Each grave marker in Graceland Cemetery turns a page in the narrative that is the saga of Chicago. Since 1860, its monuments have whispered to visitors to listen to the legends of Chicago's elite.
 

Graceland is the final resting place of Chicago's industrial barons, its lords and ladies of art and architecture, and its shapers of culture and political thought. It is an 80 acre Victorian park designed using the ideals of the English Garden movement, a virtual arboretum where gravesites were once marketed as "landscape rooms"...its monuments and tomb stones grandly designed and opulently decorated.

Known as the cemetery of architects, Daniel Burnham, Louis Sullivan, Willam Le Baron Jenney and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe all chose it as the place of their last repose. Cyrus McCormick, Allan Pinkerton, Marshall Field, Potter Palmer and Phillip Armour all rest in peace alongside fellow Chicago aristocracy. However, they entered Graceland's refuge not knowing that one day, the heroes of the common man would rest there also. Heroes such as baseball great Ernie Banks, and boxing's heavy weight champions, Jack Johnson and Bob Fitzsimmons attract as many visitors as any of their iconic neighbors.

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Consider a tour of Graceland Cemetery to be the viewing of an open history book where the visitor can feel the presence of the spirits who enabled Chicago to raise itself from the ashes to become the great metropolis of the prairie. Every prominent name etched in granite or marble is an episode in an anthology that recounts the legacy of America's most American city. Literally, a Chicago biography at every turn.