Prospect Hill was designed as a garden cemetery (also known as a rural cemetery). Until the early 1800s, most burying grounds (the word "cemetery" did not come into use in the United States until the 1840s) were next to churches. They were very overcrowded and unhealthy, with graves stacked upon each other or emptied and reused for new burials. As a reaction to the urban cemetery, the first "garden" cemetery—Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris—opened in 1804. The concept quickly spread across Europe. Garden/rural cemeteries did not have to be outside the city limits. When land within a city could be found, the cemetery was enclosed with a wall to give it a garden-like quality. These cemeteries were often not sectarian, nor co-located with a house of worship. Inspired by the English landscape garden movement, they often looked like attractive parks. The first garden/rural cemetery in the United States was Mount Auburn Cemetery near Boston, Massachusetts, founded by the Massachusetts Horticultural Society in 1831. It was followed by Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia in 1836, and Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn in 1838. Prospect Hill was designed as a typical garden cemetery, with winding roads and paths, a high stone wall, and (in time) many trees and bushes. Its main entrance was on Lincoln Road. The cemetery's most prominent feature was an ellipse, bounded on the outer edge by a road and featuring two paths: one an inner, oval path paralleling the road and the other a straight, cruciform path. The ellipse was aligned with Lincoln Road, and most burials here faced east. The District of Columbia Preservation Review Board has described the layout of the cemetery as "characteristic and a relatively early example of the garden cemeteries created in the United States beginning in the 1830s". According to the Historic American Landscapes Survey, Prospect Hill Cemetery, along with Glenwood Cemetery (1854) and Mount Olivet Cemetery (1858), "changed the dynamics of cemeteries in the city" by setting a new standard for cemetery design and layout.