What's The Coolest Tombstone In Lakewood Cemetery?

If you're ever in the mood to hunt down some under-appreciated art, take a stroll through East Harriet's Lakewood Cemetery. 

Large enough to be its own neighborhood—and with a population as big as some of the city's communities—Lakewood is the final resting place for many local notables, from the families who built Minneapolis all the way down to those who keep it great. That rich and varied history, though, makes for some spectacular funeral art, according to MinnPost.

Alongside the "towering obelisks" dedicated to "the grand muckety-mucks in Minnesota history," writer Peter Schilling, Jr. writes, there are a surprising number of beautiful, hardly-known monuments.

Schilling picks out several deserving the special attention of a cemetery stroller. There's the abstract red granite columns for neighborhood activist and historian Charles Nelson. Then there's a poetic stone-and-bronze gateway for one Edwin R. Beeman. Or what about a slightly-peculiar memorial to a family called Evans:

In the middle of this section stands a roughly 8-foot-high granite tree, replete with a fern at its base and a squirrel near the top, munching on a nut. Surrounding the tree are cut up stumps and small cords of stone wood. According to Lakewood’s brochure (and I do recommend grabbing a stack of their free literature), people could order these selfsame memorials from the Sears Roebuck catalog.