories that are inescapable in American folklore. He was born in Germany to poor parents who immigrated to hte US when he was a toddler. They first lived in Wisconsin and then moved to Chicago. His father made baskets and […]
1 January 1868 – 27 June 1936 Grand Chairman, Pullman Porters Benefit Association of America Perry Parker began working for the Pullman company as a porter in Cincinnati at around the age of 25. He worked as a porter and later as a confidential inspector (or investigator) for the company for 27 years, retiring in […]
3 January 1946, Belfast – 16 January 2008, Georgetown Neighborhood, Washington, DC Conisbee was a celebrated art historian and museum curator who began his career as a professor in the UK before he was hired by Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts to be an associate curator of French painting. From there, he moved to Los […]
7 June 1917 – 3 December 2000 Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas but when she was only six weeks old, her parents moved to Chicago during the Great Migration. Brooks would call Chicago home for the rest of her life. She had one sibling, a brother a year younger. Her father had aspired […]
24 December 1777 – 16 November 1850 Menagerist This headstone is very sweet and might make you think kindly of the person it immortalizes, but George Wombwell was no champion of animal welfare. Wombwell was a shoemaker from Essex who stumbled into exotic-animal-collecting when he bought two boa constrictors on the London docks and started […]
Lars Schmidt 1886 – 14 September 1890 Eddie Schmidt 28 April 1888 – 28 August 1890 Rudolph Schmidt 19 September 1891 – before 1900 Baby Schmidt 1890s This little headstone is quite famous, mentioned in guide books and identified on the Forest Home tourist handouts as a destination to visit. The two little brothers, Eddie […]