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Homewood Memorial Gardens is comprised of several older cemeteries and burial grounds. Holland (Mount Holland) Cemetery was the burial place of the early Dutch settlers from nearby South Holland, Illinois and saw its first burials in the late 1850s. The other early cemeteries included Fremont Holbrook Cemetery, Oak Ridge Cemetery, and the Doepp Estate Plot. By the early 1900s all of these cemeteries had become part of Oak Lawn Cemetery which changed its name to Homewood Memorial Gardens around 1965.
Homewood Memorial Gardens is a privately-owned cemetery in unincorporated Cook County, Illinois. Many other unrelated cemeteries share variations of this name. This site may have formerly been called Oak Lawn Cemetery.
The cemetery has long served as Cook County's potter's field, providing interment for indigents and unclaimed bodies. Press reports in 2011 speculated the cemetery might have as many as eight thousand such bodies, many in mass graves.
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