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Overview
In modern society, we have professionalized our care for the dying and deceased in hospitals and hospices, churches and funeral homes, cemeteries and mausoleums to aid dazed and disoriented mourners. But these formal institutions can be alienating and cold, leaving people craving a more humane mourning and burial process. The burial treatment itself has come to be seen as wasteful and harmful—marked by chemicals, plush caskets, and manicured greens. Today’s bereaved are therefore increasingly turning away from the old ways of death and searching for a more personalized, environmentally responsible, and ethical means of grief.
Is the Cemetery Dead? gets to the heart of the tragedy of death, chronicling how Americans are inventing new or adapting old traditions, burial places, and memorials. In illustrative prose, David Charles Sloane shows how people are taking control of their grief by bringing their relatives home to die, interring them in natural burial grounds, mourning them online, or memorializing them streetside with a shrine, ghost bike, or RIP mural. Today’s mourners are increasingly breaking free of conventions to better embrace the person they want to remember. As Sloane shows, these changes threaten the future of the cemetery, causing cemeteries to seek to become more responsive institutions.
A trained historian, Sloane is also descendent from multiple generations of cemetery managers and he grew up in Syracuse’s Oakwood Cemetery. Enriched by these experiences, as well as his personal struggles with overwhelming grief, Sloane presents a remarkable and accessible tour of our new American way of death.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226539584 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 284 |
| Sales rank: | 581,349 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Natural Sanctuary
Have you ever walked far inside a large nineteenth-century American cemetery? First, you hear the quiet; then, you are enveloped by nature. One day, walking in Allegheny Cemetery in Pittsburgh, I stumbled upon two small deer. I took photographs as they sat in the grass. They stayed for a few minutes, then got up and sauntered away, perfectly comfortable in this sanctuary for the dead. The wind breezed across the hilltop and the leaves fluttered as they loped away. It was a perfect moment of contemplation, repose, and rest.
The founders of the cemetery where I grew up would have been happy that, as I sat on that hilltop, I felt separated from the rest of Pittsburgh, and I focused on the beauty of the trees, the softness of the wind, and the stillness of the scene. If the founders could have spoken to me as I arrived at the cemetery, they would have advised: "commune with nature in her loveliest forms, and in these secluded retreats ... forget for an hour the toils and cares of life." They wanted to create a space where nature reminded visitors of the cycle of life and death. By engaging visitors in a bucolic setting, they hoped they could move them spiritually, encourage them to leave behind their commercial concerns, and focus on the eternal values.
Nineteenth-century urban leaders were ambitious in their moral and civic aspirations. They wanted their cities to grow, prosper, become more beautiful, and rival any other city. These aspirations drove them to establish historical societies, libraries, and schools. They printed enormous tomes celebrating their cities' histories, and ended them with biographical appendices of contemporary leaders like themselves. Their belief that nature was imbued with morality propelled them to plant botanical gardens, pleasure parks, and elaborate private gardens. They promoted campaigns to plant urban trees not only to beautify the streets, but also to reconnect city residents' relationship to nature's lessons. The cemetery was a civic and spiritual project, a part of the improvement campaign to clean up, beautify, uplift, and order the emerging cities.
Moreover, there was a pressing need for new cemeteries. Older burial places not only were inconveniently located in their rapidly expanding downtowns, but they also were laid out according to the precepts of a passing cultural age. The graveyards occupied land that was increasing in value even as their appearances seemed ill-fitting. American burial grounds and churchyards were not quite empty of any nature, nor were they as reliant on mass burial chambers as the European burial grounds. The American burial grounds typically consisted of unrelieved lines of gravestones cluttered together in tiny parcels that were adorned only by a few flowers and erratically planted trees and shrubs.
In response, two variations of reform cemeteries emerged during the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century: grid cemeteries and rural cemeteries. Most city burial places were in the grid style. These cemeteries were incrementally larger than those they replaced, more natural yet still very orderly, and located along the edge of the built-up area of the city. At the same time, like earlier burial grounds, they were usually still owned by the city or the church, rather than by lot holders or nonprofit organizations. And they sold family lots, but usually in small numbers.
Architectural historian Dell Upton has shown that grid cemeteries adopted a kind of "spatial order" that maintained similar social hierarchies among the dead as among the living. They also, he notes, sustained the importance of the individual, as they "sought to alleviate some of the terrors of burial inside the city and to soften the abode of death with plantings and other amenities" even within a design that imitated the city's grid. Thus, especially in small city burial places, the graves are located along "streets" arrayed much like those outside the cemetery gates.
In 1796, for example, fears of urban contagions and of new farm owners not maintaining the previous family's burial grounds pushed New Haven, Connecticut, residents to create a six-acre nonprofit, nondenominational cemetery on the outskirts of town. The new cemetery emulated the town's street plan with thirteen avenues crossed by three streets. The organizers softened the grid by planting Lombardy poplar trees along the avenues and scattered a few of the newly popular weeping willows throughout the sections. Individual and family lot holders were allowed to add smaller plantings to their private burial space, bringing nature that much farther into the human grid. Organized and maintained by the families themselves through a new nonprofit institution, the graves promised to be more permanent than the farm and city burial grounds they replaced.
New Haven is an amazingly early example of the English and European revolution in burial ground location and design. The cemetery was founded eight years before the iconic Père Lachaise in Paris and thirty years before the influential work of English author and landscape designer John Claudius Loudon. Loudon argued that the geometric, analytical new grid cemeteries would reinforce order, in contrast to the "confused, useless or dangerous" organization of the jumbled city graveyards. In a well-organized grid cemetery, each grave would have a precise location within a carefully orchestrated space, producing a rationality that would ensure that decomposing bodies did not function as a source of miasmatic vapors contributing to the spread of contagious diseases.
Many other cities throughout the United States, Canada, and other parts of the Western world eventually established similar grid cemeteries. Syracuse, for instance, established Rose Hill Cemetery for much the same reasons and with a similar design. In Montreal, Protestants opened a new cemetery well north of the settled parts of the city in 1799, and doubled its size in 1815. Such cemeteries would continue to be established throughout the century as towns and cities coped with growing populations, an increasing number of dead, and the public's uneasiness as epidemics continued to take horrible tolls.
Splendid Isolation
Despite the prevalence of grid cemeteries, they were not nearly as noteworthy as the second variation of their time, the "rural" cemetery. When Père Lachaise opened in 1804, some parts of the cemetery mimicked traditional formal gardens, while others followed the more organic styles favored by English country estate planners. This hybrid landscape joined city and country, order and nature into a single landscape. By mid-century, rural cemeteries had largely abandoned the formal aspects, and in turn had become a media sensation, overshadowing cemeteries that continued older traditions or adopted only limited reforms. Partially, they were more notable because their design was so different from previous burial grounds, but they also were well promoted through events, brochures, and public relations materials. As a result, the experimental cemetery was written about in all the right journals, was visited by celebrities, and attracted the wealthiest families in the largest cities.
The rural cemeteries rejected standard urban form as the basis of their design. In place of gridded streets, they included curvy roads and pathways. Instead of long vistas, one's vision was mysteriously blocked by a bend in the street, the obstacle of a tree, or a change in elevation. Nature dominated. In 1860, A. D. Gridley argued that a cemetery should be planted with a wealth of trees, flowering shrubs, climbing vines, and flowers. The image evokes a certain wildness we associate with Thoreau and others of the period. In certain places — much like Olmsted and Vaux's Ramble in Central Park — one could imagine a visitor conjuring up Walden Pond. The rural cemeteries were carefully designed to ease visitors' accessibility with roads and paths, but retained the uncertainties of a natural place.
Often situated on hills and incorporating varied topography, these cemeteries sought to meld the dead with their trees, monuments, and buildings. Visitors were educated not only about tree specimens and types of flowers, but also about the profound moral reality of natural cycles. The transition from life to death was softened as the visible symbols of death were integrated with elements of natural beauty, creating the composed stillness that I experienced in Pittsburgh.
Yet I was startled when I first came upon the deer in Pittsburgh, because I had not seen them — nor had they seen me — from afar. I was suddenly stripped of the distance most of us have from large wild animals. And as a result I was momentarily transported to less settled, wilder times. We were reduced to a natural relationship rather than shielded from one another.
But why did the "rural" design arise at all? While health and economic issues certainly played a role in the relocation of both grid and rural cemeteries, I believe the primary reasons for the cultural popularity of the rural cemeteries were the influence of Romanticism on garden design and the founders' ambitions for their cities. The Romantics believed that nature taught morality, and that its power grew, the deeper one insinuated oneself into a natural environment. Further, these new institutions were not just burial places, but part of an emerging urban social and cultural infrastructure. In 1859, civic leader, retired lawyer, former Congressman, amateur horticulturist, and local historian Elias W. Leavenworth celebrated the establishment of Syracuse's Oakwood Cemetery by arguing that "an ample, permanent and attractive resting place for our dead, seems to be the last great necessity of our city." The event was significant enough that over one-third of the city's 15,000 residents spent a beautiful afternoon listening to speakers and poets who gathered in Oakwood's Dedication Valley after a two-hour-long parade of fire companies, politicians, and countless fraternal groups. They imagined Oakwood as one more signal of their maturity as a city.
The Oakwood I grew up in 100 years later had a very different meaning for my family and me. By that time, society's relationship to nature, the way we designed landscapes, and especially our attitudes toward the dead had shifted dramatically. So, my dad, who was born in 1921 inside the superintendent's house at Belmont Park Cemetery in Youngstown, Ohio, and I, born thirty years later in a hospital down the street, had very similar experiences of the cemetery. We moved to Syracuse when I was six weeks old, into a house on the western side of the cemetery, in front of an imposing gate, but so much a part of the cemetery that I viewed it as my backyard.
For my dad and me, the cemetery was a cultural place filled with mourners, birders, lovers, and walkers looking at amazing art and statuary; a natural place, with a remarkable array of birds and myriad animals living amid the thousands of flowers, trees, and bushes. Each cemetery was also a personal space, where an adolescent Jack played with his three sisters and forty years later I set up forts with my toy soldiers or played tag with my siblings. While the personal experience was unusual (to say the least), we were in sync with the intentions of the landscape design: For us, the cemetery was a place of culture and nature that welcomed a diverse group of users.
Designing Oakwood
Between the founding of Mount Auburn Cemetery in 1831 and the dedication of Oakwood in 1859, dozens of landscaped rural cemeteries opened all over the country. Years before the first great urban park, Central Park in New York City, was completed, a pioneering group of cemetery designers developed the basis for the modern profession of landscape architecture. One of them, Howard Daniels, lost out to Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in the competition to design Central Park, yet he was a success from his design of Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati in 1845 until his death in 1863. Active in New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, he was laid to rest in Green Lawn in Columbus, Ohio, another of his over a dozen cemetery plans — including Oakwood in Syracuse.
Daniels's original plan for Oakwood has not survived, but we can learn a great deal from early maps and the landscape itself. As H. P. Smith wrote in his 1871 guidebook, Oakwood was "a mile and a half from the business center." For the first forty years, after passing along a treelined entryway and past a simple, Gothic-styled entrance building, a visitor would come to a similar iron gate on the western edge of the cemetery. In 1902, a more elaborate stone entrance bridge was constructed (see the frontispiece). This shielded the railroad tracks that ran above grade here.
As Smith noted, "[g]enerally speaking, the whole cemetery faces the west, rising with a gradual ascent to the eastern boundary on the hill-top, which completely overlooks the valley, City and lake." Immediately after the gate, the main road split, with Pine Ridge Road veering left, rising northward slowly into a broad valley with burial sites on the surrounding hills. Here, in Dedication Valley, was where those thousands of folks had gathered to celebrate the cemetery's opening. A second avenue, Midland Avenue, snakes out eastward from the gate along the bottom of a long valley out of which roads weaved up the hill to the northeast. In the flat portion near the gate, the association built the cemetery's office (1902) and chapel (1879), as well as an elaborate greenhouse (circa 1902).
Under Daniels's direction, "fifty or sixty men" worked for months shifting dirt, shaping hills, laying out roads, and planting a profusion of trees and bushes on a carefully constructed topography. Imagine what a visitor from the bustling, chaotic boomtown of Syracuse would have found at Oakwood. Walking into Dedication Valley, they would have been suddenly cut off from their urban world, having entered the largest garden any of them had ever seen. The winding of the narrow streets created constantly shifting views of the surroundings. Lawns were covered with a wide range of shade trees and an array of bushes clustered to dictate vistas and views. Visitors were especially attracted by the natural elements that seemed to magically appear as they rode or walked through the grounds.
H. P. Smith reported that the original site was "almost an unbroken oak forest, interspersed with a few pine, ash, maple, and many hickory trees, and filled with underbrush, logs and stumps." When I was young, walking through the old sections of the cemetery in the fall, I was almost overwhelmed by the yellows, oranges, and reds of oak and maple leaves. My father's workers raked them into great piles by the streets, creating a rainbow of rusty colors. Sometimes, they "accidentally" caught on fire so the cemetery did not have to dispose of them.
Seeing the landscape today must be a quite different experience. The lots are filled with mismatched monuments whose gray tones and tall spires compete with the natural setting. Angels came to stand guard atop their pedestals, broken columns and stone tree stumps signified shortened lives, and garlands of ivy and laurel were carved into marble and granite to mimic the plants covering nearby graves. The most dramatic monument stood on the hillside overlooking Dedication Valley. Drawing upon the era's fascination with Egypt, Cornelius Longstreet used money he made providing goods to Union soldiers during the Civil War to erect a pyramid where he provided crypts for his family and others, including Comfort Tyler, one of the founders of Syracuse.
In the nineteenth century, the ratio would have favored the trees and shrubs. Even as the mausoleums and monuments appeared on one side of Midland, the founders retained a large wooded section on the other. So, culture dominated on the north, while on the south, nature creates an imposing, contrasting picturesque wildness of dense foliage. As children, my brothers and I spent hours walking through the "woods," feeling very far from the urban civilization that started just a few steps beyond the gate.
When Oakwood was founded, before almost any bodies were embalmed, no pesticides or other chemicals were used to maintain the plantings, and before lawn mowers, trimmers, backhoes, and other power machinery were present, the cemetery was an environmentally "natural" place. Most cemeteries stood out as spaces with a wide range of native and exotic trees, shrubs, and flowers. They embodied the idea, expressed by American tastemaker Andrew Jackson Downing and others, that the presence of nature was an important part of civilized urban life. They also embodied the social and class inequities we shall discuss later, but from an environmental perspective, they were outstanding examples of an integration of nature and culture.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Is the Cemetery Dead?"
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Table of Contents
Introduction: DecisionsPart 1: Nature
Chapter 1. Natural Sanctuary
Chapter 2. Ecological Simplicity
Chapter 3. Co-Opting Nature
Part 2: Mourning
Chapter 4. Consolation
Chapter 5. Mourning in Public
Chapter 6. Reintroducing the Cemetery
Part 3: Memorials
Chapter 7. A Memory Palace
Chapter 8. Commemoration Everywhere
Chapter 9. A Painter’s Easel
Epilogue: The Future of Death
Selected Readings
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index