Crown Hill was not Indianapolis's first major cemetery. Alexander Ralston included a cemetery site in his 1821 plan of Indianapolis at the south end of Kentucky Avenue, where it intersects South and West Streets. Prior to the establishment of Crown Hill Cemetery in 1863, the city's main cemetery was expanded in the 1830s to create the Greenlawn Cemetery on the city's southwest side. During the Civil War Greenlawn was quickly filling with burials of Union soldiers and Confederate prisoners of war and faced encroachment from west side industrial development. By the end of the 1870s it was closed to further interments due to lack of space.