Riverside Cemetery

Riverside Cemetery is a 36-acre urban forest in Waterbury, Connecticut, and is a living museum of art, history and nature set in a beautiful landscape. Designed by landscape architect Howard Daniels as part of the Rural Cemetery Movement of the mid-19th century, Riverside rises on a hillside near the west bank of the Naugatuck River. Riverside is notable for its series of ponds, its winding roads set into the landscape, and its many large and striking monuments cast in granite and bronze. Included on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988, Riverside is the resting place of industrialists and inventors, artists and architects, suffragettes and Civil War heroes, and the men and women who changed a region and the nation.

Riverside has more than 630 mostly mature and healthy trees in the developed part of the landscape, comprising 47 species representing 30 genera. This number includes many native species including Northern Red Oak, quercus rubra; Black Birch, betula lenta; White Oak, quercus alba; Northern White Cedar, thuja occidentalis; and Sassafras, sassafras. Other trees of significance include a mature and healthy American Basswood, tilia americana; a large healthy and beautiful European Beech, fagus sylvatica; at least three mature and healthy American Sycamore, platanus occidentalis; and two mature and beautiful Tulip trees, liriodendron. One of the sassafras trees is possibly as large as any currently living in Connecticut. Riverside has recently added new trees to its landscape to add variety and color as was the original intent of the Rural Cemetery design, including a golden weeping willow, salix alba 'Tristis;' an American beech, fagus grandifolia; a silver linden, tilia tomentosa; Eastern redbud, cercis canadensis; and ornamental cherry trees, prunus x yedoensis.