promptly to close the old burial ground. Councilman Rodenfels introduced an ordinance to prohibit further burials there on April 10, 1876.²¹ The ordinance, which included punishment by fines or jail for transgressors, was passed on May 15. A month later, on June 12, the county commissioners by resolution granted to the City of Columbus "the use for Burial and Sanitary Purposes, so much of the Land purchased of Hoddy and Fullerton, as have heretofore been assigned by this Board for burial purposes in said grounds."²²

On March 5, 1877, Mr. Rodenfels introduced a resolution, subsequently passed, which declared that the fence around the graveyard was almost gone and that council did "not deem it advisable to retain said property for graveyard purposes." All persons having friends buried there were requested to remove the remains and a committee was to determine whether the property would be better laid out into lots and sold or retained as a park.²³ Progress in this direction seems to have come to a halt after Mr. Rodenfels' resignation from council in 1878 and was not resumed for another three years.

In September of 1881 council decided to keep the East Graveyard but declared it to be a park, named South Park (renamed Livingston Park in 1884). A committee was formed to have the remains of the dead and the tombstones removed.²⁴ It would appear that complete records of the graveyard still existed at that time, for the newspapers gave the precise number of 2,344 graves then remaining.²⁵

The removals were made by Frederick Doell (the sexton) and John Stone, with a large body of workmen, all under the superintendence of John Schneider. The work went on from August 14 through September, 1882, and beyond. The total cost to the city was $2,963.59.²⁶ When the work began, in the earliest-used portion in the northeast corner, the graves were all found to be full, but the Daily Dispatch speculated that such would not be the case when the workmen came to the interments made after the medical college had been established here. As of September 11, the papers reported 1,850 removals completed, but no final figure seems to have been published.

The newspapers of the time mention only Greenlawn as the destination of the removed remains from the East Graveyard, but the city council minutes as published in the later papers mention payment to Greenlawn of only $419 for three lots, ten graves, and seventy boxes buried on private lots there. One has to suspect that those seventy boxes reburied on private lots at Greenlawn must have been large ones, containing the remains of many persons other than the families of those on whose lots they were buried, unless many were also moved to the new South Graveyard. This is suggested by the discovery there in 1984 of the tombstone of John Heyl, who died in 1854 and would logically have been originally interred in the East

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