Across Hamilton County, our historic cemeteries provide a quiet but informative record of the past for history lovers while also offering residents an opportunity to enjoy our region’s beautiful landscape. Today, our readers will have the opportunity to choose from three historic cemeteries as they plan their next excursion.
* The Mizpah Congregation Cemetery, the oldest Jewish cemetery in Hamilton County, was established immediately after the U. S. Civil War (1866) by the Hebrew Benevolent Association. The association purchased a potter’s field from the Gardenhire estate with the stated purpose of exhuming the bodies of Union and Confederate Jewish soldiers who had been killed during the Battles for Chattanooga and providing them with appropriate burial.
Shortly after acquiring the site, the process of identifying and exhuming the soldiers began through the financial support and physical labor provided by the Mizpah Congregation. Each soldier was re-interned with full Jewish ritual.
The cemetery, located on East Third Street across from the Chattanooga School for the Arts and Sciences, is home to beautiful cemetery art, including a monument to Chattanooga Times and New York Times publisher, Adolph Ochs. The charter members for the Hebrew Benevolent Association included Morris Bradt, Adolph Dautch, Jacob Bach, George Colburg, Sol Simpson and others. Adolph Dautch was the first Mizpah member to be buried in the cemetery.
* Mount Olivet Catholic Cemetery, located at the western base of Missionary Ridge, is Chattanooga’s only cemetery designated for members of the Catholic faith. The cemetery was established in 1886 on land originally part of the Callaway estate and situated on a beautifully landscaped knoll. Perhaps the most famous person buried on the site is Father Ryan, known as Chattanooga’s Poet-Priest. Father Ryan’s devotion to the city’s yellow fever victims during the 1878 epidemic witnessed him ministering to the medical and spiritual needs of residents regardless of faith. When he contracted the fever and later died, he was hailed by Chattanooga as having “given his life in heroic service to the dead and dying” and as “a Chattanooga hero.”