Rogers Buchanan Cemetery

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Rogers Buchanan Cemetery is hardly famous. Few visitors to the park even know where the cemetery is. Fewer still know the surprising stories of the men and women interred behind the wrought iron fence. But for those who know the history, the cemetery is at the heart of the history of Druid Hill Park as the final home to the family that built Auchentrolie as a country estate and sold it to the city in 1860 establishing in park. The earliest burial in the small plot belongs to the man who first created Auchentrolie—George Buchanan. George Buchanan immigrated from Scotland in 1723 and became one of the city’s founding Commissioners in 1729. Through his marriage to Eleanor Rogers, George acquired 250 acres of the whimsically named “Hab Nab at a Venture” that his father-in-law Nicholas Rogers II purchased in 1716. Still not content, George Buchanan expanded to property to 625 acres and named it “Auchentrolie” After his death in 1750, he was buried in the small family plot and left the estate to his son Lloyd Buchanan. Lloyd, his children, and his grandchildren all lived on the estate and were buried in the cemetery, among them a Revolutionary War veteran who served at Valley Forge with George Washington, a Confederate spy and saboteur, and a cantankerous slave-owner who created the “Druid Hill Peach.” When Druid Hill Park was sold to Baltimore for a park in 1860, Lloyd Rogers made only one stipulation—that any living members of his family could be buried at their cemetery in Druid Hill and that the city would maintain the cemetery in perpetuity.

Watch our Five Minute Histories video on this cemetery!