St. John's Cemetery

St. Johns
St. John’s is part of Cincinnati’s catholic cemetery society. It is located at 4423 Vine Street, in St. Bernard across the street from Roger Bacon High school. It was founded on Oct. 7, 1849 at a time of a cholera epidemic due to overcrowding of other cemeteries. There are many of Cincinnati’s oldest German families buried here with many of their tomb stones written in German. The cemetery is still active, although now there are less than two dozen burials a year. The grounds of the cemetery are maintained through a trust that was set up in the 1950’s.
St. John’s Cemetery is a much smaller cemetery than Spring Grove Cemetery. You can almost stand in one spot and see the entire cemetery. There was one main road and only two side roads. While walking through, I noticed very little wildlife and hardly any variation in plant life. There were basically just shrubs lining the back wall of the cemetery. The majority of the ground was flat with one hill lining the side of the cemetery. There were no monuments at the head of tombstones addressing the family by last name. There were only medium sized statues and small tomb stone heads. It was clear that this was a catholic cemetery. Many of the tomb stones had symbols of Jesus, crosses, and angels. Moreover there were even full statue tomb stones sculpted in the shape of Jesus himself. Like I mentioned earlier, many were written in German and many of those who are buried there were around the late 1800’s early 1900’s. Also, there are big gaps of open land towards the back of the cemetery in between sections of like 20 tombstones. Cleary, there is still a lot of land left to be covered at St. John’s Catholic Cemetery.