Jesse Jackson to Be Laid to Rest at Chicago’s Oak Woods Cemetery
Rev. jesse jackson will be laid to rest this week at Oak Woods Cemetery in Chicago, bringing the civil rights leader’s burial to the 173-year-old, park-like grounds. The choice of Oak Woods places the service and interment within a landscape long framed by 19th-century design principles and a roster of prominent Chicago figures.
Jesse Jackson's Place in Oak Woods' Historic Fabric
The cemetery, located at 1035 E. 67th St., is roughly bounded by 67th Street, Cottage Grove Avenue, 71st Street and the Metra Electric tracks. Chartered by the state in 1853, Oak Woods took its first burials in 1865, and its appearance today reflects deliberate 19th-century planning that sought to make burial grounds resemble public parks.
Adolph Strauch, the Prussian-born landscape gardener who influenced the site, was a leader in the “landscape lawn” movement. His approach—emphasizing hills, curving roadways and open sightlines—left Oak Woods with gently rolling terrain and named drives such as Sunset Boulevard and Memorial Drive. The grounds include four small lakes, one of them Symphony Lake, contributing to the cemetery’s naturalist feel.
Charles Birnbaum, president and CEO of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, describes Oak Woods as part of the city’s “unrivaled historic fabric, ” noting the unified composition created by plantings, monuments and a manicured ground plane. Because the cemetery was designed without fences around family plots, visitors can move freely across the landscape, a deliberate effect of Strauch’s design that blurs the line between park and memorial space.
Oak Woods Cemetery and the City’s Memory
The cemetery’s monuments and grave markers span nearly two centuries of funerary design, with influences from Egyptian, Greek and Roman revival to Art Deco and contemporary styles rendered in granite and marble. That architectural and horticultural continuity is one reason Oak Woods has become a repository for Chicago’s civic memory and the final resting place for leaders across multiple fields.
What makes this notable is that locating a high-profile burial here connects an individual life to a deliberately curated landscape designed to function as a public narrative. The combination of monumental architecture, open lawns and water features at Oak Woods situates interment amid a visible record of the city’s past.
The cemetery’s history also reflects Chicago’s growth: when Oak Woods was planned, the city had roughly 30, 000 residents and many defining events, such as the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, lay in the future. The site’s scale and composition were intended to match a metropolis on the rise, an ambition that shaped both layout and plantings.
Landscape Design by Adolph Strauch and Legacy
Strauch’s broader work is evident elsewhere; his magnum opus, the Spring Grove cemetery and arboretum in Cincinnati, spans 730 acres and includes 12 small lakes. That reference point underscores the ambitions behind Oak Woods’ own plan: to offer expansive, park-like cemetery grounds that emphasize landscape cohesion over walled family enclosures.
Because Oak Woods was laid out in that manner, the site’s visual strengths—sweeping lawns, curated plantings and a mix of funerary styles—have endured. The result is a cemetery that, by design, presents burials as part of a shared urban setting rather than isolated plots. The arrival of Jesse Jackson’s remains on these grounds this week will add another chapter to that ongoing civic and cultural composition.
Oak Woods’ combination of historic monuments, natural features and planned vistas ensures it remains a distinctive setting for public mourning and commemoration, and the cemetery’s role in the city’s landscape will be emphasized by this week’s interment.
