Its burials include a number of the city's high-profile civic and business leaders, as well as a substantial indigent population, and artist Frederic Edwin Church.

Its basic layout has been little altered since its founding, and it retains most of its 19th-century features; a memorial chapel built in 1884 was destroyed by fire in 1904.

In 1864 a number of plot owners banded together to purchase the entire cemetery, establishing the non-profit association that now manages the property three years later.

In 1884, the association hired landscape designer Thomas Brown McClunnie to lay out the cemetery's northwest quadrant.

In contrast to the rural cemetery movement, McClunnie's parklike setting emphasized a simple rectangular layout, rather than winding lanes that conformed to local topography.