Howard Cemetery (Limestone Hill) was situated on the Ridge road in West Seneca just beyond the city line. It had frontage of 710 feet on the Ridge Road and a depth of 383 feet extending back to South Park. The cemetery was right in the center of the section where real estate values were booming after the Lackawanna Steel Company began construction of its plant.[Buffalo News Jan 5, 1903]

The cemetery contained both paid plots and pauper graves.

Buffalo News 1902 articles regarding the City's plan to sell the cemetery the following things were noted about Howard Cemetery:

The first register in the book of records is Dec. 22d, 1858. For long periods of time recording any data was regarded as superfluous.

The cemetery originaly consisted of twenty acres (another article says 13). All but 6 1/2 acres had been deeded to the park department in 1892, so the City could only sell 6 1/2 acres. In August 1902, the City planned to sell the part of Howard Cemetery called "Potter's Field" to former Alderman F.W. Knickenberg for $1800 an acre; however, John J. Griffin, a real estate man, then offered $28,000 for the parcel and was the successful bidder in Jan 1903.

However, the sale did not go through and the library was built on the site. The present library parking lot covers what was once Howard cemetery.

excerpt from "The History of Lackawanna" by the Lackawanna Bicentennial Commission [no place/date of publication], on page 23, in the section about Lackawanna Public Library:

Despite its then desolate and deplorable condition, the site most favored for a building was occupied by Howard's Cemetery, since 1858 a burial ground for paupers and the unknown dead of Buffalo. Centrally located on Ridge Road, and extending north to South Park, the site was ideal but it also covered the remains of 3733 unfortunates, many of
them infants. After prolonged discussion, Buffalo agreed to legislation transferring the land to Lackawanna but stipulating the removal, cremation and the reburial of the remains in a common vault on the site. During 1918, due to the flu epidemic, 59 bodies were added, with the last dreary procession trudging from the cemetery on October 25, 1919. The work of exhuming the remains, collecting the ashes and providing a final resting place took more than a year, but it transformed a wasteland which had long blemished the City's principal street.