Crimmins Introduction to Oakland Cemetery Guide

Introduction timothy j. crimmins in this guide to Oakland Cemetery, Ren and Helen Davis bring to life Atlanta’s first landscape of remembrance, pointing out that Oakland Cemetery is a miniature version of the city of which it is a part. The novelist William Kennedy captured the relationship between the city of the living and the city of the dead in his 1983 novel Ironweed with his keen observation that “the dead, even more than the living, settled down in neighborhoods.” As Kennedy’s pro- tagonist in the novel, Francis Phelan, travels through a cemetery, he observes its sprawling middle-class neighborhoods, where there were “fields of monuments and cenotaphs of kindred design and striking size, all guarding the privileged dead.” As he moves farther on, there appear “acres of truly prestigious death: illustrious men and women, captains of life without their diamonds, furs, carriages, and limousines, but buried in pomp and glory, vaulted in great tombs built like heavenly safe deposit boxes, or parts of the Acropolis.” Last came the working classes—“the flowing masses, row upon row of them under simple headstones and simpler crosses.”1 Oakland Cemetery likewise has its neighborhoods that visibly differentiate prosperity in death as in life, with its “fields of monuments,” “great tombs,” and “row upon row of simple headstones.” By the 1880s, visitors could come to Oakland to see Atlanta in miniature. Those buried there came from the great mansions along Peachtree Street and Capitol Avenue, the cottages along Collins Street, and the shotgun houses in Mechanicsville. There is also the great grassy expanse of Potters’ Field, where transients, those without means who lived in boardinghouses and shacks, are buried head by foot under a lawn of grass without commemorative markings. They are as invisible in death as in life. But Oakland Cemetery has significant differences from St. Agnes Cemetery, the real-life location in the Kennedy novel, just as the latter’s city, Albany, New York, differs from Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta’s Oakland Cemetery began separating slave from free in the 1850s and continued segregating black from white after the Civil War. St. Agnes was an exclusively Catholic cemetery in a city with a large Catholic population whose working-class and, later, lace-curtain neighborhoods were built by waves of Irish, Italian, and Polish immigrants. Oakland’s Catholics are dispersed among their Protestant neighbors. Religious separation in Oakland occurs with the designated Jewish burial area, established when Hebrew congregations purchased areas of the xiii cemetery where they could bury their dead contiguously, according to their laws and customs. St. Agnes Cemetery describes itself as “consecrated in 1867 in the fashion of a rural cemetery.”2 Oakland Cemetery was established seventeen years earlier, but not in the fashion of a rural cemetery. Even though trendsetting cities like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia had created what came to be known as “rural cemeteries” as early as 1831, the Atlanta City Council, in establish- ing what came to be known as Oakland Cemetery, just created a municipal burying ground, on land situated to the east of the town’s center and beyond its built-up areas. In nineteenth-century New York, Boston, and Atlanta, the provision of burial places was another new municipal service that local govern- ments were forced to provide as a result of their burgeoning populations. The dead became too numerous to be buried in the churchyards that had served colonial-era towns. Boston, whose population topped 70,000 in 1830, created a model for addressing the burial needs of its citizens. The city government did not establish a city cemetery; rather, it delegated the task to the not-for-profit sec- tor. Like most large urban centers, Boston had its share of voluntary asso- ciations dedicated to promoting the common good, one of which was the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. The society decided to combine its inter- est in flora with the city’s need to bury the dead, so it created a “garden cemetery,” a place where the dead would be surrounded with trees, shrubs, and flowers. The place envisioned by society members was to be not just a burial ground visited by the families of the dead, but also a destination for the living of Boston, a place where its residents could come to see a landscaped garden. In 1831, the society purchased seventy-two acres of land across the Charles River four miles west of Boston Common. The key financial question facing the society was how to cover its initial expense of $6,000 and the additional expenses of landscaping the grounds, fencing the property, and constructing an entrance gate and administrative building. The acquisition cost was quickly recouped by the sale of the first 100 lots at $60 each, while additional sales supported land development costs and land purchases that expanded the cemetery to 112 acres by 1850.3 In his 1831 address at the dedication of the cemetery, named Mount Auburn, Joseph Story explained that the crowded conditions in Boston, which is surrounded by a harbor and tidal waters, necessitated the location of the cemetery in the countryside, well beyond the city limits. Because of this, he called Mount Auburn a “rural” cemetery, a descriptive that was applied to garden cemeteries in other cities. The Massachusetts Horticultural Society hired Alexander xiv Introduction The map of Mount Auburn Cemetery shows the contours of its carriageways and lanes. Its layout was the model for urban parks and early suburbs in the expanding cities of nineteenth-century America. From James Smillie, Mount Auburn Illustrated (New York: R. Martin, 1847). Wadworth, a civil engineer, to lay out the grounds. Wadworth did this with intersecting, curved, and winding avenues that used the land economically and also produced “the picturesque effect of landscape gardening.” Roads made twenty-feet wide for carriages and six-feet wide for foot traffic were lined with ornamental shrubs and flowers. Family lots of three hundred square feet that were sold to the initial purchasers were not expected to lie fallow for long, as Story noted: “It is confidently expected that many of the proprietors will, without delay, proceed to erect upon their lots such monuments and appropriate structures, as will give to the place a part of the solemnity and beauty, which it is destined ultimately to acquire.”4 Story went on to detail the advantages of such a location: There are around us all the varied features of her beauty and grandeur— the forest-crowned height; the abrupt acclivity; the sheltered valley; the deep glen; the grassy glade; and the silent grove. Here are the lofty oak, the beech, that ‘wreathes its old fantastic roots so high,’ the rustling pine, and the drooping willow. Here is the thick shrubbery to protect and conceal the new-made grave; and there is the wild-flower creeping along the narrow path, and planting its seeds in the upturned earth.5 Introduction xv The forested hills overlooking the Charles River served as resting places for deceased Bostonians and as a rural refuge for the living. From James Smillie, Mount Auburn Illustrated (New York: R. Martin, 1847). Story also noted the connection between the cemetery and the city: from the heights of Mount Auburn, visitors could see below them the winding Charles with its rippling current. In the distance, the City,—at once the object of our admiration and our love,—rears its proud eminences, its glittering spires, its lofty towers, its graceful mansions, its curling smoke, its crowded haunts of business and pleasure, which speak to the eye, and yet leave a noiseless loneliness on the ear.6 By 1840, Mount Auburn had developed a parklike setting, with its specimen trees and shrubs labeled with their Latin names, allowing it to function as the horticultural society’s arboretum as well as a cemetery. But it was also a place of art because of the memorials that had been commissioned by the first families of Boston. Three years after the Boston merchant and scientist Amos Binney died in 1847, the New York Daily Tribune reported: A fine piece of monumental sculpture . has just arrived. It was executed in Rome, for the tomb of Dr. Amos Binney of Boston, and will be placed in Mount Auburn Cemetery. Those who have seen the monument in Italy speak in very high terms of its merit as a work of art.7 Mount Auburn began as a marriage between the need for burial places beyond the city limits and the desire for a horticultural garden. Its curvilinear xvi Introduction streets with wide carriageways attracted the city’s increasing numbers of middle and upper classes, who journeyed there for pleasure rides and to show off to their visitors. They also came to see the works of art in the sculptures and mausoleums erected as memorials to the city’s wealthy elite, as well as the more modest statues and tombstones “guarding the privileged dead.” Looking back eighteen years after the establishment of Mount Auburn, the architect and planner Andrew Jackson Downing noted that the first American cemetery was an “idea that took the public mind by storm”: “Travelers made pilgrimages to the Athens of New England, solely to see the realization of a resting-place for the dead, at once sacred from profanation, dear to the memory, and captivat- ing to the imagination.”8 As Boston’s population expanded across the Charles River toward Cambridge, horse-drawn trolley lines were established to con- nect Harvard Square with Mount Auburn and the elite suburban neighborhoods that were developing along the route.

Load more