The Lake Effect team headed to Forest Home Cemetery for the latest event in its Lake Effect On-Site series. We learn about the origins of the cemetery with historian John Gurda, explore the many trees and plants that inhabit the cemetery, and the young Milwaukeeans who keep it looking beautiful. Plus, they learn about the honey bees that live at Forest Home and look at nearby tavern Holler House, which boasts the oldest sanctioned tenpin bowling alley in the nation.
Forest Home is the oldest cemetery in Milwaukee. This year it’s celebrating its 175th anniversary. In that time, the cemetery has become the resting place of some of Milwaukee’s most well-known residents; as well as a community gathering place, where Milwaukeeans of all stripes come to connect with the landscape and our shared past.
Although the cemetery was founded by St. Paul's Episcopal Church in 1850, historian John Gurda says it's always been open to people of all faiths.
“They had a vision of what they called a cemetery for the city… they said, ‘We could’ve made this just for Episcopalians, we decided to make it for everybody. And they also said they wanted to make it a monument to the taste and liberality of Milwaukee, so they wanted something kind of a cut above,” he explains.
Gurda wrote the book on the cemetery, called Silent City: A History of Forest Home Cemetery. Today, the cemetery is home to many of the most influential people in Milwaukee's history, including two of the city's three founders.
"One of my favorite places here is Brewer's Corners, it's kind of on the central-east portion of the cemetery... You have the biggest monuments on the grounds which is Valentine Blatz, the Blatz Family monument," says Gurda. "Right across from Blatz you have the Pabst Family plot, and right across from them you have the Schlitz-Uihlein family plot. So Schlitz, Pabst, Blatz, it's like a Southside street corner."
Forest Home isn’t just a cemetery, it’s also an arboretum home to more than a hundred varieties of trees. Walking through the cemetery in spring or summer, visitors are greeted by a wide array of foliage and bountiful greenery.
"Forest Home was here before the Milwaukee County Park system, so people used to come here to picnic," says Sally Kubly, a member of Forest Home's preservation board of directors who leads tours on the cemetery's many trees.
There are more than 2,800 trees on the grounds, encompassing more than a hundred different species. Among the trees are a myriad of green spaces that require care and maintenance. Alongside staff, interns from Teens Grow Greens have also helped maintain the cemetery's landscape.
Internship educator, Paula Lovo, says that when the program began interns were a bit leery of working at the cemetery.
Lovo explains, "Their first question was, 'Are we digging out [graves]?'"
In reality, they were maintaining garden beds at the cemetery, learning about the arboretum, and the history of the cemetery.
For more than a century, Forest Home Cemetery has been a place for Milwaukeeans to reconnect with nature. But this natural landscape relies on a lot of critters to keep its trees and plants abloom. Like honey bees, which have found a home at the cemetery, thanks to Chad Nelson and his wife Barbie Brennan Nelson.
The couple are co-owners of Fairy Garden Hives, a local company that manages hives and makes honey. That includes Silent City Honey, harvested from the hives here at Forest Home. The honey has a flavor that's unique to the cemetery, due in large part to the many flowering trees on the grounds.
"What's neat about this place is it's the oldest forest that I know of in Wisconsin... and [the trees'] root structure goes down deeper, they pull up different tannins," says Chad Nelson. "There's a lot of things in there so the flavor is different. One mature tree is equivalent to 17 acres of agricultural flowers or wild flowers."
As Barbie Brennan-Nelson explains, that flavor changes throughout the season. "As the trees have been blooming longer, as the plants have been blooming longer and the roots get deeper, it gets a deeper flavor," she says.
Over the years the neighborhoods surrounding Forest Home Cemetery have grown and changed a lot. But since 1908 it’s had at least one constant companion: the Holler House, a nearby tavern that boasts the oldest sanctioned tenpin bowling alley in the U.S.
For all that time it’s been owned by the same family. Tom and Cathy Haefke are the latest members of the Skowronski family to take the helm. The tavern draws in visitors from around the world, in part due to its historic bowling lanes. The lanes have been maintained there for more than a century.
"It's two-lanes, you have to have a pin-setter, but everything - the length, the width - everything's the same," says Tom Haefke.
Today, the lanes use human pin-setters, generally members of the Skowronski family or neighborhood kids.
