It is probably a safe assumption that the
twenty-foot strip of land east of the Brickell Addition, which was not
owned by the City but was enclosed within the fence, was used as a roadway
from a northern gate to the north/south roadway. The existence of a
northern gate can be deduced from the superintendent's report in 1845 that
he had made a road (High street) from the City to the "middle gate."
LOTS
The Kerr tract, measuring 198 by 330 feet,
was common ground and never was laid off into lots.
The only explicit statement found
concerning the size of the lots in the Doherty tract is contained in the
petition of Elias Gaver et alia in Common Pleas Complete Record
57/1. This petition states that the Doherty tract was laid out into
fifteen by thirty foot lots, "with suitable streets and foot paths."
Martin's history (p. 390) adds the information that the lots were "pretty
uniform in size and shape."
The size of the lots as stated in the Gaver
petition is almost certainly incorrect. The petition also states that the
Doherty tract was laid out into 629 lots, some designated by number and
some by letter. If this number of lots is correct, and if the lots were
all of about 450 square feet, then sooner or later all of this tract must
have been laid out into lots, including virtually all of the roadways and
footpaths, leaving no means of traversing the graveyard without crossing
grave-spaces. This possibility is eliminated by the City's claim in its
answer to the Gaver petition that the value of the roads and walkways was
over half of the value of the tract; though possibly not accurate, such a
statement would have been entirely impossible if the tract contained 629
lots of 450 square feet.
The replacement lots which were provided in
sections M and Q at Greenlawn Cemetery were supposed to have been of area
equal to the area of the lots in the North Graveyard. Every one of these
lots at Greenlawn measures fifteen by twenty feet, or very close to this.
On this basis it must be acknowledged that this was probably the true size
of the North Graveyard lots.
This conclusion is also supported by an
analysis of the locations of grave markers which were surveyed for
condemnation of the 100 foot strip in 1871. (Probate Court Complete Record
6/187.) A graph of the north/south locations of these stones (see below)
fits very well with a pattern from south to north of (1) a 25-foot
roadway; (2) a 20-foot lot; (3) a 7 1/2-foot path; (4) two, 20-foot lots;
(5) another 7 1/2-foot path. This pattern fits the "three tiers of lots"
criterion for the south 100 feet as established by the newspaper article
when the condemnation case was begun.
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