Westview Cemetery
Westview Cemetery, located in Atlanta, Georgia, is the largest civilian cemetery in the Southeastern United States, comprising more than , 50 percent of which is undeveloped. (Georgia National Cemetery, for military veterans and their families, covers 775 acres.) Westview includes the graves of more than 125,000 people, and was added to the Georgia Register of Historic Places in 2019 and the National Register of Historic Places in 2020. History. McBurney Era (1884-1930). In May 1884, twenty-seven leading Atlanta citizens, including L.P. Grant, Edward P. McBurney, Jacob Elsas, H.I. Kimball and L. DeGive, petitioned the Superior Court of  Fulton County to create the West View Cemetery Association. The association was to be led by secretary and general manager McBurney, who was a capitalist and financier in Atlanta. The petition was granted in June, and during the rest of the year members of the Association gathered approximately 577 acres of farms, homesteads, and undeveloped land, around four miles west of downtown Atlanta, from more than a handful of owners. The cemetery buried its first resident – Helen Livingston Haskins – on October 9, 1884. By this time, the cemetery had opened three distinct sections: the main burial sections, originally known as  Laurel Hill, Terrace Hill, etc.; Rest Haven, an African-American section; and God’s Acre, a pauper section used by the City of Atlanta until 1925. In 1888, West View Cemetery opened a permanent receiving vault that was built into the side of a hill in Section 4. It would serve as a temporary storage space for bodies until families could pick out a suitable burial plot or, in winter, store a body until the cemetery grounds were thawed and traversable by horse-drawn carriages. In 1889, a Confederate sculpture was erected, and a burial ground was established within West  View to commemorate the Confederate dead of the American Civil War. The statue and burial ground completion ended years of failed attempts to memorialize the war, specifically the Battle of Ezra Church, part of which had taken place on the northern boundaries of the cemetery. In the same year, cemetery officials had discussions with a Jewish congregation about opening a dedicated Jewish burial ground within the cemetery: ultimately the congregations purchased new sections from Oakland Cemetery in downtown Atlanta instead. The Romanesque Revival gatehouse opened the following year. It was designed by architect Walter T. Downing and contained a waiting  room, toilets, and a secretary’s office. The Westview Floral Company, incorporated in 1891, grew flowers at greenhouses on the cemetery property for sale to lot holders and to the public. It also carried out contracted landscape gardening for wealthy Atlantans – be it at their homes or businesses. The Company became the largest greenhouse operator in the south until it was closed. All its structures were removed from the cemetery by 1973. The only two items from the greenhouses that still exist are the 110-foot-high water tower, built in 1921, and a plant that was discovered circa 1895  on the property by then head gardener Thomas Burford – the Ilex cornuta “Burfordii,” or Burford holly. It is now sold the world over as a landscape shrub. Adair Leadership (1930-1933). In August 1930 the West View Cemetery Association announced to the public that E.P. McBurney would no longer run the cemetery; it would instead be headed by Atlanta real-estate mogul Frank Adair, with his brother, Forrest, acting as vice president. Coca-Cola scion Asa Candler Jr. would serve as the association's board president and help guide the cemetery behind the scenes. However, three years later, the Great  Depression was in full swing and affected the Adair brothers’ hold on West View. As such, in June 1933, the Adairs relinquished control of West View, and Candler took full control of the cemetery. Candler Era (1930-1952). Between 1940 and 1950 Candler constructed his version of Hubert L. Eaton’s memorial park at West View, the Garden of Memories. In 1943, construction started on Westview Abbey. Designed by California-based architect Clarence Lee Jay and mausoleum builder Cecil E. Bryan, the abbey contains 11,444 crypts and is designed in the Spanish Plateresque architectural style. The structure is composed of  a mausoleum and an administration building. The mausoleum's lower and main floors are complete, but much of the third floor has yet to be built out. Lake Palmyra was completed just southwest of the abbey in 1947. Named after Palmyra, the biblical “city of palms” in Syria, Lake Palmyra had at one time a stone pier and, along one of its shores, one of four known versions of Harriet Hosmer's "Zenobia in Chains", which had been purchased by Asa Candler in 1943. The lake was drained in the 1970s because of maintenance issues and Zenobia was removed from  the grounds. Between 1947 and 1948 Candler built an administration building that partly wrapped around the greenhouse's 1921 water tower. It contained offices, a reception room, a cafeteria and restrooms. It also contained Asa Candler Jr.’s trophy room, billed as one of the largest private trophy rooms in North America, which showcased trophies from Candler’s hunts in Alaska, Africa and elsewhere. The structure was demolished in 1973 and many of the animal specimens were donated to the Fernbank Museum of Natural History. Candler unveiled the Fountain of Life Memorial in 1950. The memorial consisted of a fountain  and a bas-relief depiction of the Last Supper sculpted by Fritz Paul Zimmer. The sculpture still exists, but the fountain was removed a few decades later. West View becomes Westview. Due to advancing age and mounting legal issues, Candler sold West View to Lou O. Minear, Chester J. Sparks and Grover A. Godfrey Jr. in 1951. It was at that time that “West View” became “Westview.” The new owners sold the cemetery to Frank C. Bowen and Raymond B. Nelson in 1952. That year, Westview Cemetery, Inc. was liquidated and all its assets were transferred to The Westview Cemetery , Inc., which became a nonprofit. Bowen Era (1952-present). Throughout the mid-1950s and into the 1960s, Bowen added eight new memorial park-style sections, such as Garden of Devotion, Garden of the Savior, etc. In 1970, the cemetery, under Bowen’s guidance, officially ended segregation within the main grounds of the property. Additionally, during that decade, there were talks of finishing out the third floor of Westview Abbey. A small portion was completed, but three-fourths remain to be finished. In 1975, Westview staff moved into a new administration building designed by Henry Howard Smith, the son of famed Atlanta  architect Francis Palmer Smith. The new building sits near the old 1890 gatehouse along Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard. A year prior to the move, Frank Bowen had ceded operations of the cemetery to his son, Charles Bowen Sr. During the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, Bowen Sr. and Westview opened a couple of columbaria and expanded the maintenance structures. After nearly forty years Bowen Sr. relinquished control of the cemetery to his son, Charles Bowen Jr, in 2014. Later that year, the cemetery celebrated its 130th anniversary and welcomed the publication of John Bayne’s book "Atlanta’s Westview Cemetery . The following year, Westview Cemetery opened its grounds for regularly scheduled walking tours conducted by Atlanta Preservation Center tour guides. Because of the cemetery’s size, two tours were developed – the Nineteenth-Century Tour and the Candler-Era Tour. A year later, Westview officials created the Friends of Historic Westview Cemetery, which plans the rehabilitation of Westview’s 1890 gatehouse – offering public restrooms, a museum and gift shop. In 2018, Jeff Clemmons’s Atlanta’s Historic Westview Cemetery" was published. With the support of the Atlanta Preservation Center, Clemmons got the cemetery added to the Georgia Register of Historic Places  (2019) and the National Register of Historic Places (2020). Westview Cemetery remains an active cemetery with up to eight burials a day. It has become popular with Hollywood: filmmakers are at the cemetery throughout the year, filming features and television shows. Former interments. Atlanta University President Edmund Asa Ware was buried in a plot that straddled the then-segregated white and African-American sections of the cemetery in 1885. His body was moved to a memorial on the A.U. campus nine years later. Atlanta mayor Ivan Allen Jr. was buried at Westview when he died in 2003, but he was  reinterred at Oakland Cemetery in 2009. Location. The cemetery is located at 1680 Westview Drive SW, Atlanta, GA 30310. Its telephone number is (404) 755-6611. The office is open Monday-Friday 9-5 and Saturday 9:30-2 and is closed on Sunday. Gates are open from 8 am until 5:30 pm every day except Christmas and Thanksgiving. The site is a fifteen-minute walk from the West Lake MARTA station.