The first notation made of an institutional cemetery was in 1892 when the Hospital arranged with Catholic Bishop John Samuel Foley to move bodies which had been buried northwest of the County House to an island in the middle of the reservoir.

In 1937 the contract was given to Charles C. Diggs, Sr., who founded "The House of Diggs" (reputed to be Michigan's largest funeral home at one time) and a politician,[5] to handle burials in the cemetery and transfers to Wayne State University School of Medicine as state law mandated that these functions be handled or supervised by a licensed mortician.

Charles Diggs, Jr., then 15 years old, would drive his mother from Detroit to the morgue which was a red brick building at Eloise called the round house because of its shape and they would prepare the body for burial.

The field lay forgotten and neglected, especially since the last burial (in one of the three plots) was in 1948; it now stands in the way of other uses, and is seen as a responsibility by Wayne County commissioners who are perplexed over use of the Eloise site.

[citation needed] The presence of over 7,000 marked but unnamed graves — and the absence of many supporting records — is potentially an insuperable obstacle to any future development.

Young abandoned a plan to expand Detroit City Airport's runway because the adjoining Gethsemane Cemetery blocked the way, and outraged relatives protested.

As a result, a few years later Southwest Airlines ended its operations there, citing the city's inability to keep its promises and the need for longer runways to accommodate larger jet aircraft.

[19] According to Frank Rembisz, former Hamtramck city council president, to move the cemetery, they needed to get surviving relatives's permission, and would have had to retain "Talmudic scholars from Israel to sift through the earth to make sure there were no remains left."