Biography | John D. Rockefeller — Buried Under This Obelisk at Lake View

People look for Rockefeller in New York, because that is where the name still buys buildings.

He was buried in Cleveland, four days after he died in Florida.

The body left The Casements by special car. A private service was held at Pocantico Hills. On 27 May 1937 he was placed here, at Lake View Cemetery, beside Laura Spelman Rockefeller, who had died in 1915.

He had not lived in Cleveland for decades. The city was still the one that had given him the first job, the first refinery, and the 1870 charter on Public Square.

Lake View was already the family plot.

The family monument is a tall granite obelisk, identified on the cemetery's own points-of-interest map.

The map point marks that monument; conflicting secondary lot references are unnecessary for identifying it.

Lake View opened in 1869 on the ridge between Cleveland and East Cleveland, at 12316 Euclid Avenue.

James A. Garfield's memorial is on the same grounds.

So are industrialists, mayors, and a baseball player killed by a pitch. Rockefeller is one neighbor among them.

Visitors leave dimes on the base. The habit comes from the later years when he handed out dimes as a greeting. The cemetery's own access arrangements govern visits, and mourners and other graves deserve consideration.

What the stone does not say is the argument that followed him. Standard Oil was broken in 1911.

The fortune was already moving into the University of Chicago, the General Education Board, the Rockefeller Foundation, and a son who would spend it differently.

The grave records a Cleveland ending, not a verdict.

Stand at the obelisk and you are looking at a decision made long before 1937: that the first city, not the last house, would keep the body.

Sources: [Lake View Cemetery](https://www.lakeviewcemetery.com/our-grounds/points-of-interest); [Cleveland Historical](https://clevelandhistorical.org/files/show/731); [contemporary newspaper issue](https://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=SLM19370527-01).

Photo: THD3, 9 May 2010, [CC BY-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/), via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rockefeller_grave_2.JPG), resized. This later photograph shows the monument, not the burial ceremony.