CHAPTER FIVE

THE DEVELOPMENT OF RURAL, PARK-LIKE CEMETERIES

I. BACKGROUND

    The first white settlers coming into the Boonslick region soon produced the first deaths, but it was about forty years before the first professionally platted cemetery was established in the Boonslick.¹ Until then, burials were usually in family or community burial plots or adjacent to a church in a graveyard.

    Conscious planning of cemeteries that takes into account more than mere disposal of the deceased is a relatively new concept in Western thought. It did not spring into existence, but instead is the result of the cultural movement of Romanticism that came to a zenith in the establishment of this particular institution. To understand this phenomenon fully, the roots of this type of Romantic sentiment are as important as the physical layout of the grounds, because the purpose of a Romantic, park-like cemetery was to appeal to the heart even more than the eye and intellect.

    Cemeteries are ancient in concept, but although their basic function (the burial of the dead) obviously has not changed in thousands of years, the physical as well as intellectual aspects of the cemetery have undergone dramatic revisions through the centuries. From large pyramids of Egyptian pharaohs to the burial of kings under the main altar of Medieval cathedrals, these large tombs proclaimed the importance and significance of the deceased as part of their iconography.² This mattered more than the actual storage area for the body. Commoners were certainly buried, but under much less grand conditions and in tombs that might or might not be marked. By the Baroque era, space was at such a premium in Europe that burials were stacked in crowded graveyards where the actual burial plot was sold to a family for use for a certain span of years. At the end of the time the bones were disinterred and thrown together in a charnel house. The burial plot was then reused.³ If space was at a real premium, the charnel house might be dispensed with and the exhumed remains burned. A typical space of time was fifty years, a half century, during which time the people who actually remembered the deceased would have also died. William Shakespeare's tomb has the most famous quotation about this common situation when he admonishes men to "touch not my bones."⁴

II. ROMANTICISM
    By the end of the eighteenth century, the situation in Europe was becoming desperate in terms of crowding in the cemeteries. Thomas Miller, writing in Picturesque Sketches of London, Past and Present, said that he never could look at the small church graveyards of England without disgust. Feeling that the dead were sadly misplaced, he began to think in Romantic terms of the dead being buried in plots where trees could make a "soothing murmur" over the graves and where all around would be "gentle images of rest."⁵ Miller continued, "The price of corn, the state of the money-market, or the rising and falling of the funds are matters which ought to be discussed far away from those we followed and wept over and consigned to their silent chambers, there to sleep till the last trumpet sounds."⁶

    Miller then proposed the concept of a cemetery where people could walk through a land littered with tokens of affection and people could show that their love for the deceased existed beyond the grave. Miller's proposal thus placed equal emphasis on the mourned and the mourner. With proper Romantic attitude, he mixed three of the principal concepts of Romanticism, the beautiful, the picturesque and the sublime, with the park-like atmosphere of an English country garden.

    This new equal emphasis upon the mourned and the mourner produced a new ritual, mourning. By means of this ritual, families (the role was assigned to the women of the family) showed their distress and love of the deceased while visually expressing their solidarity as a unit. Mourning was only for family members, but included remote relatives. For example, the second wife was expected to wear black when relatives of the first wife died. Dear friends who died were not outwardly mourned since they were not genetically part of the family unit. Weeping, outbursts of distress, meditations on Death, and long epitaphs on gravestones became fashionable. Hidden sexual references couched in sentiment appeared and remained stylish throughout the nineteenth century as mourning became a cloak for many kinds of expression which were not considered seemly otherwise. A typical epitaph read:

"In the dismal night-air dressed,
I will creep into her breast,
Flush her cheek and blanche her skin.
And feed on the vital within.

Lover, do not trust her eyes,
When they sparkle most, she dies.
Mother, do not trust her breath,
Comfort she will breathe in death;

Father, do not strive to save her,
She is mine and I must have her,
The coffin must be her bridal bed,
The winding sheet must wrap her head;

The whispering winds must o'er her sigh,
For soon in the grave the maid must lie,
The worm it will riot on heavenly diet,
When death has deflowered her eyes." ⁷

    Romanticism and its attendant ritual of mourning was in full flower in Europe before the first stirrings reached the United States. As people on the Eastern coast and especially in New England sought to appear "civilized and cultured," the idea of the Grand Tour of Europe became popular as explained by Hawthorne or humorously chided by Mark Twain. The resultant search for cultural equivalency for the United States caused a Romantic version of Nature in general to find acceptance. Nature became mixed with the Noble Savage, American ideas about Manifest Destiny and the landscape. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a famous article called "Nature" which verbally expressed the visual understanding of the relationship between humans and the world around them.⁸ Suddenly, European ideas and mores were fashionable as Americans sought their own version of Romanticism. The appropriate combination of all these trends became the rural park-like cemetery.

    Beginning in approximately 1830, the ideas of the beautiful, the picturesque, and the sublime as romantically expressed by Thomas Miller flowered in England into cemeteries with carefully landscaped grounds, stately entrances, and a concern for health. Pierre LaChaise in France in the late eighteenth century had led the way in the concept of an individual being worthy of a stately monument, no matter what the financial or social status, so that "nouveaux riche" counted as much as nobility.⁹ This rise of individualism combined well with the ideas of Thomas Miller in England, where a stable government produced the right conditions for putting them into practice. In Kirkenhead, a suburb of Liverpool, Joseph Paxton designed a city park in 1814 for the municipal government. This park consisted of two completely independent networks--an irregular one of narrow pedestrian paths and also a roadway for carriages that ran around the outer edge of the park.¹⁰ This concept of separate paths allowed pedestrians to stroll at leisure, safe from horses. (When applied to a cemetery, it meant mothers who bore the family responsibility for mourning could tend the family graves without fear of an accident to the living children.) Discussion in England about beautiful parks had always been fashionable, but as the Romantic Era prospered and matured, discussions concerning landscape gardening dominated the popular sentiment as well as the literature. Arguments arose over what was considered appropriate to use in landscaping and people used the word Nature freely in their conversations and writings, dignified by a capital letter. Nature became a goddess whose unpredictability was desired above the ordered route of eighteenth century Classicism.¹¹

    There was also a practical reason for businessmen to promote this new type of cemetery. Firstly, there was money in the selling of the lots. Secondly, the investments were protected by the orderly and constant stream of visitors which helped stop vandalism. Thirdly, the stench of burning the remains of older burials in crowded downtown graveyards was abolished which made the business districts much more pleasant^.12

III. THE AMERICAN ROMANTIC RURAL, PARK-LIKE CEMETERY
    Andrew Jackson Downing was the first American to use the term "the beautiful" and "the picturesque" as applied to suburbia. Americans, since their Colonial era, had provided for open commons in towns and villages. These sometimes contained burials, but the concept of a park was not widespread. People saw no necessity for such amenities when an entire continent waited to be conquered.¹³

    William Penn in his plan for Philadelphia and L'Enfant in his design for Washington, D.C., made parks an integral part of their city plans. Wealthy citizens might have formal gardens such as those found since the eighteenth century at the Governor's Mansion at Williamsburg, Virginia. Orderly and geometrically tidy, these gardens were private. Downing wrote a book on landscape gardening for the masses, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America with a View to the Improvement of Country Residences.¹⁴ In spite of its long title, the volume was soon found in homes across the country. Published in 1841, the book was well within the financial and social reach of the citizens of the Boonslick as the generation of the original settlers gave way to a generation with more affluence and desire for the amenities associated with civilization. Downing's major concern was for the reader to see the Beautiful in Nature and Art.¹⁵

    Downing's ideas were influential. Among those who admired him was Frederick Law Olmstead, who later designed Central Park in New York. Olmstead was the employer of George Kessler, who designed the present scheme of Walnut Grove in Boonville in Cooper County in 1902, the greatest of the Boonslick cemeteries. Olmstead dedicated his book, Walks and Talks, to Andrew Jackson Downing whose works and beliefs he followed as much as possible.¹⁶ Thus, the works of Downing came to the Boonslick through these reinterpretations. Downing first advocated public parks in 1848. As the frontier receded ever farther westward, the need for public spaces became apparent. In 1848, Kansas City was in competition with Boonville and Glasgow as the principal outfitter for western trade. A lot in Glasgow could be traded evenly for a lot in St. Louis, although there is no comparison in value now.¹⁷ The Boonslick was full of immigrants intent upon proceeding further west or settling in the business communities beside the bustling Missouri River, alive with steamboat traffic.¹⁸ However, from Downing's vantage point back in the East, open space was becoming a prized possession. Downing used the concept of rural, park-like cemeteries, as brought back to the East Coast by people returning from the European Grand Tour, as an example of what public spaces should contain and how they should be landscaped.

    The first rural, park-like cemetery in the United States was Mount Auburn in Boston. Downing said it was "a charming natural site, finely varied in surface, containing about 80 acres of land and admirably clothed by groups and masses of native forest trees...tastefully laid out, monuments built, and the whole highly embellished."¹⁹ Mount Auburn was established in 1831 and was quickly followed by Greenwood Cemetery in New York, Spring Grove in Cincinnati, and Laurel Hill in Philadelphia. Based upon the English philosophy of Thomas Miller and inspired by Downing's landscape concepts, these cemeteries became prototypes for other cities before the Civil War. Whether actual open space was needed for the citizens was not taken into account as cities and towns ever father away from the Atlantic strove to be in fashion with a rural, park-like cemetery in their community. Along with the rural atmosphere, excellent taste was supposedly displayed in the choice of gravestones and especially in the design of the front gates. The handbook about Greenwood Cemetery in New York proclaims:

"That it belongs to the Gothic style, all will see.
That it is a pure and noble specimen of the order will
be evident to those who have made architecture a
study. Tastes differ and will always differ. To my
mind, the style here adopted, is the style of the
building best adapted to the place. Its associations,
as suggested by this grand and solemn portal, seem to
me every-way congenial with the character and uses of
the ground. In its origin the Gothic is not only
religious but Christian. Its whole history has
entwined it with ideas of reverence and worship,--with
all that faith can impart of hope, and consolation,
and strength, amid the bereavements of life, and the
certainty of dissolution."²⁰

    Even if space was not physically needed for recreation, these cemeteries became places of recreation for the city's citizens. About 60,000 people per year drove through Greenwood Cemetery in New York City.²¹ The ensuing traffic jams, shrieking horses, and screaming children soon dispelled the Romantic notion of quiet, melancholy, and philosophical contemplation. Most cemetery associations were quickly forced to adopt rules and print handbooks to help people thread their way through the grounds.²² These books served as tour guides while providing heavy moralizing aimed at the visitor who would read the passage aloud in front of the stone described. The 1867 book about Greenwood Cemetery in New York is typical of the period with careful attention to transportation routes. One could arrive at the cemetery either by ferry or by car. Carriages were available to be rented at the outer gates to Greenwood. Tourists were warned that the stories told by these carriage drivers were not always authentic. Many of the cemeteries reported terrible problems on Sunday, when entire families would pay perfunctory respects after church at the graves of relatives, then break out the picnic basket and spend the rest of the afternoon eating.²³

IV. HEALTH CONSIDERATIONS
    The benefits of these rural, park cemeteries in terms of health also deserve mention. The early nineteenth century medical community did not understand the concept of germs in the spreading of disease, but people did realize that cemeteries away from congested areas had a beneficial effect. Some began to suspect that diseases must be contagious and that contact with corpses should be avoided. Pressure was applied to city officials to have all burial grounds removed outside the city limits.²⁴

    Cholera was the most feared disease at the time the rural, park-like cemeteries were established in the United States. An individual could be well in the morning and dead by evening. In Walnut Grove cemetery in Boonville, an elaborate monument to Kate Tracy was erected by her sorority sisters when Kate died suddenly from cholera while on a visit to St. Louis in 1854 (Illustration 39). The marble statue depicts Kate being consoled by Wisdom, who is supposedly garbed as a Grecian maiden.²⁵ In addition to massive cholera epidemics, other diseases such as measles, undulant fever and tuberculosis killed many people. Nancy Hanks Lincoln was immortalized following the assassination of her son as the most famous victim of undulant fever, which was commonly called "milk fever."²⁶ Tuberculosis appears to be the disease described in the epitaph from Kensal Green.²⁷

    Small children succumbed to childhood ailments and many exhausted mothers followed their child in death a few days or weeks later.²⁸ The survey reveals less gravestones to children from the period 1810-1850, the first generation of settlement. The number of gravestones commemorating children increases as more and more people flow into the Boonslick. Since the first generation did not erect as many gravestones to adults, they also did not erect as many gravestones to children as the next generation. Since women were the guardians of the physical home, the religious home, and the cemetery home (whose aspects included the grave and the ritual of mourning), death among children combined with the cult of motherhood to produce sentimental memorial markers erected by parents. Previous generations had often not even marked the graves of their young children, let alone erected large and expensive monuments.

    Thus, the forces of the Romantic movement, landscape gardening and health considerations moved cemeteries into rural areas surrounding urban centers. Even when parks for open space were not a physical necessity, people still platted and landscaped rural park cemeteries. This movement arrived in Missouri with construction of Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis.

V. BELLEFONTAINE CEMETERY
    Bellefontaine, which means beautiful fountain in French, suggests loveliness with its very name. The cemetery was begun in 1849 on 138 acres of land on the old military road leading to Fort Bellefontaine, for which it was named. The tract had belonged to the Hempstead family and their family burial plot was already in place within the bounds of the new cemetery. Auguste Chouteau announced in 1815 that no more burials could be made on his land and a specific burial ground was opened in St. Louis. As the city expanded and kept disturbing graves, and as cultural considerations arrived from the East, the necessity for a permanent cemetery became evident. On March 7, 1849, the charter for a rural cemetery that was to become Bellefontaine became effective and the cemetery was legally in existence. Eleven prominent men were involved and they took the name Rural Cemetery Association for their group.²⁹ The start of this cemetery was none too soon for in June, 1849, the worst cholera epidemic of the century hit St. Louis. By early July, everyone who possibly could had left the city. The beleaguered Mayor with little assistance tried to cope. The cities with the greatest immigrant populations and hence the most crowding suffered the greatest losses and St. Louis was no exception. By the middle of August, 10% of the population had died and the Catholic Cathedral was averaging thirty funerals per day.³⁰ Everyone, including the horses, was exhausted by the gigantic task of burying the dead.³¹

    As soon as the epidemic passed, James E. Yeatman of St. Louis went East on business and was instructed by the Rural Cemetery Association to inquire about a competent and experienced engineer and landscape architect who would come to St. Louis and develop the cemetery. Yeatman's wife had died in May, 1849, of tuberculosis, so he was also searching for an appropriate stone for her grave, which meant visiting the large, rural, park-like cemeteries.

    Yeatman convinced Almerin Hotchkiss, who was working at Greenwood Cemetery in New York, to come to St. Louis. Only thirty years old, Hotchkiss fulfilled all the requirements and upon his arrival in St. Louis in the fall of 1849, he immediately began to develop the cemetery along the plans of Greenwood. He was superintendent of Bellefontaine until his death forty-six years later and was succeeded by his son, Frank, who was superintendent for more than 20 years. Since Hotchkiss had been employed at Greenwood Cemetery in New York, he made Bellefontaine a copy of the older cemetery. Even the path names are identical. Because of Hotchkiss, Bellefontaine fits into the height of the picturesque rural, park-like cemetery movement in the United States. As in Greenwood in New York, lot owners were free to decorate the lots as they chose with monuments, fences, and foliage.

    On May 15, 1850, the cemetery was dedicated as Bellefontaine Cemetery and the next year the charter was officially changed to the latter name.³² By 1871 Bellefontaine had attained some maturity and was ripe for admiration by tourists intent upon discovering that the Midwest had amenities equal to any in the country.³³

    The importance attached to this first great rural, park-like cemetery in Missouri can be seen in part of the address given by Truman Marcellus Post at the dedication and then inscribed on his gravestone.

Soon the mourner shall follow the mourned, till we and
all hearts that beat for us beneath these heavens shall
at last keep the love and silent rendezvous of the
grave; yea, I see the endless succession of the future
hastening on, as the many waters of yonder mighty
river, till marble after marble crumbles. Till the
seasons weary in their round and the sun grows weary in
the sky and time itself is secure and death like old.
I see the world of life itself passing and Death's
shadow falls over all but Death himself shall perish.
In that hour the Great Victor of Death shall summon the
pale prisoners of the grave and they shall come forth;
and then though the voice of Earth's memory may have
perished for ages, though the rock hewn monuments may
have crumbled long cycles ago, still a record written
on no earthly marble waits us in the great doom and our
mortal works follow us there."³⁴

    Bellefontaine is located 115 miles east of the Boonslick and approximately 150 miles east of Walnut Grove Cemetery in Boonville in Cooper County, the Boonslick's romantic, park-like cemetery. Contemporary newspapers of the period of Walnut Grove's construction mention how Walnut Grove was consciously designed to imitate Bellefontaine (and thus Greenwood in New York, one step removed.) As Greenwood is never mentioned in the newspaper accounts, it may well be that to Boonslick citizens the standard worthy for emulation and for comparison was Bellefontaine. Many Boonslick families such as the Morrisons in Howard County near Glasgow had relatives buried both in Bellefontaine Cemetery and in the Boonslick region with stones from St. Louis erected in both places.³⁵ Thus, Walnut Grove is the pinnacle of the rural, park-like cemetery in the Boonslick and the rural, park-like cemetery is the pinnacle of conscious planning in the United States for cemeteries as more than repositories of the departed. A closer look at Walnut Grove Cemetery in Boonville shows all the characteristics of the above cemetery, plus those alterations commonly called "vernacular" in architectural writing.

ENDNOTES

1Records in the Archives of Walnut Grove Cemetery in Boonville, Missouri.

2Aries, Philippe, The Hour of Our Death, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), p. 40.

3Ibid, p. 82.

4Epitaph on Shakespeare's tomb in Stratford, England.

5Curl, James Stevens, The Victorian Celebration of Death, (Detroit: Partridge Press, 1972), p. 51.

6Ibid, p. 52.

7Morley, John, Death, Heaven, and the Victorians, (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971), p. 43.

8Emerson, Ralph Waldo, "Nature," Major Writers of America (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1962), p. 490.

9Aries, p. 459.

10Choay, Francoise, The Modern City: Planning in the Nineteenth Century (New York: George Braziller, 1969), p. 22.

11Hipple, W. J., The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth Century British Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois Press, 1957), p. 312.

12Curl, James Stevens, "Highgate: A Great Victorian Cemetery," Royal Institute of British Architects, (April 1968), p. 179.

13Fyre, Mary Virginia, The Historical Development of Municipal Parks in the United States: Concepts and Their Application, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Microfilms, Inc., 1965), p. 19.

14Downing, Alexander Jackson, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America with a View to the Improvement of Country Residences (New York: A. O. Moore and Company, 1859), p. 290.

15Chadwick, George F., The Park and the Town (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966), p. 181.

16Olmstead, Frederick Law, Forty Years of Landscape Architecture (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1922), p. 91.

17Memories of Missouri, Inc., Report on the Historic Architectural Survey of the City of Glasgow (funded by the State Office of Historic Preservation), in 1987/1988.

18McDaniel, Lyn, editor, Bicentennial Boonslick History (Boonville: Boonslick Historical Society, 1976), p. 79.

19Chadwick, p. 181.

20Cleveland, Nehemiah, Greenwood Cemetery: A History from 1838 to 1864 (New York: Anderson and Archer, 1866), p. 15.

21Olmstead, p. 21.

22Cleveland, p. 1.

23Tatum, George, Penn's Great Town (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961), p. 87.

24Morley, p. 44.

25Information in the Archives of the Friends of Historic Boonville, Boonville, Missouri.

26Brandt, Keith, Abe Lincoln, The Young Years (Mahwah, New Jersey: Troll Associates, 1982), p. 33.

27Morley, p. 43.

28Rosenberg, Charles E., The Cholera Years (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 3.

29Records in the cemetery headquarters of Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri.

30Bryan, John A., A Walk Through Bellefontaine Cemetery (St. Louis: no publisher, 1944), p. 1.

31Rosenberg, p. 115.

32Records in the cemetery headquarters of Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri.

33Bicknell, Mrs. Fannie Warner, "The Rural Cemeteries of St. Louis, St. Louis Ladies Magazine (St. Louis, no publisher given, October 1871), p. 335.

34Epitaph on gravestone of Truman Marcellus Post in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri.

35Memories of Missouri, Inc., Report on the Historic Architectural Survey of the City of Glasgow (funded by the State Office of Historic Preservation), in 1987/1988.

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