The purchase was completed on February 13, 1839. Though the council committee had indicated that the land would be purchased from councilman Greenwood, it was in fact purchased from Matthew King and his wife Phoebe, who had purchased it from E. W. Gwynn just two weeks earlier.⁵ As payment, the Kings accepted twenty-five dollars in cash and eleven hundred dollard in notes drawn on the city treasury. The lot contained eleven and one quarter acres, but that figure included all of the land out to the middle of the Livingston road. Today's park, with losses to adjacent streets, contains nine and one half acres.

A portion of the land was laid out in lots and sold by the city to citizens for the use of their families. About one third of it was never laid off because it was too low, swampy, and wet. Even the portions which were used were wet; as late as 1882 when removals were being made, workmen found all of the first graves opened to be full of ground water.⁶ The other part of the land was used as a public burying place, principally by Germans in the early years.^? The public portion of the ground was in the rear and included the north-eastern corner, where the first burials were made.

The South Graveyard, like the North, was operated under a superintendent (a member of council) and a sexton, who were appointed by council each spring, with duties as described for these positions in the North Graveyard history. The sextons who served at the South Graveyard through 1860 were James McDonald, Titus Richards, Conrad Pfeifer, John Fronenburgh, and Frederick Roll.⁸

As with the North Graveyard, the purchaser of a lot in the South Graveyard was given a receipt by the superintendent, which was taken to the mayor who wrote a deed for the lot. Ten such deeds were recorded at the court house, the earliest bearing the date of October 28, 1841 and the latest April 3, 1860. Two additional names of lot owners were recorded in Cornelius Jacobs' report as superintendent 'in the spring of 1846.⁹ All of these appear in the consolidated list. Sales were slow and seem to have gradually dwindled to practically none by 1860. The surviving superintendents' reports show the following numbers of lots sold: April of 1845, 16 lots in the previous twelve months; 1846, two; 1847, seven; 1851, nine, including one fractional lot; 1858, one lot sold.¹⁰ By this time, of course, most purchases of new lots were being made at Greenlawn Cemetery.

In March of 1849, about the same time that the dead house was being built at the North Graveyard, council gave permission to George Krell, a carpenter, to erect a dead house in the South Graveyard, under the direction of the superintendent.¹¹ The 1872 Franklin County atlas shows a building, undoubtedly this "dead house," in the graveyard just east of the entrance on Livingston avenue; the entrance was opposite the present Seventeenth street. Also in 1849, a communication was received from the County Commissioners, asking

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