Greenwood Cemetery installs new sign, revives push to save historic chapel in Rockford
By Helen Karakoudas
Special to the Rock River Current
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ROCKFORD — Work is done on a new sign at Greenwood Cemetery, the latest in a series of changes to make the grounds of Rockford’s oldest and largest cemetery as inviting as a neighborhood park.
“It’s massive, like we wanted it to be — just a great thing to drive by from a far distance away and still see it,” Chuck Elliot, a Greenwood Cemetery board of trustees member, said as he stood admiring the limestone wall that’s 24 feet long and over 5 feet tall.
The sign, powered by solar lights, sits in front of a group of tall trees on the northeast side of the Main and Auburn streets roundabout. It towers behind flowers framing the Veterans Memorial Circle wall just to the west of the cemetery’s main entrance. People out walking their dogs, counting their steps, spying for birds, and strolling as they post to Instagram all pass by it.
For Mary Ann Smith, another trustee on the cemetery association’s five-member board, that too is as it should be.
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“Cemeteries were one of the earliest examples of a public park. They invited people to find space for recreation and leisure. This cemetery is a community institution. We want to invite people to use the cemetery and enjoy the grounds with respect and joy,” Smith said, referring to Greenwood’s 71 acres near where the west side neighborhoods of Edgewater, Churchill’s Grove, Signal Hill and North End Square come together. “We want to be good neighbors. Anything we are able to do to make our presence more beautiful and more dignified is a good thing.”
The new sign, a $29,000 project funded mostly by private donations, is both a milestone for Greenwood’s trustees and a visual reminder of their stalled, costlier capital project: restoration and renovation of the cemetery’s chapel. Closed for decades, the little castle-like building on the National Register of Historic Places is tucked away near the cemetery entrance at 1011 Auburn St. The chapel is the Greenwood icon that inspired the sign.
“My goals for the sign were to make it look like it always was there and matched the feel of the historic chapel at the cemetery,” said Jim Wojtowicz, landscape architect for the sign project.
Wojtowicz, whose work includes the Nancy Olson Children’s Garden and several other projects at Klehm Arboretum and Botanic Garden, isolated ornamental shapes on the chapel’s exterior and echoed them on the sign’s buttresses. For the masons who crafted the sign, he brought in rusticated limestone blocks from Anamosa, Iowa — the same quarry used in the late 1800s to source limestone for the chapel.
Greenwood trustees can’t recall exactly when the chapel was closed, just that it eventually had to be as weather factors and an animal and termite infestation took their toll. Its use had declined as neighborhood churches became more traditional locations for funeral services. The push to bring back the chapel as multifunctional space started in 2007, according to Smith, better known for having led the charge, with her late husband, C. Gordon Smith, to save the building housing the Coronado Performing Arts Center.
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At first, the goal was stabilizing the chapel. According to Elliot, the cemetery board’s treasurer, $210,000 was raised initially and has covered a new roof, gutters, tuckpointing, dehumidification, outside wall wash lighting, and reinforcement of the window frames and stained glass windows.
The goal then shifted to what was needed to reopen the chapel. By 2012, the estimate for the chapel’s restoration and renovation was $1 million, according to a past report in the Rockford Register Star. According to Elliot, the most recent estimate in January 2023 is $1.5 million.
Chapel’s history: A Rockford first, twice over
The Greenwood Chapel was built in 1891, nearly 40 years after the cemetery moved to its current location in 1852.
“It was the first of its kind in Rockford, a nondenominational cemetery chapel designed specifically for inside funeral services,” said Pam Hein, a historic preservation consultant who researched the building’s records, put them into context, and compiled the nomination form for the chapel to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places. That designation came through in 2012.
An example of Late Victorian-Richardsonian Romanesque architecture, the chapel was designed by Henry Lord Gay, a nationally renowned Chicago architect whose work in the Midwest includes The Echoes in Fontana-on-Geneva Lake, Wisconsin, and the Burpee Museum of Natural History’s Barnes Mansion — as well as the grave marker at Greenwood for Anna Peck Sill, founder of Rockford College.
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Another nationally respected architect, Frank B. Gibson, a mortuary expert, designed an addition to the chapel in 1921 that included marble-lined receiving vaults, a Tiffany-style conservatory roof, and a crematory.
“When the crematory was added, it was also a first for Rockford,” Hein said. “Today we don’t think much about the choice to be cremated, but there was a time when cremation was a very controversial topic.”
Work remaining to reopen the chapel
Though improvements to the cemetery’s grounds can be — and have been — done in stages, trustees say they’ve reached the point where that’s no longer the case for work remaining at the chapel.
Since the original effort to stabilize the building, the cemetery association has added a second furnace, temporary ducting for moisture control, and outdoor security lighting, according to Elliot.
“We were hoping it would be less to do the rest in phases. But it’s not,” Elliot said, cautioning a photographer to watch his step on the termite-weakened floor.
“This is not a big building, and there is major work to be done,” Smith said. “What must be accomplished to realize a safe, beautiful and accessible building is all linked together.”
That list includes:
- Replacing the wood floor, including its termite-damaged support structure
- Restoring the assembly room and tower to its original condition
- Adding two restrooms and converting a former office to a service kitchen
- Adding a pass-thru from the kitchen to the assembly room
- Electrical, HVAC, plumbing, plastering, painting, carpentry
- Restoring the atrium’s stained glass ceiling and ceramic tile floor
- Making the building ADA-accessible
The initial $1 million estimate for the chapel project, over a decade ago, included renovating existing office space and installing cremation equipment to restore the chapel’s two crematory areas. The current estimate of $1.5 million, though higher, factors in other changes but not those.
According to Elliot, after the work was done to stabilize the chapel, an anonymous donation of more than $500,000 funded the addition of a new crematory and office near the cemetery’s garage space at the north end of the property, on Brown Avenue off North Main Street. According to Smith, Greenwood cemetery now does about 35 cremations a month.
How a reopened chapel would be used
“It’s important for the community to save buildings like the Greenwood Chapel,” said Hein, the historic preservation consultant, who lives nearby in Churchill’s Grove. “The building represents the history of funeral practices over the years. It stands today because forward-minded predecessors wanted to create something long-lasting and beautiful. It is, in and of itself, a monument. I’d like to think that it will continue to stand and serve Rockford for generations to come.”
Should the cemetery association be able to restore and renovate the chapel, Smith and Elliot say it would be available for any appropriate use that would accommodate about 100 people.
“Funerals, weddings, parties, meetings, educational opportunities. It would be a very attractive and historically significant space,” Smith said.
She confirmed a suggestion made by Ernie Redfern, co-chair of Friends of Veterans Memorial Circle, that a reopened Greenwood Chapel could be the place in Rockford that offers all Winnebago County veterans a memorial service at no cost.
“Yes, (we) would be honored to host the services of veterans,” Smith said. “We feel that this would be an important cog in the ways veterans are recognized and honored in the neighborhood of Veterans Memorial Circle.”
Redfern, an Army veteran, is site supervisor of dozens of volunteers who, in appreciation of veterans and military families, plant and maintain thousands of flowers every year at the unusual veterans’ memorial at the Main/Auburn roundabout. For the past four years, the cemetery association has co-hosted the planting day and given the group access to Greenwood’s water throughout the summer for flowers in areas that are not irrigated.
“To provide veterans’ families and friends a place to have a dignified memorial in such a beautiful setting at no cost would make this county unique in honoring our service members,” Redfern said, referring to Greenwood Chapel. “This is what takes you from good to great.”
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Veterans of every war except the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are buried at Greenwood Cemetery, says the brochure for a self-guided tour of Greenwood, available at the cemetery office and printed in 2011. That’s likely no longer true. What hasn’t changed since the brochure was printed is that Greenwood Cemetery is the resting place of one Revolutionary War veteran and 529 Civil War veterans.
Appreciating the park atmosphere
Not all the gravesites of Civil War veterans at Greenwood Cemetery have headstones. The 458 that do are brighter this year thanks to 815 Stone Scrubbers, a Rockford-based group of volunteers who clean the headstones of Civil War veterans.
Janie Jenkin, a Churchill’s Grove resident who founded the group, says she loves how the new sign completes the front entrance and invites people to explore. Jenkin and her crew, who come from as far south as Dixon and as far north as Milwaukee, have been regularly meeting at Greenwood Cemetery since the spring.
“We have seen bird watchers out there looking up in the trees at the hawks, blue jays and cardinals that nest in some of the old trees. We have seen photographers snapping pictures of wildlife. Our favorite,” Jenkin said, “has been someone who popped up a hammock between two large pine trees, napped a bit and then laid there beneath the trees and just started to sketch what he was looking at above him.”
Changes to the grounds at Greenwood Cemetery started in early 2022. Word continues to catch on in surrounding neighborhoods— especially that signs not allowing dogs have all come down.
“We certainly welcome people walking their dogs, as any park would,” Smith said. “We simply ask that dogs are on a leash and that owners be respectful of the grounds.”
Enhancing the park atmosphere
Improvements that led to installation of the new sign started in early 2022 when groundskeepers for Greenwood Cemetery took down the fence along North Main Street and replaced it with a row of trees.
In May 2022, an excavation crew hired by the cemetery association removed the monument base on North Main Street where a statue of a Civil War soldier had stood from 1984 to 2014.
The statue, which is county property, was moved downtown months after the roundabout was built. It’s now at the Wyman Street entrance to Veterans Memorial Hall. What remained near the base at Greenwood Cemetery were rotting benches and broken planters. Those were also removed in May 2022 and the area was reseeded. The new sign is several yards back from where the statue stood.
A flowering-tree project is next on the cemetery association’s list of improvements to make the grounds more like a park.
“If you drive through, there are big gaping spaces as you look around. Why is that? Well, because a couple of old trees came out years ago. Very soon, we’re going to fix that,” Elliot said, referring to a row of 19 crabapple trees planted over a decade ago at the back of the property. Groundskeepers will be dispersing them in the sections of the cemetery where mature trees were lost to nature. “You know flowering crabapple trees,” Elliot said smiling. “You know what they’re going to do.”
Between deciduous trees and evergreens, the cemetery has more than 700 trees, according to Smith.
“We are constantly monitoring the trees at Greenwood, and very mindful of reforestation, using a variety of species,” Smith said. “Some people are selecting trees for memorials to loved ones. In that case, we will identify them with a plaque.”
How to learn more
Greenwood Cemetery trustees will work with any individual or group who would like to see the interior of the chapel. To arrange a time, email greenwoodcemeteryrockford@gmail.com or call 815-962-7522.
How to help
Donations are tax-exempt under section 501(c)13 of the IRS code, a section specific for cemeteries. You can make a one-time or periodic donations by PayPal or credit/debit card HERE or write a check payable to Rockford Cemetery Association and mail it to Greenwood Cemetery, 1011 Auburn St., Rockford, IL 61103.
This article is by freelance journalist Helen Karakoudas. Email feedback to news@rockrivercurrent.com
