|
The Las Vegas City Council has designated the Woodlawn Cemetery, located at 1500 Las Vegas Blvd. North, as a city historic landmark.
The Historic Preservation Commission nominated the cemetery because it meets the city’s historic landmark designation requirements; it is older than 50 years, it reflects the city’s cultural, social, political and economic past and it is an established visual feature within the city.
This designation meets many of city’s historic preservation goals listed in the Las Vegas 2020 Master Plan and its Historic Properties Preservation Element including the preservation, maintenance and protection of districts of historic interest and to promote and encourage the stability of designated landmarks by preserving their historical and architectural integrity.
The cemetery continues to operate today more than 90 years since it opened in 1915. Woodlawn Cemetery is basically 40 acres created from three phases of development. This first section is extremely important in design and content as those who are buried in this section are a finite number of original pioneers that were responsible for the creation and survival of the community. According to the nomination report for the National Register of Historic Places, the cemetery includes “…members of nearly every pioneer family that lived in the Las Vegas Valley during the formative years.” The former sexton's or caretaker’s residence and one of Las Vegas' first well sites remain in this first section.
The first section, which borders Las Vegas Boulevard on the western edge, was designed and dated July 22, 1914, by surveyor J.T. McWilliams. McWilliams was a master of his trade and was responsible for nearly every major civic civil engineering project in the early historic period of the formation of the community of Las Vegas. He surveyed all of the original land purchases for the San Pedro Los Angeles & Salt Lake Railroad and designed the first official townsite in Las Vegas. City records from 1914 -1916 confirm the cemetery’s function as the community’s cemetery with an appointed Board of Trustees, the hiring of the sexton, and the construction of a tool house (later the sexton’s residence) and the well.
The second 10-acre section which borders the first to the east was designed and dated by Las Vegas City Engineer George Rittenhouse Sept. 20, 1944. Its burials date to the mid-forties, during a period of extreme growth in Las Vegas’ history due to war-time economics when the population grew from approximately 8,000 to 40,000.
The third and last 20-acre section borders the second to the east and hosts burials dating to the early sixties. It is relatively new and is not as historically significant as the first and second sections except that this is where the cemeteries that predate Woodlawn Cemetery intersect with it thus confirming it as the community’s preferred site for its burials.
There isn’t any other existing example of a Las Vegas location where all members of the pioneering community gathered. The early pioneers interred at Woodlawn represent the general demographic of early Las Vegas and the broad spectrum of groups that built the city. The cemetery broke the barriers of inclusion such as class, race and gender in death that existed in life. Woodlawn Cemetery became the indicator of a cohesive society that made a long-term commitment to the future of Las Vegas.
-end
Return to News Release Index
|
