Animals

In 1864, Crown Hill was far removed from the growing city of Indianapolis. That was one of the reasons the founders picked this site. But the city grew up around Crown Hill. One major city street goes through it, another forms its western boundary. Houses are right across the street on the south and east sides, and a nearby interstate highway makes a wide jog in order to avoid coming through Crown Hill. Still, with over five hundred fenced-in acres, some of it solid woods, Crown Hill is a nature refuge, a home for a wide variety of animals.

Because of its urban setting, most of the animals living in Crown Hill are the same kind animals found in most places throughout the city. In that way, Crown Hill is like a big backyard, the biggest backyard in town. This means that except for the ever present birds and squirrels, most of the animal life starts hopping as daylight turns to dusk and night, which is also when the human visitors leave. Of course, these include Eastern cottontail rabbits, opossums, and raccoons, as do most city environments. But at Crown Hill it also includes an occasional fox and numerous deer.

White-tailed deer first returned to Crown Hill in the 1980s. First one was seen, then another, and another, until now it is estimated that 30 or 35 live inside the cemetery grounds. Only occasionally will they be seen during the day, but an early visitor will very often see them, usually in the distance.

One year recently a ground hog lived in a hole near the Waiting Station and was frequently observed. Mallards sometimes nest at Crown Hill and raise their young even though there is no body of water in the cemetery. Visitors are all but assured they will see some fox squirrels or the smaller red squirrel, and occasionally an eastern chipmunk will skitter by, surprised that anybody would want to see his home.

Plants Except for its people, Crown Hill is probably best known for its trees. A tree map is available from the cemetery office with the location of over 100 species of trees marked and identified by both their common name and scientific name. The trees themselves have a marker with the corresponding number attached to their trunks. This makes the cemetery a very hot spot in the fall, when it seems a large part of the Marion County student population is asked to make a leaf collection. Make sure your students know about this valuable resource.

The trees add greatly to Crown Hill's beauty, especially in the spring and the fall. Early flowering trees include a great many White and Pink Flowering Dogwoods, and varieties of Crabapples, followed by the Magnolias, Northern Catalpas, and Black Locusts. The fall visitor will be rewarded with a rich palette of colored leaves, the bright yellow of the Gingko being one of the most striking.

A favorite of visitors to the cemetery because it is so unusual is the European Weeping Beech. If not trimmed, the branches of this tree drape their way to the ground and an entire tour group can stand beneath one, completely hidden from the outside world. This is just one of the many types of trees not native to Indiana that were planted in Crown Hill to add to its natural beauty. In addition to the hundreds of trees scattered throughout the burial sections, there are several thickly wooded areas in other parts of the cemetery.

On a smaller scale, Crown Hill is home to an assortment of flowers. Spring brings out wild flowers such as Snowdrift and a profusion of purple and white Violets. Daffodils bloom beside the woods near the southern approach to the underpass, where the road goes underneath 38th Street, followed by Day Lilies both there and on the Crown's north side. Early June still brings wild strawberries to the slopes of Crown Hill, which was sometimes called Strawberry Hill by the pioneers. Unfortunately, the deer population has limited the success of some of the more formal plantings of flowers in recent years.

Geology

Why is it Crown Hill instead of Crown Meadow or Crown Woods? The answer lies in the glaciers that went through the area several times during the past two million years, the last one leaving about 18,000 years ago. Most of the region is glacial till, soils and gravel that were left in a mostly level pattern as the glaciers receded. But here and there are deposits called kames where sand and gravel had been trapped in glacier pockets. Crown Hill is the site of one such deposit and rises to 840 feet above sea level, about 200 feet above the nearby White River.

Vanishing Nature

In a little book entitled A Home in the Woods, available in most libraries, Oliver Johnson talks about growing up on a farm a mile or two east of present day Crown Hill, very close to today's State Fairgrounds. One of his tasks as a boy was to ride the family horse down to the mill on the White River to get a sack of the family's corn ground. He dreaded this job because it meant riding by a big swamp called the Round Pound. It was not unusual, he said, to see a panther coming out of Round Pond.

Round Pond is long gone. In its place is the large meadow in the heart of the cemetery. Crown Hill's developers, never able to turn it into a pretty lake, finally filled it in when the underpass was built underneath 38th Street. Gone long before Round Pond were many of the other animals Johnson mentions hunting. Besides the panthers, these included bears, which they used to chase from dens near 38th and Fall Creek, through Crown Hill, down to Meridian and Fall Creek, and back. It also included many less dangerous animals like wild turkeys, pheasants, and other animals that have been able to adapt to an urban setting now that they are no longer looked upon as food, such as raccoon and the recently returned deer.

But this story illustrates that even though Crown Hill has tried to maintain as natural a setting as possible, the hand of man has greatly altered the landscape in the past two hundred years. Most, if not all of the trees you see here, were planted after the cemetery was established. Most of the grounds had already become tilled farmland. A walk through the cemetery is a good time to pause and realize that the head of man must sometimes restrain the hand of man if we are going to have any places of natural nature left.