The Secrets Inside Minneapolis’s Most Glamorous Graveyard

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Good old Napoleon Bonaparte, the French emperor, hasn’t left much of a trace in the city of Minneapolis. Except: Lakewood Cemetery, the local result of Napoleon’s 1804 “Imperial Decree on Burials,” which demanded cities get their dead out of the urban core and locate them in sleepier spots, better for both reflection and hygiene. Paris built the Père Lachaise Cemetery (home of Jim Morrison) to follow Napoleon’s plan, and the dead previously found in different private churchyards moved to new berths in the country (with a little help from the living).

The first American outpost of what historians now call the “rural cemetery movement” was Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery. Soon enough, in 1871, Minneapolis got Lakewood Cemetery, likewise gathering up the dead from downtown and placing them on 250 acres in the hills above Lake Calhoun/Bde Maka Ska. Deepening the Napoleonic connection, a willow on one hill grew from a cutting collected at Napoleon’s gravesite, the Valley of Willows, on St. Helena Island. (The tree has since perished.) 

Time marched on, and over the next century, about 100,000 Minnesota bodies settled within the beautiful ironwork fences of Lakewood. Then, in 1970, the administrators of the not-for-profit Lakewood Association placed a want ad for “a neat-appearing young man” to work at “an old established firm” in Minneapolis within “a small congenial office.”

Minneapolis native Ron Gjerde answered the call. “When I drove up, at first, I kind of did a double-take,” he remembers now, heading into his 50th year at Lakewood, where he’s currently president. “I think they wanted someone who wanted to make a career of it. They got that.” 

I had wanted to meet Gjerde and get a personal tour of Lakewood because I longed to know what he has seen. And I needed to do it before he retires, as he plans to do after he hits that anniversary. He wanted to meet me because he feels Lakewood needs to fight some myths. Foremost among these misconceptions is the idea that it’s full (it’s nowhere close to full), the idea that it’s expensive and exclusive (the average couple spends upwards of $8,000 to be buried at Lakewood; other services too upsetting to think about, like cremation for children, start around $120), and the idea that you’re not allowed to go in there (you can walk the grounds during visiting hours). The cemetery has started booking Sunday concerts for its renowned and gobsmackingly gorgeous chapel. (Americana act David Huckfelt plays May 6 and folkies Dusty Heart play June 10. Tickets cost $10.) 

I had been thinking of Gjerde as the man who knows where all the bodies are buried, and suddenly in the car on the way to meet him, I realized that bad joke was sure to pop out of my mouth. Do not say that, I warned myself as I stepped into the neoclassic granite administration building that sits like a Lincoln Memorial where Hennepin meets 36th Street. Needless to say, it was perhaps the second thing I said. 

Gjerde replied, “Of course I know. It’s very important to keep good records.” 

Gjerde, now 66, is a big man who wears dark, respectable suits and projects a calming air. He still sports the close buzzcut of the neat young man he was in 1970, though now it’s snow white. His first job was, in fact, making sure the bodies got buried in the right places. He drove around in the cemetery’s 1967 gold Oldsmobile Delmont 88, triple-checking that each grave had been “opened” (that’s cemetery parlance for dug) in the right place. Later, he would return to triple-check that the right body had been delivered to the right place. 

He’d type interment-record cards—salmon-colored for women, manila for men—listing the name and the birth and death dates of the interred, and file them in enormous file cabinets. Thirty years ago, when families arrived on Memorial Day, a line would stretch out the office and down the stairs of the administration building, as Lakewood employees thumbed through the cards finding loved ones.

Now Lakewood has an app for that, which you download on your phone. Then GPS can lead you to any grave you want to find. (Personalized printed maps in the administration building and self-serve kiosks are available if you haven’t got a phone or you prefer to mourn in analog.) The digitization from cards to clouds happened under Gjerde’s watch, as has just about everything else. Did you know gravediggers are now called grave technicians? And those technicians have kept busy. Since 1970, Lakewood has doubled its residency to almost 201,000. If we counted populations of the dead, Lakewood would be the third-largest city in Minnesota, smaller than Minneapolis and St. Paul, but bigger than Bloomington, Duluth, or Rochester.

As Gjerde and I toured the cemetery, I learned many things great (Lakewood once held the highest geographic point in Hennepin County, but they bulldozed it) and small (no one knows whom tiny Jo Pond is named for). Knowing that you are busy—and life is short—I now present only the most astonishing points for your future visit:

  1. The noble white Fridley monument of draped classical figures (near the entrance) does indeed commemorate the family that lent its name to the northern suburb. It’s also the final resting place of Mary Fridley, unwilling star of the biggest tabloid murder mystery of Minnesota’s early 20th century, which started the day Mary’s philandering husband lured her on an outing to the Mississippi Bluffs, faked car trouble, bashed her on the head, and shoved her off a cliff. 
  2. Minnesota’s Civil War dead and former slaves can both be found here. Other pioneering African-American residents include the state’s first black schoolteacher (Mary Jackson Ellis), the first black female lawyer (Lena Olive Smith), the first black state senator (B. Robert Lewis), the first black doctor (Romber Sirelle Brown), and the first black athlete in what would become the Big 10, who later became one of the first black NFL players (Bobby Marshall).
  3. Bald eagles, barred owls, and red-tailed hawks can regularly be found in the cemetery, which sits alongside a bird sanctuary. Other passersby include wild turkeys, deer, foxes, and coyotes. 
  4. Tiny Tim, who died singing his hit “Tiptoe Through the Tulips With Me” at the Woman’s Club of Minneapolis, lies inside Lakewood’s memorial mausoleum. He holds his beloved ukulele in the crypt.
  5. Remember when the far left in America was entirely Republican? The abolitionist founders of Lakewood would, and they rest within these noble gates, joined by representatives of every American political development of the last century and a half. There are suffragettes, including Clara Ueland, who led a march of 2,000 through Minneapolis. Senator Paul Wellstone, his wife Sheila, and daughter Marsha Markuson can be visited alongside the fence near the lake. The carved boulder that serves as their headstone typically holds a great number of stones placed there to mark the respect of visitors, in the Jewish tradition. Hubert Humphrey’s grave occupies the eastern boundary of the cemetery, near King’s Highway. Legend has it that the surrounding plots have already been bought by prominent DFLers. (Location, location, location!) Democrat Rudy Perpich and his wife Lola dwell in the southeastern corner, toward the bird sanctuary. A modern sculpture of two steel arcs represents the couple leaning toward one another for support. Eight Minnesota governors rest in Lakewood (so far).
  6. There are too many former Gophers, Minneapolis Miller baseball greats, and North Star hockey champs hereabouts to count. Minnesota’s own version of Magic Johnson, Bill Goldsworthy—a legend for his “Goldy Shuffle” skating with the 1967 North Stars—became the face of AIDS in town. Goldsworthy raised awareness and acceptance of the disease when he discussed it publicly, before his death in 1996.
  7. When Lakewood opened, a typical purchase encompassed a 12-person plot. Today the average purchase offers space for two.
  8. Sears, the department store chain, started in Minneapolis as the business of Richard W. Sears. While his grave has relocated to Chicago, his parents remain near the Sears monument. Some of Lakewood’s early grave-markers and monuments came from Sears showrooms, including distinctive ones shaped like tree stumps decorated with wildlife. 
  9. Even Minnesotans who are flat broke can get into Lakewood. Since its founding, the University of Minnesota has maintained a spot for the interment of those who donate their bodies to the medical school. 
  10. Section one, on the hill overlooking the lake, contains magnate-and-millionaire row. Here’s where you find the Cargills, the Newells (the SuperValu family), the Pillsburys, and the Daytons. 
  11. The Lakewood Memorial Chapel holds a spot on the National Register of Historic Places and represents the greatest surviving work by art nouveau designer Charles Lamb, of New York. The interior mosaic—celebrating Love, Hope, Faith, and Memory—includes more than 10 million tiles. 
  12. A Minneapolis public school teacher felt so passionate about demystifying death that he left instructions for part of his cremated remains to be donated to Lakewood for display. They can be examined on the lower level of the chapel, in a clear glass urn. 
  13. Around three dozen couples get married every year in the Byzantine funeral chapel, which opened for weddings after a 1996 renovation. 

Of course, I had to ask Gjerde if he plans to be buried at Lakewood. And of course he does. His reason is simple: If you’re buried in Lakewood, or your ashes are memorialized there, that’s permanence—the anchor of memory in a place. It’s the only way your great-great-grandchildren will ever find you, if they suddenly decide they would like to. It’s how Tiny Tim’s fans can find Tiny Tim. It’s a place to pay respect to a brave hockey player who revealed he had AIDS when that was unthinkable. 

Gjerde tells me what, in the cemetery business, passes for a real horror story. Now that cremation is so popular, people take their boxes of ashes home, stick them in a closet, and then they die themselves, and everything goes in the garbage. No card, no record, no option for the future to find you by GPS, or leave a stone behind.

Gjerde showed me where his parents lie, by a crooked pine tree near the western gates. “I like to keep them close,” he said. “Now I think I’m going to be one of them one day, too. But I don’t know if I want to be down with my parents. 

“I kind of like the garden mausoleum myself,” Gjerde added then, with the comfort of someone who has had nearly 50 years to think over where he stands, and where he would like to remain, in perpetuity. 

Mpls.St.Paul Daily Edit

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