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Tours of Oak Ridge CemeteryNotable Women at Oak Ridge Cemetery
Grave-finding at Oak Ridge
The city of Springfield website includes an interactive map of Oak Ridge Cemetery. Use grave locations noted below to find individual burial sites. (If the map’s search function doesn’t work, you can drag and scroll through the map to find the correct block and site.)
However, be aware that many gravestones lie flat with the ground; that may make it harder to find a specific grave even when you’ve located it using the map.
Businesswomen | Activists | Educators | Officials | Other
Businesswomen
Henrietta Ulrich (1797-1887) Block 7 GPS 39.82630N, 89.65685W
Born to German-Russian gentry in today’s Estonia, Henrietta Ulrich became a prominent real-estate investor and financier in Springfield. Most of the city’s near west side originally was farmland that Ulrich developed. Henrietta Street is named after her.
More information: SangamonLink.org
Bell Miller (1870-1940) Block 7 GPS 39.82608N, 89.65712W
At age 22, Bell Miller opened a flower shop in her home. Within a few years, she was running a complex of seven greenhouses and related buildings around First and Canedy streets. She then went into high-end real estate, constructing the luxury Bell Miller Apartments at 835 S. Second St. The building later became The Inn at 835, a bed-and-breakfast inn and event facility.
More information: Wikipedia.org
Augusta “Madame Brownie” Kellogg (1835-1915) Block A GPS 39.82680N, 89.65792W
Augusta Kellogg was the proprietor of Springfield’s best-known house of prostitution for 35 years. Her business, which a newspaper called “one of the most orderly in the state,” made her wealthy. But Kellogg, known professionally as “Madame Brownie,” also was known for her charity. “Madam Brownie never turns anyone away,” a tramp once said of her, “and she usually gives money, too.”
More information: SangamonLink.org
Activists
Susan Lawrence Dana (1862-1946) Block 11 GPS 39.82496N, 89.65680W
Susan Lawrence Dana is best known for commissioning Frank Lloyd Wright to build what today is the Dana-Thomas House State Historic Site at Fourth Street and Lawrence Avenue. But she was far more than a wealthy patron of the arts. “As the world changed around her, she … played many roles,” the Dana-Thomas House Foundation says. “She entertained lavishly, traveled the world, championed the rights of women and African-Americans, shared her time and money, and led seekers of spiritual truths.”
More information: Wikipedia.org; The Dana-Thomas House Foundation; Susan and Me: Two Women in a Wright House (book) by Roberta Volkmann
Maydie Lee (1879-1920) Oak Ridge Abbey (mausoleum) GPS 39.82055N, 89.65481W
Mary Thankful “Maydie” Spaulding Lee was the force behind many of Springfield’s progressive causes in the first two decades of the 20th century. She was a suffragist, Single Taxer, trade union advocate, political organizer and adviser to her brother, city council reformer Willis Spaulding. “Her consecrated heart was indeed the very heart of Springfield,” Vachel Lindsay said of Maydie.
More information: SangamonLink.org
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Educators
Elizabeth Graham (1882-1982) Block 18 GPS 39.82349N, 89.65937W
Elizabeth Graham made her living as an English teacher at Springfield High School but dedicated her life to preserving the memory of Springfield poet Vachel Lindsay. She met Lindsay as a college student, saying later she expected to meet a “freak.” “I hadn’t heard him talk 10 minutes before I was absolutely caught in his net,” she said. Graham headed fundraising efforts to preserve the Lindsay home at 603 S. Fifth St. and in retirement served as the home’s custodian and interpreter. “She was a Springfield institution,” a former student said at Graham’s memorial service, “in and of herself a monument to Lindsay and the fox-fire magic of the well-wrought word.” Graham Elementary School is named after her.
More information: SangamonLink.org
Susan Wilcox (1866-1943) Block 18 GPS 39.82353N, 89.65937W
Susan Wilcox taught English and other subjects at Springfield High School for 46 years, nurturing such budding talents as poet Vachel Lindsay and poet/translator Robert Fitzgerald. Lindsay called Wilcox his “noblest and most faithful friend of my life.” Wilcox also was one of the central figures in a group of literary and political visionaries, including Lindsay, the brothers Willis and Charles Spaulding, and others, who agitated and improved Springfield in the early 20th century. Wilcox Elementary School is named after her.
More information: Wilcox Collection, Lincoln Library (Springfield’s municipal library)
Officials
Annie Rheem Hannon (1857-1945) Block 10 GPS 39.82559N, 89.65735W
Annie Rheem Hannon was the first woman to win a countywide election in Sangamon County, even though women were not yet allowed to vote. Hannon’s father, Noel Hannon, had been elected county school superintendent in 1890. Annie Hannon was his assistant, and when Noel Hannon died in February 1892, the county board named her his interim replacement. Annie won election to the post that April, defeating a male candidate. She lost renomination two years later and retired from public life. When she died in 1945, Annie Rheem Hannon was still the only woman to have won a county elected office; it would be 11 more years before she lost that distinction.
More information: SangamonLink.org
Ines Hoffmann (1905-94) Block 31 GPS 39.82149N, 89.65593W
Ines Hoffmann was the first woman elected to the Springfield City Council. She was serving as the city’s first woman corporation counsel in 1957, when Mayor Nelson Howarth appointed her commissioner of accounts and finances, replacing Frank Whitney. Hoffmann won elections in her own right in 1959 and 1963.
More information: Findagrave.com
Other
Nellie Grant Jones (1825-1922) Block 10 GPS39.82560N, 89.65740W
Ellen “Nellie” Wrenshall Jones was the third child and only daughter of President Ulysses S. Grant and his wife, Julia Dent Grant. Her second husband was Frank Hatch Jones, a Chicago banker whose family was from Springfield.
More information: Wikipedia.org
Carrie Post (1824-1914) Block 11 GPS 39.82490N, 89.65670W
Caroline “Carrie” Lathrop Post was the mother of breakfast cereal tycoon C.W. Post and the grandmother of socialite/businesswoman Marjorie Merriweather Post. She is known in Springfield as the namesake of the Carrie Post King’s Daughters Home for Women, which housed elderly women for 110 years.
More information: Community Foundation for the Land of Lincoln (King’s Daughters Organization)
Nellie Revell (1873-1958) Block 39 GPS 39.82364N, 89.66272W
Riverton-born Nellie Revell was a vaudevillian and journalist, but she made her name as publicist extraordinaire for such show business luminaries as Lillian Russell, Will Rogers and Al Jolson. Following a back injury that left her hospitalized for four years in the 1920s, she reinvented herself as a newspaper columnist and radio personality. “I believe she has more friends, more real, honest-to-God, on-the-level friends, than anybody I know,” humorist Irvin S. Cobb wrote of Revell, “and the reason why she has them is because she gives back friendship in such unselfish and plenteous measure.”
More information: SangamonLink.org
Rebecca Woods (1812-65) Block 10 GPSW 39.82577N, 89.65803W
The inscription on Rebecca Woods’ tombstone says: “For many years the faithful servant of N. H. Ridgely.” Woods, who was African-American, is buried with other members of the family of financier Nicholas H. Ridgely, a sign of respect that is diminished by the fact that the tombstone doesn’t give her full name; it simply calls her “Becky.” Woods’ obituary provided a better tribute: “Her genuine goodness of heart made her a general favorite.”
More information: SangamonLink.org
Susan Moore (1841-1907) Block 4/Home for the Friendless plot GPS 39.82701N, 89.65841W
Susan Moore, a blind woman originally from Arkansas, was one of the first residents of the Springfield Home for the Friendless, a private charitable institution that cared for orphans and children of the poor, plus a few impoverished women, from 1863 until 1928. Moore lived at the home from its founding until her death. The inscription on her tombstone says, “Though She Walked In Darkness She Brought Sunshine To The Home For 43 Years.”
More information: Findagrave.com, SangamonLink.org
“Mattie Rayburn” 1836-91 Block 7 GPS 39.82617N, 89.65730W
The 40-foot granite tower, topped by an 8-foot-tall sculpture of a woman, that marks the grave of Mattie Rayburn is one of Oak Ridge Cemetery’s most striking, and puzzling, monuments. The base of the column is engraved “Bishop and Mrs. Rayburn,” while a small stone separate from the column lists the spot as the grave of Mattie S. Rayburn, “wife of W.H. Rayburn.” (The Rev. William Rayburn, who pastored for a time in Williamsville, was expelled from the Methodist clergy for apostasy, allegedly including advocating for free love; he is buried in Belfast, Northern Ireland.) However, other research suggests the woman buried here may have been named Hannah Funk Rayburn, not Mattie – or perhaps she may have been a widow history identifies only as “Mrs. Redfield.” Folklore claims the monument faces northeast so that Mattie Rayburn, or whoever she was, could look down on the residents of Williamsville who scorned her in life.
More information: Oakridgecemetery.org (cemetery tour page); SangamonLink.org; Lusts of the Prairie Preachers (book) by Jerry Klein and Jack Bradley
