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Book Reviews the Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American

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Book Reviews the Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American Book Reviews 171 ronmentalism of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administra- tions. Glass begins with the intriguing story of how the congres- sional committee headed by Albert M. Rains acted as a catalyst for the changes embodied in the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act. Glass skillfully pieces together how committee members laid the groundwork for the legislation and saw it through its infancy. He also shows how the committee brought together the first gen- eration of leaders for the modern preservation movement. With lib- eral access to their files-as well as seventeen interviews-Glass reveals how the historians, architects, and planners framed the “new” preservation, an approach that stresses the broad patterns of architectural significance over the “greatness” of isolated land- marks. Glass is the first to admit the shortcomings of his work. Time, money, and restricted access to vital private records limited his analysis in places. But the broad sweep of his effort is as solid as his contribution to the field. DOUGLASL STERNis an architectural historian in Louisville, Kentucky, where he heads a private marketing and public relations company. The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History. By Da- vid Charles Sloane. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Pp. xxiii, 293. Illustrations, tables, notes, biblio- graphic essay, index. $35.95.) In this meticulously researched and highly readable narrative, David Charles Sloane analyzes what Elias W. Leavenworth, foun- der of Oakwood Cemetery in Syracuse, New York, described in 1859 as “the last great necessity of our city” (p. xxii). A Dartmouth College historian whose family has designed and managed ceme- teries for four generations, Sloane is uniquely qualified for his task. Drawing upon a vast array of primary sources, Sloane de- scribes an “American mosaic of death” characterized by “a vast di- versity of. burial customs and burial places.” Nevertheless, this mosaic has a “discernable pattern” (p. 1). Until the early nine- teenth century most Americans were interred in isolated frontier graves, family farm graveyards, churchyards, or potters’ fields. But shortly after the Revolution the first of four overlapping American cemetery models began to emerge. Between the 1790s and the 1850s the dominant mode was the urban cemetery, typified by the New Haven Burying Ground. Nor- mally situated inside the municipal boundary, it usually was fam- ily- or government-owned, managed by a sexton, and featured a formal garden design with stone and marble markers and sculp- 172 Indiana Magazine of History ture. During the 1830s the rural cemetery, located outside the city limits and inspired by Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, emerged. Privately owned and frequently managed by a superintendent, it was picturesque but economically ineffi- cient, with serpentine roadways, wide pathways, and large marble and granite markers and monuments. While the rural cemetery prevailed into the 1870s, it was eclipsed soon thereafter by the sub- urban lawn-park, typified by Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincin- nati. This model was marked by a pastoral landscape featuring large lots, artistic use of water, and markers set close to the ground. Its entrepreneurial ownership stressed management by a professional superintendent well versed in cemetery design and maintenance. The lawn-park yielded in the 1920s to the memorial park. Modeled on Forest Lawn in Glendale, California, the memo- rial park retained the pastoral and entrepreneurial character of the lawn-park, but it rejected three-dimensional markers in favor of ground level markers and central sculptures. Management also aggressively promoted pre-need lot sales. Reinforcing Sloane’s typology is his close attention to the con- ceptual context, including changing religious and social attitudes about death, developments in landscape architecture, advances in disease theory, the rise of the funeral industry and cremation, and other forces that influenced the American way of death. This otherwise excellent volume has the footnotes at the rear rather than at the bottom of the page where they belong, and on page 105 the word “Perspective” is used where “Prospective” is meant. Despite these quibbles Sloane has produced an outstanding contribution to the scholarship of the American urban landscape. CARLE. KRAMERis executive director of the Clark County Planning Commission, Jeffersonville, Indiana, and president of Kentuckiana Historical Services. He is also co-editor of Louisville’s Olmstedian Legacy: An Interpretative Analysis and Docu- mentary Inventory (1988). .
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