John Gurda called the Forest Home Cemetery “Milwaukee’s first park” and he has a point. Open since before the Civil War, Forest Home was designed as a garden for contemplating departed loved ones, not merely a field for depositing the dead. The latest Milwaukee title in Arcadia’s “Images of America” series is largely a photo gallery affording readers an armchair tour of the cemetery’s 189 acres. Aesthetic interest is mostly confined to pre-World War I monuments, the cenotaphs and obelisks towering over the grounds and the pillared tombs of Milwaukee’s industrialists festooned with stone laurels and doves, angels and allegorical figures. Many familiar local names are etched in stone, including Billy Mitchell and Christopher Sholes, the 19th century inventor of the keyboard still in use today.
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