Eastside Historic Cemetery District

The Eastside Historic Cemetery District is significant for containing the oldest cemeteries remaining in Detroit and the oldest Jewish burial ground in Michigan. The district's cemeteries are also notable for containing the final resting places of many persons prominent in the early history of Michigan and in the political, religious, business, and cultural history of the state and city of Detroit. Two of the district's cemeteries, Mt. Elliott and Elmwood, possess additional importance as fine examples of rural cemetery design of the nineteenth century. Mt. Elliott and Elmwood are also significant in architectural terms for their notable Medieval-style gatehouse structures and, in the case of Elmwood, for its early Gothic chapel. The wealth of funerary art, including fine examples of all the styles and types of monuments in vogue in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, also gives these two cemeteries and the district significance. The cemetery district possesses additional significance for being the site of the Battle of Bloody Run which occurred during Pontiac's 1763 siege of Detroit.

The Eastside Historic Cemetery District contains three contiguous, nineteenth-century cemeteries and is located one and one-half miles from Detroit's central business district. Originally a suburb of Detroit, the area is now within the city limits and was a major target of slum clearance in the Seventies. The 130-acre site contains the Catholic Mount Elliott Cemetery, the Protestant Elmwood Cemetery and the Jewish Lafayette Street Cemetery. In keeping with the characteristics of a rural cemetery, both Mt. Elliott and Elmwood have winding roads, mature trees, and formal, medieval-style, stone gateways. Elmwood also contains a small Gothic chapel. Lafayette Street Cemetery is a one-half-acre burial ground at the southeast corner of Elmwood Cemetery. The three cemeteries are surrounded by similar iron fences and are bounded by vacated Waterloo Street on the north, Mount Elliott Avenue on the east, vacated Monroe and Lafayette Streets on the south and vacated Elmwood Avenue on the west. Elmwood Cemetery on the west and Mount Elliott Cemetery on the east lie back-to-back divided only by a wire mesh fence.