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The Rural Cemetery: "The Peaceful, Beautiful Ideal”
A fundamental role of the cemetery is to ensure a peaceful, final resting place for loved ones. They are also extraordinary living records of our society. Historic cemeteries tell us about design, ideas about mortality and death, and the historical social and political hierarchies of a locality.
Especially important is the rural cemetery. Distinct from church graveyards, this is a 19th-century culmination of a movement that began in 18th-century Europe. The rural cemetery drew heavily on early garden aesthetics, embracing classical ideals of a pastoral utopia as embodied in the Greek region of Arcadia. In fact, nascent cemeteries evolved from garden memorials and burials, leading to a revolution in the way Western culture tended to its dead, and forever impacting its landscapes.
Amiable Child Monument
Here in New York, Morningside Heights’ monument commemorating the death of young St. Claire Pollock, the “Amiable Child,” may be read as a very early example of this transformation. While Riverside Park itself did not exist when the monument appeared in the 1797, the location almost assuredly conjured the essence of the Arcadian ideal, something early cemeteries strove to capture.
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St. Paul's Chapel
But cemeteries were as utilitarian as they were aesthetic. With urban church graveyards overflowing with bodies (e.g., Trinity Church and St. Paul’s in Manhattan), towns and cities, first in Europe, then America, turned to pastoral outskirts to replace these grim, overcrowded spaces. As James Stevens Curl writes of the cemetery in "The Victorian Celebration of Death," "Here was the peaceful, beautiful ideal, a place fit for reflection and memories where death was civilised.”
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Green-Wood Cemetery Gates
Within a few decades of the 19th century, rural cemeteries had begun sprouting up all over, including New York’s most famous example, Green-wood, in 1838. On July 27 of the following year, lawyer and noted New York diarist George Templeton Strong approvingly wrote after a visit that Green-wood “when it is a little improved & cleaned up will exceed Mt. Auburn,” its pioneering Boston counterpart.
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Civil War Soldiers' Monument
As time passed, the role of these grounds became evident. Philip Hamilton Hill, a sales clerk from Albany who lived for a time in New York, records excursions to several cemeteries. These cemeteries were equally burial ground and park. In fact, Hill himself had written about Green-wood four years previous that he “spent about three hours rambling through the grounds, viewing the different monuments, and reading the inscriptions on them.”
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Van Ness Parsons Mausoleum
As Hill suggests, the monuments themselves stoked curiosity then, as they do today. Any visitor will note the diverse iconography on display in most historic cemeteries which reveal a great deal about the cultural exchanges of the past. In fact, cemeteries are virtual primers in architectural styles, presenting examples of gothic, neo-classical, art deco, and colonial revival funerary architecture to name just a few.
Naturally, the ever cantankerous Strong had his own thoughts on such matters after another visit in April 1844:
"This recurrence to heathen taste and anti-christian usage in architecture or art of any sort is or should be unreal and unnatural everywhere, but in such a place as that \[a cemetery], it’s disgusting."
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Trinity Church and Graveyard
Such bellowing over perceived irreligion was a common lament among religious-minded contemporaries, and perhaps it was the widespread use of Egyptian motifs that rankled Strong. In fact, while we may easily note classical influences in early rural cemeteries, the use of Egyptian-inspired ornamentation was also common, and coincided with growing interest in things Egyptian during the 19th century. Striking examples of mausoleums occur at Green-wood as well as its Bronx rival, Woodlawn, but many will be surprised to find out that the obelisk, simple, yet ubiquitous, is perhaps the most prolific monument with Egyptian origins.
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Flatbush Dutch Reformed Church
Suffice to say that the history behind cemeteries is deep, interesting, and multi-faceted. So, as we seek out good socially distant activities, there’s an abundance of reasons to visit your local cemetery. You may be surprised what you discover!
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