Grand Rapids Past: David Kendall Designed His Own Gravestone [Video]

The Kendall School of Art and Design has been a downtown institution since 1931. Named after famed Grand Rapids furniture designer David Wolcott Kendall, it was established to memorialize his legacy of design in Grand Rapids.

But did you know David Kendall designed the very stone that marks his family's plot in Oak Hill Cemetery?

The historic Oak Hill Cemetery sits at the corner of Hall and Eastern on Grand Rapids' Southeast Side. It is decorated with beautiful monuments, obelisks and mausoleums that fit in with the early 1900s idea that cemeteries be a an area of rest and repose for th elving as well as a resting place for the dead.

Videographer Scott Harmsen has been documenting the history of the cemetery with Thomas Dilley, an historian and lecturer on historical cemeteries throughout Michigan.

Here, Dilley discusses the design of the Kendall stone which sits in the south half of the cemetery.