"As a beautiful breathing spot, its possibilities are even manifest to the ghosts of the pauper dead who now look out on mansions of the millionaire and mayhap grin to think that all things come to those who wait and that the whirligig of time has transmuted their lowly beds into nooks of safety and beauty." – Former Birmingham Mayor George B. Ward.

Visitors to the Birmingham Zoo and Botanical Gardens may be surprised to learn that the parks housing such beauty were constructed upon burial sites associated with "pest houses" in the area that dated to 1888.

Lane Park, originally called Red Mountain Park, is a large area on the southern located near the western terminus of Highway 280. The 200-acre site was purchased by the city of Birmingham in a series of transactions dating from 1889 to 1902. The first purchase was made under mayor A. O. Lane.

Lane had a section of the site, on the west side of Cahaba Road dedicated in February 1893 as a "Potter's field" or pauper's cemetery. Known as Red Mountain Cemetery or "South-Side Cemetery", it was used for Jefferson County until shortly after the turn of the 20th Century. The cemetery contains some 4,711 graves. A smallpox hospital also was built on the park property, just south of a quarry where curb-stones for 1st Avenue North were being mined.

In 1910, a tent city was erected in the area of the property near today's English Village to be used in the treatment of tuberculosis patients, the first such establishment in North Alabama.

In 1934, the entire 200-acre parcel was dedicated by the City Council as a public park, named "Lane Park," in honor of Mayor Lane.

The park site was expanded in anticipation of the creation of the Birmingham Zoo, which took up 50 acres of the enlarged park. The zoo's first exhibit, "Monkey Island", opened to the public on April 2, 1955. Another 67 1/2 acres was enclosed in 1962 when the Birmingham Botanical Gardens first opened.

The database for the Red Mountain Cemetery Record of Interments preserves the records of those buried in the cemetery and provides fragments of information about the lives these individuals once lived. http://bpldb.bplonline.org/db/static/pdf/RedMtnCemIntro.pdf