Oakdale Memorial Gardens

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.