CEMETERIES

CEMETERIES. The term "cemetery" entered American usage in 1831 with the founding and design of the extramural, picturesque landscape of Mount Auburn Cemetery. A non-denominational rural cemetery, Mount Auburn was an urban institution four miles west of Boston under the auspices of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society (1829).

With the exception of New Haven's New Burying Ground (1796, later renamed the Grove Street Cemetery), existing burial grounds, graveyards, or churchyards, whether urban or rural, public, sectarian, or private, had been unsightly, chaotic places, purely for disposal of the dead and inconducive to new ideals of commemoration. Most burials were in earthen graves, although the elite began to construct chamber tombs for the stacking of coffins in the eighteenth century. Most municipalities also maintained "receiving tombs" for the temporary storage of bodies that could not be immediately buried. New Orleans

favored aboveground tomb structures due to the French influence and high water table.

Mount Auburn, separately incorporated in 1835, established the "rest-in-peace" principle with the first legal guarantee of perpetuity of burial property, although many notable families continued to move bodies around from older graves and tombs through the antebellum decades.

Mount Auburn immediately attracted national attention and emulation, striking a chord by epitomizing the era's "cult of the melancholy" that harmonized ideas of death and nature and served a new historical consciousness. Numerous civic leaders from other cities visited it as a major tourist attraction and returned home intent on founding such multifunctional institutions. Major examples include Baltimore's Green Mount (1838), Brooklyn's Green-Wood (1838), Pittsburgh's Allegheny (1844), Providence's Swan Point (1847), Louisville's Cave Hill (1848), Richmond's Hollywood (1848), St. Louis's Bellefontaine (1849), Charleston's Magnolia (1850), Chicago's Grace-land (1860), Hartford's Cedar Hill (1863), Buffalo's Forest Lawn (1864), Indianapolis's Crown Hill (1864), and Cleveland's Lake View (1869). Most began with over a hundred acres and later expanded.

Prussian landscape gardener Adolph Strauch's "landscape lawn plan" brought a type of zoning to Cincinnati's Spring Grove (1845), which from 1855 on, in the name of "scientific management" and the park-like aesthetics of the "beautiful," was acclaimed as the "American system." Cemetery design contributed to the rise of professional landscape architects and inspired the making of the nation's first public parks.

Modernization

Inspired by Strauch's reform, cemetery managers (or cemeterians) professionalized in 1887 through the Association of American Cemetery Superintendents, later renamed the American Cemetery Association and then the International Cemetery and Funeral Association. The monthly Modern Cemetery (1890), renamed Parkand Cemetery and Landscape Gardening in 1895, detailed the latest regulatory and technical developments, encouraged standardized taste and practices, and supplemented inter-changes at annual conventions with emphasis on cemeteries as efficiently run businesses. Modernization led to mass production of memorials or markers, far simpler than the creatively customized monuments of the Victorian Era.

Forest Lawn Cemetery (1906) in Glendale, California, set up the modern pattern of the lawn cemetery or memorial garden emulated nationwide. Dr. Hubert Eaton, calling himself "the Builder," redefined the philosophy of death and exerted a standardized control at Forest Lawn after 1916, extending it to over 1,200 acres on four sites. Innovations included inconspicuous marker plaques set horizontally in meticulously manicured lawns and community mausoleums, buildings with individual niches for caskets, no longer called coffins.

Cremation offered a new, controversial alternative for disposal of the dead at the turn of the twentieth century. Mount Auburn installed one of the nation's first crematories in 1900, oven "retorts" for "incineration" to reduce the corpse to ashes or "cremains." Some larger cemeteries followed suit, also providing "columbaria" or niches for storage of ashes in small urns or boxes. Still, acceptance of cremation grew slowly over the course of the century and was slightly more popular in the West.

National Cemeteries

The War Department issued general orders in the first year of the Civil War, making Union commanders responsible for the burial of their men in recorded locations, sometimes in sections of cemeteries like Spring Grove and Cave Hill purchased with state funds. President Lincoln signed an act on 17 July 1862 authorizing the establishment of national cemeteries. On 19 November 1863, Lincoln dedicated the National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, adjacent to an older rural cemetery, for the burial of Union soldiers who died on the war's bloodiest battlefield. In June of 1864, without ceremony, the Secretary of War designated the seized 200-acre estate of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Arlington, Virginia, overlooking Washington, D.C., across the Potomac. Former Confederates dedicated grounds for their dead, often in large areas of existing cemeteries. By 1870, about 300,000 of the Union dead had been reinterred in national cemeteries; some moved from battlefields and isolated graves near where they had fallen.

After World War I, legislation increased the number of soldiers and veterans eligible for interment in national cemeteries. Grounds were dedicated abroad following both World War I and World War II. In 1973, a law expanded eligibility for burial to all honorably discharged veterans and certain family members. To accommodate veterans and the dead of other wars, Arlington grew to 408 acres by 1897 and to 612 acres by 1981. By 1981, with the annual burial rate exceeding 60,000 and expected to peak at 105,000 in 2010, new national cemeteries were needed, such as that dedicated on 770 acres at Fort Custer near Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1984.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hancock, Ralph. The Forest Lawn Story. Los Angeles: Academy Publishers, 1955.

Jackson, Kenneth T., and Camilo José Vergara. Silent Cities: The Evolution of the American Cemetery. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1989.

Linden-Ward, Blanche. Silent City on a Hill: Landscapes of Memory and Boston's Mount Auburn Cemetery. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989.

Sloane, David Charles. The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

Blanche M. G.Linden

See alsoArlington National Cemetery ; Landscape Architecture .