amounting to thirty or forty dollars were uncollected. All of the excess, he reported, would be required to repair the fence and put the ground in good order that spring.²⁵ At five dolars per lot, the income and accounts due correspond to some 74 lots sold in the year. In the following spring he reported collecting $119 during the previous twelve months.²⁶ Just prior to the beginning of that period, on April 20, 1849 Council passed a motion allowing the graveyard superintendents to retain for their services ten percent of the money collected for lots sold.²⁷ One would expect that this might encourage the superintendents to sell as many lots as possible. The twelve month period also included some months of unusually high death rates because of a cholera epidemic. Despite these factors, income from the sale of lots had dropped. This was because most of the usable portions of the graveyard had been sold and persons wishing to purchase burial lots were now doing so at the new Green Lawn Cemetery, which opened in the summer of 1849.

On June 22, 1848 a card appeared in the Ohio State Journal calling for the procurement of a one hundred to two hundred acre tract of land near the city as a new burying ground. Of the North Graveyard, the writer said:

The "old burying ground," so called, adjoining the town on the north, is pretty much filled up with the inhabitants of the dead. At least the better parts are fully occupied, leaving a small portion unfit for proper use. Now it is manifest that more room is needed... The city is rapidly increasing, and in a few years it will grow entirely around the present site.

This call for new burial grounds outside of the city parallels similar calls being made elsewhere at the same time; the interment of the dead in crowded towns was coming under increasing attack as an offensive and unhealthy practice. The movement had already succeeded in Boston and was being promoted in Cincinnati as early as 1836. Though all three Columbus graveyards had been outside of the populated area when opened, the city was growing rapidly and soon would surround all three sites. The proposed, new site apparently was conceived as what came to be called a cemetery, as opposed to a graveyard, the former word soon coming to mean an extensive ornamental burial ground, a place pleasant to visit rather than somber, crowded, and often neglected. The fine burial places of the Turks, extending over large tracts adorned by cedars and other trees, are thought to have suggested the plan to European and American reformers.

The result was the formation of the Green Lawn Cemetery Association by several prominent citizens of Columbus in August of 1848. The Association contracted for and laid out the core of the present Cemetery in 1849 and the first burial was made that July. The grounds were "situated less than two miles from the corporation limits"

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