Springfield museum leads summer solstice tour at historic Laurel Grove Cemetery
Laurel Grove Cemetery will open 50 signs across 12 acres for a June 19 solstice walk, tracing Springfield's founders, mayors and migrant families.
Laurel Grove Cemetery will turn 3274 Judkins Road into an open-air history lesson when the Springfield History Museum and the cemetery host the Fifth Annual Summer Solstice Celebration on Friday, June 19, from 5 to 7 p.m. The self-guided tour will spread 50 informational signs across the 12-acre site in Glenwood, giving visitors a chance to move at their own pace through one of Springfield’s oldest public spaces.
The event frames Laurel Grove not just as a burial ground, but as a record of the city’s beginnings. Event listings describe it as a 171-year-old community cemetery, and the site’s history reaches back to the Zara Tousey Sweet donation land claim. Charles B. Sweet settled in Glenwood in 1851, Zara Tousey Sweet filed a nearby claim in 1852, and William Sweet, Zara and Maria Sweet’s second son, died at age 5 in 1855 and was buried on the family property. Zara later sold the claim to Thomas Judkins in 1857, tying the cemetery’s early story to the road and land patterns that still define the area.
The cemetery’s markers also map the broader Willamette Valley. More than 4,000 people are buried there, including Isaac Briggs, who founded Springfield with his son Elias, along with four former Springfield mayors. Other names connect the site to Eugene and Cottage Grove as well, from the family of author Opal Whiteley to major league pitcher Howard Fox, Charnel Mulligan, who co-founded Eugene, and Henry and Mary Newman, whose son later opened Newmans’ Fish Company in Eugene. Laurel Grove is also named for the madrone and laurel trees that once stood on the site, a reminder that the landscape itself shaped the cemetery’s identity.
The museum says its mission is to foster awareness of Springfield history and connect the past and present, and the solstice tour is built around that idea. Visitors can look for Victorian-era symbols on headstones, including broken-limbed trees that mark a life ended too soon, and a rare zinc marker known as a zinkie, a cheaper alternative to carved stone. Museum curator Maddi McGraw said the goal is to show that “local history is all around us.”
Laurel Grove remains an active preservation site as well as a historic one. The cemetery says it is a nonprofit, donations are tax deductible, and work parties are held on the third Saturday of each month for brush-clearing, monument restoration and leadership help. The solstice timing gives families an unusually vivid way to encounter Springfield’s past, in a setting where civic memory and maintenance are still happening in plain view.
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