OAKDALE MEMORIAL GARDENS
Historic Site — 2501 Eastern Avenue, Davenport, Scott County, Iowa
Status: Operating · Access: Open to public
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/oakdale-memorial-gardens-iowa/

NPS-listed historic site associated with the Underground Railroad.

A historic site in Davenport, Iowa, a National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom listing, Oakdale Memorial Gardens is filed here for what the record attaches to it. NPS-listed historic site associated with the Underground Railroad. It sits in the archive under dark history, Underground Railroad history and the Underground Railroad. The dossier holds 3 documented facts — a documented spine with no haunting reports attached. The site is open to visitors.

Oakdale was Iowa's answer to Mount Auburn — the 78-acre rural cemetery Davenport's founders incorporated in 1856, laid out in rolling hills along Duck Creek in the same garden-cemetery movement that had remade American burial a generation earlier. The cemetery sits directly across the street from the Iowa Soldiers' Orphans' Home — the children of the dead looking out at the fathers' graves, a pairing the National Register nomination notes without needing to underline it.
The Civil War fills Section 11. Davenport's Camp McClellan — later Camp Kearney — mustered and trained nine infantry regiments, six cavalry regiments, and an artillery battery, and its 300-bed general hospital sent its dead across the road to Oakdale. The soldiers were buried first wherever there was room, then consolidated into the Soldiers' Lot — 174 Civil War dead by 1885. Some 160 were later moved to the national cemeteries at Rock Island and Keokuk; the remaining 71 stayed, including seven killed at Fort Donelson — the first Iowa casualties of the war.
The rest of Oakdale is Davenport's who-was-who — Bix Beiderbecke lies here, the cornetist whose sound outlived him by a century, along with the generals, the governors' families, the prairie-city founders. The GAR plot, the zinc and bronze and marble markers, the mausoleums under the hillside trees — the National Register historic district keeps the whole design.
Oakdale is the archive's orphans'-view file — the garden cemetery across the road from the soldiers' orphans' home, where the first Iowans killed in the Civil War lie in the lot the army consolidated, in the landscape that carried the rural-cemetery movement to the Mississippi.

WHY THIS FILE MATTERS
Oakdale Memorial Gardens is the archive's Soldiers' Lot file — the 1856 Davenport garden cemetery where Camp Kearney's hospital dead were buried across the road from the orphans' home, and where Bix Beiderbecke shares the hills with the first Iowa dead of the Civil War.
A cemetery across from the orphans keeps its lot — the file's suggestion being that Oakdale's hold is the sightline: the graves of the fathers in view of the home that raised their children, in the garden Davenport built in 1856.

HISTORY — 3 documented facts
· NPS includes this site in the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom. A documented site gives the file real substance; this entry is part of that record. The fact is historically verified — the part of the file that doesn't need hedging. The detail is preserved in 'Public NPS Network to Freedom listings, row 2, ID 01GA01'. Documented ground is what separates this file from pure legend — this is part of it.
· Oakdale Memorial Gardens is documented on the National Park Service Network to Freedom for its role in the Underground Railroad. The site's documented history is the record the rest of the file stands on. The fact is historically verified — the part of the file that doesn't need hedging. Sources including 'NPS Network to Freedom listing' carry the record. It's the sort of fact that gives the haunting reports their context.
· The cemetery is documented. The site's documented history is the record the rest of the file stands on. It's verified history: the dossier's load-bearing detail. The detail is preserved in 'NPS Network to Freedom listing'. The entry's timeline holds it; the lore holds the rest. The telling survives; the proof stays folklore.

SOURCES — 3 cited
· Public NPS Network to Freedom listings, row 2, ID 01GA01 — National Park Service
  https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/sortable_dataset/undergroundrailroad/F0E29766-00A1-12E5-C3D062151C3F7E26/nri-NTFListings6426NOPIItable.csv?t=1784017173223
· NPS Network to Freedom listing — National Park Service
  https://www.nps.gov/subjects/ugrr/index.htm
· Underground Railroad — Wikipedia
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Railroad

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Methodology: https://haunthunt.com/methodology/ · Corrections: https://haunthunt.com/report/