St. Mary Cemetery lies in the middle of one of the most densely populated residential areas on Cleveland's west side. Its nine acres of land, dotted with shade trees and beautiful grave stones, is surrounded by a fence, and, at its West 41st Street entrance, a posted sign advises visitors of its visiting hours. However, neither this entrance nor its other on West 38th is gated. This being the case, St. Mary's almost beckons to neighbors and any other passersby to visit it at any time, day or night, enjoy its grassy grounds, walk its pretty paths, and, most importantly, respect its magnificent monuments.
In 1853, just one year before Ohio City was annexed to the City of Cleveland, thus becoming Cleveland's west side, prolific nineteenth-century real estate developer Hiram Stone platted a new residential subdivision south of Ohio City in Brooklyn Township. He called it "H. Stone's Addition to Ohio City & Cleveland," a remarkably prescient title at the time. The new subdivision stretched west from Pearl (West 25th) Street all the way to Gauge (West 44th) Street, and from Clark Avenue north to Walworth Run at Ohio City's southern boundary.
The platted area contained almost 700 lots for residential houses, but left undeveloped in its midst were thirteen acres located just east of Burton (West 41st) Street and north of Clark Avenue. In 1861, as houses were going up in Stone's subdivision—many of them for German immigrants who were pouring into Cleveland in this period in large numbers—the southernmost six acres of the undeveloped thirteen in the middle of the subdivision were purchased by the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland for, according to the deed of purchase, "cemetery purposes for the benefit of German Catholics on the west side of the Cuyahoga River."
Many of the early records of St. Mary Cemetery appear to have been destroyed in a fire, making research of the early years of the cemetery difficult. However, secondary sources tell us that St. Mary Cemetery was established on those six acres of land in 1862 by St. Mary of the Assumption parish, Cleveland's first west side German Catholic parish. The property for St. Mary Cemetery was purchased during the pastorship of Father F. X. Obermueller, a German immigrant, but it appears that it was under a subsequent pastor, Father Stephen Falk, a Swiss immigrant who served the parish from 1862 to 1880, that the cemetery grounds were developed and consecrated. In St. Mary Cemetery's early years, it was often referred to as Burton Street Cemetery, after the street upon which it fronted. That street, in turn, had been named after William Burton, an Ohio City pioneer whose summer cottage was built on the street in 1839 and still stands directly across from St. Mary Cemetery.
Just a few years after St. Mary Cemetery opened, another German Catholic parish, St. Stephen, was established on Cleveland's west side. It began in 1869 as a mission of St. Mary of the Assumption for German Catholics living west of Gauge (West 44th) Street. A decade later, in 1881, another parish, St. Michael Archangel, was also founded as a mission of St. Mary's for German Catholics living on Cleveland's southwest side. In the years that followed, German Catholics who belonged to either St. Mary of the Assumption, St. Stephen or St. Michael's parishes were permitted to be buried at St. Mary Cemetery which, by this date, had now become part of Cleveland's west side following the 1867 annexation of an area of Brooklyn Township that included the lands upon which the cemetery was located.
It is interesting to note that no Cleveland newspaper mentioned St. Mary Cemetery during the first decade of its existence. The first to mention the cemetery, albeit obscurely, was the Plain Dealer on May 30, 1871, when it published an article which noted that, on Decoration Day, Father Falk of St. Mary's German church had, at the west side "Catholic cemetery," decorated the graves of "J. Mayer, J. Schneider, F. Werz, A. Klein, K. Mecil, B. Lais, F. Schwonger, S. Vochatger, C. A. Schmidt, and Jas. Macklin." All of these men presumably were German Catholics who had fought for the Union—and for which some had died—in America's Civil War. Cleveland city directories were even slower in acknowledging the existence of the new cemetery. St. Mary Cemetery was not listed in any Cleveland directory until 1874.
Thousands of German immigrants and descendants of German immigrants were buried at St. Mary Cemetery in the years that followed its establishment, many of them beneath beautiful gravestones inscribed in the German language. A number of these gravestones are memorials to notable German Catholics who, in the second half of the nineteenth century, operated successful retail businesses on Lorain Avenue near Fulton Road, an intersection that soon became known as Lorain-Fulton Square. A number of those gravestones honor members of the related Fridrich and Schmitt families who operated several different businesses in that west side commercial district, including Fridrich Bicycle, one of the oldest retail bicycle shops in the United States until it closed its doors in 2024.
Another example of a notable German immigrant businessman buried at St. Mary Cemetery is Friedlin "Freddie" Hirz (1843-1903), a tailor who for years had a shop on Lorain Avenue, just west of what is today West 45th Street. His shop was so well known that it was featured in the 1874 Atlas of Cuyahoga County. Another is Edward Disler, a German immigrant and jeweler who successfully operated a store on Lorain Avenue near West 25th Street for many years.
While St. Mary Cemetery was explicitly founded for German Catholic burials, Catholics of other ethnicities were later given permission to bury their dead there too. The first of these were Bohemian Catholics many of whom lived near the cemetery in a west side neighborhood that was known in the second half of the nineteenth century as the Isle of Cuba. The early-arriving immigrants likely first worshiped with German Catholics at either St. Mary of the Assumption or St. Stephen, but, by 1872, their numbers were sufficiently large that the Bishop permitted them to form a parish of their own, which they called St. Procop, after Bohemia's patron saint. Their first church was built on Burton Street, just south of St. Mary Cemetery in 1874. One of the earliest verifiable burials of a Bohemian Catholic at St. Mary Cemetery occurred in 1892, when 41-year- old Miloslav Holecek, a Cleveland grocer and immigrant from Karlova Huť in Central Bohemia, died and was buried there. His gravestone, as well as those for a number of other Bohemian immigrants buried at St. Mary's, is inscribed entirely in the Czech language.
In the early years of the twentieth century, Catholic immigrants of other ethnic groups from Central Europe who often tended to settle in urban areas where Germans and/or Bohemians had first settled, including Hungarians, Poles, and Slovaks, became members of the west side German and Bohemian Catholic parishes, and when they died, they were permitted to be buried at St. Mary Cemetery too. Their gravestones were often inscribed in their native languages.
In 1917, Father Casimer Reichlin, the first pastor of St. Stephen who had served for an incredible 47 years, died. By this time, there appears to have already been a large circular section near the West 41st Street entrance to St. Mary Cemetery, in the center of which a large cross had been erected. It further appears that it was decided that this beloved pastor should be buried in that section, with a large sculpted monument erected over his grave. Four years later, Father Reichlin's long-time friend and fellow priest, Bishop Joseph Koudelka, who had been a pastor at both St. Procop and St. Michael, died and was buried next to Father Reichlin's grave in the circular section. A similarly sized sculpted monument was placed over his grave too. Soon this circular section of St. Mary Cemetery became known as the Priests Circle. In the years that followed, other notable local priests who had served west side Catholic parishes were accorded the same honor and buried in the Priests Circle, some below large monuments and others below simple flat grave markers. As of October 2025, there were eleven priests buried in the Priests Circle. Father Stephen Falk, whose efforts led to the development of the cemetery and its consecration in 1862, is not buried in the Circle, as he died in 1899 long before the Priests Circle was initiated. A simple flat grave marker in Father Falk's memory, which apparently replaced a more elaborate earlier monument, is located in another section of St. Mary Cemetery.
By the early 1920s, there were few available burial plots left at St. Mary Cemetery. The parish of St. Mary of the Assumption decided to remedy this by expanding the cemetery's lands, and in 1927 and 1928 it successfully purchased three additional acres of land for the cemetery that abutted the eastern end of the original cemetery grounds. The additional acres had earlier been developed as residential lots in H. Stone's Additional Subdivision. Houses on the lots were either torn down or moved, and the cemetery grounds were successfully extended all the way to West 38th Street. Along with the additional land, St. Mary Cemetery was further enhanced at this time with a second entrance on West 38th Street and a new walking path that led from that entrance directly to a new circular section in the cemetery.
On November 15, 1931, the new addition to St. Mary Cemetery was consecrated at a ceremony attended by a representative of Bishop Joseph Schrembs. Some five years later, on May 17, 1936, the Cuyahoga County Council of the Veterans of Foreign Wars placed a flagpole and a memorial plaque in the center of the new circular section, the plaque inscribed: "Dedicated To The Veterans Who Served . . . Lived . . . Died . . . for their Country."
As previously noted, St. Mary Cemetery had long held the graves of a number of German Catholic soldiers who fought and died in the Civil War, and also likely holds graves of soldiers and veterans who had fought in the Spanish-American War and/or in World War I. No veterans from any of these war, however, are buried in this new circular section. The first soldier buried in what became known as the Soldiers Circle, was Charles L. Andrews, a U. S. Navy radio operator who was killed on Easter Sunday, April 5, 1942, during the Battle of Bataan in the Philippine Islands. The remains of sixteen other soldiers or veterans who served in World War II were also buried in the Circle between 1942 and 1948.
In 1945, as a result of dwindling attendance numbers, St. Mary of the Assumption parish was dissolved and, in 1948, the management, care and maintenance of St. Mary Cemetery was transferred to the Calvary Cemetery Association, an organization which was later renamed the Catholic Cemeteries Association of the Cleveland Diocese. By the early 1950s, the last of the available lots in the cemetery were purchased, and, by 1976, according to a January 21, 1976 Plain Dealer article, the number of annual burials at St. Mary Cemetery had dropped to just fifty. Today, in 2025, the annual numbers appear to be considerably less. According to findagrave.com—a website at which volunteers create memorials for people whose remains have been buried in cemeteries all around the world—the remains of only nine deceased persons have been buried at St. Mary Cemetery since 2020.
St. Mary Cemetery is no longer the active burial place for west side Catholics that it once was. Burials are now few and far between. The cemetery's elaborate gate that once stood at its West 41st Street entrance in 1929 is gone. The sacred monuments to Father Reichlin, Bishop Koudelka and Father Falk have been substantially damaged, likely by vandals. The cross in the middle of the Priests Circle, which stood there for years until recently, is now gone. Acts of vandalism, as noted in a number of Plain Dealer and Press articles over the years, and the effects of exposure of the cemetery's monuments to Cleveland's weather over long periods of time, have left many monuments damaged and unreadable while many others have simply vanished. Still, St. Mary Cemetery remains one of the most historic cemeteries on Cleveland's west side and one which should be visited, respected, and carefully managed and maintained, not only for the descendants whose ancestors are buried there, but also for all Clevelanders who see value in preserving an important piece of their city's history.
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