From Atlanta’s Oakland Cemetery: An Illustrated History and Guide by Ren and Helen Davis:
“In nineteenth-century New York, Boston, and Atlanta, the provision of burial places was another new municipal service that local governments 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 seventy thousand 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 sector. Like most large urban centers, Boston had its share of voluntary associations dedicated to promoting the common good, one of which was the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. The society decided to combine its interest 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 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….
“Other cities quickly adopted the Mount Auburn model, establishing private societies that purchased rural land, landscaped it, and sold the first lots to a wealthy elite. Philadelphia established Laurel Hill in 1836; Baltimore, Green Mount in 1838; and New York City, Greenwood in 1839. The multiple functions of the rural cemetery fit into an emerging consensus among progressive thinkers about the need for civic improvements in American cities….
“Established as a burial ground, the Atlanta City Cemetery acquired greater cultural and material significance because of its hilly location and the course of its development. Twenty-two years after its establishment, with expansions, the erection of monuments, and the growth of a cover of oak trees, the cemetery was renamed Oakland. It had become a garden cemetery with artistic monuments…. America’s larger urban centers incorporated the garden qualities of the cemetery, park, and suburb into their expanding perimeters from the 1820s to the 1870s. It was in the 1880s that Atlanta became large enough to support these developments, and Oakland Cemetery led the way…. “
Hello!
This is the third of three posts with photographs of the Oriental lily Lilium speciosum — also known by the names Japanese Lily and Japanese Show (or Showy) Lily. The first post is Lilium speciosum, the Japanese Show Lily (1 of 3), and the second post is Lilium speciosum, the Japanese Show Lily (2 of 3).
In my last post, I introduced these three photos, which show where the Japanese Lilies are located:
The photos show the kind of integration — across history, culture, landscape design, botany, and historical memory — that was common during the rise of Victorian garden cemeteries in the United States from the middle of the nineteenth century. The entire plot is bounded by a short concrete wall on all sides, one that separates the space from those surrounding it yet still provides visual and physical access to the family memorial from any direction. More than one structure is present within the plot’s boundaries, a common occurrence in spaces like this. In this case, though, the bell-shaped monument has a ragged break at the top — one that wasn’t caused by aging but was sculpted that way, probably to represent a life cut short. The presence of grass, ferns, shrubs, and flowers within the same space softens the appearance of the monument’s more harsh stone structures, creating calming shadows while adding contrasting colors to its other visual characteristics. These elements all come together as staging for a story and a history, one that is simultaneously a narrative containing family memory while potentially indicating a family tragedy.
This space actually memorializes members of two families related by marriage — that of Daniel Dougherty and Patrick Connely, who both died in 1851, so it’s likely that the tall monument was constructed and erected around that time. The Dougherty name is inscribed on one side of the monument; the Connely name on another. Connely died of natural causes but Dougherty was murdered by a perpetrator who was never identified — an event that lends credence to the idea that the broken monument represents a tragic circumstance. The inscriptions on the broken monument are no longer legible, so this may be speculation on my part; but even if I’m wrong, you can see how interpreting a historical space while recognizing the symbolism of something like a broken structure can lead to reasonable conclusions about its original intended meaning.
You can read a bit more about Dougherty here, and Connely here; and read about the family relationship on Oakland’s Irish Resident’s page. The square building to the right of the monument is not part of the Dougherty-Connely memorial, but is that of Timothy Burke, another Irish immigrant to Atlanta who’s also mentioned on the same Irish resident’s page. It’s quite common — especially in this old section of the cemetery, its Original Six Acres established in 1850 — for memorial spaces to appear to merge from certain angles simply because they’re so close to each other, which was perhaps another reason the Dougherty-Connely section has boundaries defined with a wall.
These three photos also illustrate another defining principle of garden or rural cemeteries: their blend of constructed and natural elements that were intentionally planned to combine the two. The movements that created this element blending — which started with Mount Auburn Cemetery in Boston — evolved from a confluence of several emergent nineteenth-century concerns: rapidly growing populations in U.S. cities and the resulting need to expand cemeteries; backlash towards the unrelenting effects of capitalist progress and its effects on the environment; and rising worries about how urban centers detached human beings from the natural world.
Garden cemeteries like Mount Auburn or Oakland — often called “rural cemeteries” to reflect their design rather than their location — were proposed and developed with these concerns in mind. They were created as memorial spaces that served multiple purposes simultaneously, including that of providing a resource for living residents to explore history, architecture, and nature not far from their homes. The compressed history I excerpted from Atlanta’s Oakland Cemetery: An Illustrated History and Guide at the top of this post connects Mount Auburn’s development to Oakland’s; and the book Arcadian America: The Death and Life of an Environmental Tradition by Aaron Sachs takes up their representation of nature and the environment, starting with an evocative description of Mount Auburn and leading us to its nationwide influence:
Many Americans came to see Mount Auburn as a new paradise. Their experiences of the cemetery, though, suggest a garden not of carelessness but of caring — not of gratification but of gratitude. It was a grounded, earthly Eden. Within just a few years, Mount Auburn became perhaps the leading tourist attraction of the young republic, often mentioned in the same breath as Niagara Falls and George Washington’s estate at Mount Vernon….
The cemetery offered serenity but also excitement — a sense of seclusion in sheltered dells, but also the confusion of labyrinthine trails and the stimulation of broad views…. It taught the ravishing beauty of autumnal decay, the Romantic pleasure of melancholy. It suggested that the fullness of life could be tasted only through a constant awareness of death. It offered the consolation of regeneration even as it reinforced the pain and anxiety of limitation. It was an asylum, a sanctuary, but not necessarily an evasion. Visitors sometimes came to the cemetery not just to recuperate from modernity, but to rethink their role in it….
Both men and women spent their leisure time at Mount Auburn…. The cemetery clearly cultivated a spectrum of emotions, and it was large enough to accommodate expressions of both joy and grief, but most people at Mount Auburn seem to have experienced a reverent, satisfying mixture of the two….
This embrace of social unity, of a public spirit manifested in environmental terms, of wild nature as a tonic and a countervailing force against a hubristic Progress, was expressed by civic leaders again and again, in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Brooklyn, Rochester, Albany, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Providence, Louisville, Savannah, Charleston, Richmond, Buffalo, Detroit, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Atlanta, New Orleans, Memphis, and Cleveland — each of which consecrated a nonprofit rural cemetery between 1836 and 1853.
Taken together, these developments show us how garden cemeteries have evolved to embrace so many cross-cultural characteristics. Grounded in both history and nature, we see why it happens that a place like Oakland contains such a mixture of often-exotic plants and flowers, while simultaneously representing Georgia-native and naturalized flora and fauna within the same physical space. And much of its architecture takes all this into account: it’s common for monuments like that of the Dougherty-Connely families to mirror the landscaping around it. Here, for example, we can see how the monument’s carvings are not incidental or accidental: from top to bottom, fleur-de-lis that resemble the lilies planted at its base are sculpted in stone…
… likely proscribed in the initial design of the memorial, then maintained in historical continuity for the next 175 years. The monuments reflect the landscape, and the landscape is constantly being developed and revitalized to reflect the art and symbolism in the monuments, throughout that entire time.
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
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