NEW!! - Over 90% of Prospect Hill markers are now online!
I've put approximately 5800 photos online of Prospect Hill Cemetery markers, which represent 90%-95% of all the markers in the cemetery; all photos are named and alphabetically sorted. The only sections left to photograph are the first sections to the left of the cemetery entrance. Photos of every other area and marker in the cemetery are now on this site. Click on the Lists/Pictures item on the bottom of the left menu on this page to see the markers.
Omaha’s First Cemetery
Burial permit #1 at Prospect Hill Cemetery was purchased in 1858 by Alonzo F. Salisbury, who was at one time the Douglas County representative to the Territorial Legislature. According to an old receipt found in the Douglas County files, the funeral director, A. F. Vischer, certified that Salisbury paid $25 for the coffin and the service. His widow, Lydia, certified that she paid $8 to the gravedigger, John Ryan, for his services.
The cemetery has been active ever since that day, despite several periods of neglect and even a scandal or two. Prospect Hill no longer allows new burials, since the cemetery is just about full, but is open to visitors every day of the year.
As Omaha's first cemetery, it enjoys a special place in the history of our town. At about the same time that Prospect Hill was founded, Cedar Hill Cemetery, which sat adjacent to Prospect Hill, was also founded and was 4 times the size of Prospect Hill. This cemetery never had much success; after a few years the land was sold off and the burials relocated, until by 1890 it was out of business and the land that it sat on had been incorporated into the City of Omaha itself. Today there are businesses and homes on the land that the older cemetery occupied.
It's important to remember that Omaha originated as a settlement in approximately 1854; Lewis and Clark had been through this area not too many years before that. Burials were placed wherever an open area could be found, and there was quite a lot of open area around here then. The vast majority of these graves were not marked; there were many old pioneer graves uncovered in the early part of this century as the downtown district was redeveloped. I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't still a few lost graves in our downtown area, under some of the big buildings.
Because of this, Prospect Hill represented a firm step towards Omaha becoming a city in its own right. At this time, Council Bluffs, Iowa, directly across the Missouri River from Omaha, was a much bigger and more important town. The towns were to change places in the coming years, and Omaha eventually outgrew Council Bluffs. Not, I might add, without some of those early Omaha leaders resorting to some very dirty tricks.
The Rich and Famous
If you walk through the cemetery on a sunny morning or a quiet afternoon, anyone at all familiar with Omaha will undoubtedly recognize the majority of the names on the monuments in Prospect Hill. The streets and neighborhoods in Omaha are named after the people buried in Prospect Hill; these pioneers shaped the city in its earliest days. It would have been a travesty to have lost this rich slice of history to vandals and neglect; this nearly happened until the Greater Omaha Genealogical Society, in 1976 as part of the Bi-Centennial, began to reclaim the land from waist high weeds and garbage, and the cemetery began its most recent rise from neglect.
As you'll see, 99% of the photos of the people on this site are men. Our founding fathers never saw the need to include pictures of the women who helped build Omaha when they were publishing histories of the town; only the men. This has made it very difficult to connect a face to the women buried in these cemeteries, and if anyone out there has any pictures of these women they'd like to share, please let me know.
I’m indebted to this publication for some of the information that follows on this website, and I’d like to thank the Association for allowing me to share it with everyone. It’s my hope that you will want to read more about the history of Prospect Hill and the early Omahans, and purchase this informative book. It is well worth the money.
