The Niles History Center and Friends of Silverbrook have teamed up for a virtual tour of Silverbrook Cemetery.
Learn about historical people and famous folks who played an important role in the history of Niles, including the Chapin family, Lottie Wilson and John Gipner.
Click on the star to hop to that part of the virtual tour!
If the stars are too small to click on, such as on your cell phone, you can click on each of the tour stops below:
Mollie Watson, assistant director at the Niles History Center, will be your virtual tour guide of Silverbrook Cemetery.
Click NEXT for the video text
Hello! Welcome to our virtual Silverbrook Cemetery Tour. This is a partnership between the Niles History Center and the Friends of Silverbrook. We are really sad that we are not able to do an in-person tour this year, but we still wanted to do something in the cemetery so we will be posting various videos and information about several people and families buried here at Silverbrook Cemetery.
For this first video, we wanted to provide just a short cemetery history.
Silverbrook Cemetery started in 1836 when George Bond purchased 6 acres of land for use as a public cemetery. Two years later, it was opened for public sale.
The original section of the cemetery is the Bond section, but over time Silverbrook has had several additions to it, including Old Ground, City, New, and the Garden of Memory.
We are standing here near the current entrance to the cemetery and this is the third entrance to Silverbrook. The original entrance was located along what is now South 11th Street and the second entrance was along Cherry Street.
We will show some photos of those as well so you can get an idea where those entrances would have been located in the cemetery.
Current Silverbrook Cemetery office building
The current entrance on the corner of East Main and Cherry is the cemetery’s third.
The first entrance was on South 11th Street. As that road became a main throughway for the City, the entrance moved to Cherry Street.
In 1930 the entrance moved to this location to allow more space for funeral processions.