Historic Cemetery Walking Tour

This year our Historic Cemetery Walking Tour is scheduled Saturday September 14, 2013.  From 10:30 until 3:00 p.m., the trolley will leave Three Rivers Museum approximately every 30 to 45 minutes.  All tours begin and end at the museum. Tickets are $15 per person, museum members $13 per person.

Enjoy a leisurely guided tour through a local historic cemetery and learn about interesting people buried here, gravestone symbolism, and community history as portrayed by local actors and actresses.  Wear your walking shoes.  Tours take approximately 1 1/2 hours.

Green Hill Historical Marker

Established in 1894, this cemetery was originally located on the southwest corner of Fondulac [now Martin Luther King St.] and 6th streets. Around the turn of the century, James A. Patterson, Captain F. B. Severs, Clarence W. Turner and Samuel Sondheimer, all prominent Muskogee merchants, contributed this 250 acre site to be used as the town's official burial grounds. In 1904, removal of bodies to this place began. Mr. Patterson was the first to be buried here. By 1910, additional bodies were exhumed from the first cemetery and placed here. The area is divided into three sections: The Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic (sometimes referred to as ST. Joseph's Cemetery), Greenhill is the final resting place for many former and prominent Muskogee citizens, among whom are: Charles N. Haskell, First Governor of Oklahoma, Miss Alice Robertson, Oklahoma's first congresswoman and the second woman elected to the United States Congress; and Alexander Posey, outstanding newspaperman and Poet Laureate of the Creek Indians. As of this year, [c. 1987] the remains of 57,000 persons lie buried here.

Read about the Moving of Greenhill Cemetery from its original spot on the hill at about 6th Street between Martin Luther King Street and Denison Street, from an article in the Muskogee Phoenix.