Riverside Cemetery Asheville

In 1885, Asheville’s churchyards were crowded, and city leaders worried that the old burial grounds could threaten the water supply. The city was growing quickly after the railroad arrived, and it needed a cemetery large enough for a modernizing town. The Asheville Cemetery Company formed that year, bought land overlooking the French Broad River, and planned a garden-style burial ground that could serve the living as well as the dead.

Riverside opened earlier than expected. The first burial was for Charles Hill, a 25-year-old who died suddenly before the cemetery’s planned opening. His grave turned a civic project into a working cemetery at once. The grounds expanded as the city did, eventually reaching more than eighty acres. Their design used winding roads and landscaped slopes, part of a nineteenth-century movement that treated cemeteries as places for quiet walks and public memory.