Knollwood Cemetery

Knollwood Cemetery is a cemetery located at 1678 SOM Center Road in Mayfield Heights, Ohio. Established in 1908, it is one of the largest cemeteries in Cuyahoga County. A mausoleum was completed in 1926, and an expansion finished in 1959. The cemetery's mausoleum, the largest in the state, boasts a number of windows by Tiffany & Co.

Creating the cemetery

Knollwood Cemetery was incorporated on September 9, 1908, by C.F. Heinig, Francis P. Newcome, and H.L. Ebbert. A five-member board of directors was established, and Benjamin Ottman elected its first president. A few weeks after its incorporation, the cemetery purchased of land from the Pennington-Quilling Co. for $40,000 ($ in dollars). The land had previously been the farm of Robert Lowe. In June 1909, the cemetery purchased another of land for $100 ($ in dollars) from James Watters, and of land from J.W. Thorman for $100. Another were acquired from other sources.

Ground was broken on the new cemetery on June 26, 1909. Paul Heinze, an architect from Detroit, Michigan, who had designed several cemeteries in the Midwestern United States, laid out Knollwood as a "park" cemetery. Twenty work crews began preparing burial vaults, grading roads, and landscaping of the site in preparation for a July 15 dedication. Work included the creation of a man-made lake. The cemetery's roads were paved with macadam, while the county began work on grading and laying asphalt on Mayfield Road to upgrade it in time for the burial ground's opening. Other work at the site included the emplacement of stormwater sewers about belowground, and the construction of a front entrance consisting of wrought iron gates supported by several granite pillars. A.T. Russell sold of land to Knollwood in September 1909.

The first interments at Knollwood were about 300 bodies removed from the old Erie Street Cemetery in downtown Cleveland. Hiram Brott became the first contemporary person to be interred at Knollwood when he was buried there on April 27, 1910. Interments were relatively few in number until 1912. Demand for burial space was strong enough that by 1916 of the cemetery had been cleared, landscaped, and plots laid out. Fully of this acreage was near the entrance of the cemetery, and consisted of a park-like garden cemetery. The remaining were more like a lawn cemetery. Another of the property had been cleared of underbrush and sodded, while remained heavily forested. The cemetery association also sold about of land, and spent $25,000 ($ in dollars) constructing a caretaker's residence (which included a small chapel) and maintenance buildings.

By the mid 1920s, Knollwood Cemetery was effectively a large land-holding company. In 1925, Knollwood sought to become a nonprofit organization. Under Ohio law, this meant the cemetery had to divest itself of most of its investments, which meant selling off land. This included the sale of of land to the new Acacia Park Cemetery, adjacent to Knollwood.

By the end of 1927, Knollwood Cemetery held more than 2,300 remains.

Mausoleum

In 1923, Knollwood Cemetery announced it had hired noted funerary architect Sidney Lovell to design a large, above-ground mausoleum for the cemetery. Plans called for the structure to be a mixture of Gothic Revival and Egyptian Revival, and for it to include two chapels and about 50 "private rooms" off the main corridor. It was completed about 1926.

To decorate the mausoleum, the cemetery commissioned a number of large stained glass windows from Tiffany & Co., most of which were vaguely secular in nature. Other Tiffany windows were commissioned by individuals who owned crypts in the mausoleum. All of the windows were finished in the late 1920s and early 1930s, toward the end of Louis Comfort Tiffany life, making it unclear how much work Tiffany himself put into their design. As of 2006, there were 17 windows in the mausoleum attributed to Tiffany.

In 1928, Knollwood Cemetery officials determined the mausoleum should be expanded. Hubbell & Benes