Fun with Cemeteries, Part III

Picture of the Ascension Mausoleum from the Forest Lawn web site. If you want to find out just how many different things you can do at a cemetery visit the home page. Find out about special events, tourist information, educational opportunities, etc. 

Time to talk about memorial parks! Break out the noise makers, folks!

So in 1913 a man named Hubert Eaton arrived in Los Angeles and started selling cemetery plots in a place called Forest Lawn, a cemetery that was going nowhere fast. His ideas revolutionized the cemetery movement. I'm going to write loosely about what I found in both The Last Great Necessity and Jessica Mitford's The American Way of Death Revisited. Let's hope I get all of this right...

• Part of Eaton's vision was to streamline the entire burial process. Forest Lawn provided flowers, funeral director, cemetery plot, and monuments. He also added a mausoleum. He essentially mandated that all markers be flat ones bought from the memorial park itself. Naturally, monument dealers didn't like being "cut out" of the profits.
• Eaton wanted to eliminate all traces of death from the cemetery and added works of art instead. Indeed, Forest Lawn is a tourist destination, which is SO Los Angeles.
• And, yes, Virginia, commercialism took root. As Sloane says, "Forest Lawn was formed as the last resort of a failed suburban developer who had first tried to establish a more traditional cemetery." Mitford approaches the subject more cynically pointing out that cemeteries can be established as non profit companies thanks to the charitable intention of those rural cemetery founders from the early 1800s. Also, cemeteries can be put on cheaper land and "house" more people to the acre than a subdivision. Profits were there for the taking for those who knew how to properly take advantage of the situation--and how to structure the company so all of the costs fell under the non profit cemetery and all of the profits magically floated into the pockets of those who bought the cemetery.
• Not entirely a new concept, pre-need sales became a foundation of the memorial park cemetery. You don't want to know about the mark up, and you don't want to know what happens to some of the money that's put into a perpetual trust fund. Do know that aggressive sales tactics are often used. Mitford tells the story of a woman who received a "free" plot only to have the sales person perform a bait and switch by telling her the free plot wasn't in a good spot--but she could apply the amount to a better spot! And the most expensive part of a mausoleum? The crypts that are "heart level." And, yes, there are sales people who can tell you that with a straight face while placing a reverent hand over their respective chests.
• Forest Lawn was fictionally featured in The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh and also skewered by Aldous Huxley in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.
• As memorial parks swept the nation, cemeteries faced many problems. Americans didn't visit cemeteries as often nor did they participate as much in their upkeep. (Here I would add that I think this trend came later to the South since I have a vivid recollection of Decoration Day, and I have visited MANY a cemetery to find relatives or to pay respects. Also, the church cemeteries of the South often have a church nearby to help fund upkeep. That said, there are many cemeteries that have been forgotten.)

A photo of Evergreen Cemetery in Richmond, VA. Like many neglected cemeteries, this one is an African-American cemetery, a holdover from the days of segregation. Look around church cemeteries in the South and you may see similarly neglected sections on the outskirts. Why can't folks just take care of the whole cemetery? That's another rant for another day.

• Most rural cemeteries (Remember: rural cemetery is a type of cemetery, not cemeteries in rural areas per se) hadn't collected enough for perpetual upkeep. People weren't visiting and certainly weren't adding anything extra for upkeep. 
• While the funeral home business flourished, independent cemeteries struggled to do business in the new twentieth century way. They faced all sorts of obstacles: new regulations and rising costs among the greatest. Sloane points out that "many cemeterians alive in 1950 could remember the days of a simple horse-drawn coach carrying a wooden box and accompanied by a small family group in carriages. Now cemeteries allowed cars to roam the tight roadways, automobile hearses and lines of cars formed the procession, and wooden boxes were for the indigent only."
• The contrast between the simplicity of such earlier funerals and the increased pomp and circumstance of mid-twentieth century funerals led to the publication of The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford and The High Cost of Dying by Ruth Mulvey Harmer.

I'm going to tackle some of the information I learned from Jessica Mitford in some future posts. Prepare to be outraged. Better yet, go check out The American Way of Death and read it for yourself because it is well written, often tongue in cheek funny, and absolutely an important read for anyone who may one day have to go through the funeral process.

Fun with Cemeteries, Part II

This gorgeous view of Shiloh Military Cemetery came from Wikipedia.
I have at least one relative buried here. Chances are, you do, too.

When last we left the American cemeteries, rural ones were all the rage. Now many of those rural cemeteries are getting overcrowded and facing many of the same problems their urban counterparts did. Where monuments used to be nestled in picturesque landscaping, monuments have now taken over the landscaping. Enter Adolph Strauch. He made plans to transition these cemeteries to more of an organized lawn plan. He placed limitations on marker size and took out many of the trees and shrubs in order to give cemeteries a more open feel.

Aside from the changes to the cemetery landscape, the entire business of death was becoming more commercialized. Here are some interesting points about death and cemeteries from Sloane's book The Last Great Necessity. These have been gleaned from his chapters on the years 1855-1917:

• Cemetery management at this time passed from a sexton or a caretaker to a superintendent. Superintendents had more authority than sextons or caretakers, having the ability to limit monument size and alter landscape--this marks a change from when families decided the where, when, and how of burial.
• Strauch's changes meant that more and more cemeteries would require horticulturalists and engineers rather than relying on amateurs. (Note from moi: none of these changes necessarily apply to rural church cemeteries. Strauch is writing almost exclusively about larger metropolitan areas at this point.)
• "By the end of the 1870s, all cemeteries used annual-care fees, bequests, and perpetual-care payments as means of increasing their income." This change is going to pave the way for cemeteries as businesses run for profit and, of course, the abuses that come from greed.
• Did you know that the mechanical lawn mower was patented in England in 1830? You can imagine how much easier that made cemetery maintenance, and it also raised the standards of what was expected from cemeteries.
• The movement from rural cemetery to lawn cemetery mirrored the reform movement of the late 1800s when Americans were also trying to put order to the urban explosion of their cities. There was also a generalized movement toward specialization which, in the case of death and dying, meant that "nurses and doctors cared for the living, morticians handled the dead, and cemetery superintendents beautified the grave." Interestingly enough, many immigrants resisted these changes, still feeling that death was to be handled within the family.
• The Civil War impacted death and dying in many ways. One, embalming became popular as a way of getting deceased soldiers back to their families. Also, large numbers of dead required national cemeteries, cemeteries that reinforced America's sense of democracy as well as Strauch's vision of an uncluttered landscape by having uniform tombstones in neat rows with little landscape to intercede.
• At the same time, urban reforms meant more parks. Understandably, Americans started to frolic in these urban parks rather than in the rural cemeteries they had used before.
• And a side note from Jeanne Holder, she came across "tiered lots" whereby Victorians priced lots in a manner similar to which theater seats were sold. The most expensive ones were high on a hill facing east so the deceased would be able to better witness the coming of God. The cheap seats, if you will, were at the bottom of a hill facing west. (Side note: one of the Memorial Parks on Whitlock has almost all of its graves on a hill facing east. Coincidence? I think not.)

And I'm going to stop there. The next section is on the "Professionalism of the Process of Death," which is at the heart of my next novel. We'll spend some quality time there. In the meantime, I'm glossing over a lot of work so if you want to find out more, check out The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History by David Sloane

Fun with Cemeteries, Part I

I borrowed this picture of Mount Auburn from here. A talented photographer named Svadilfari took it--check out his photostream here. 

I feel like a real writer now. I'm querying one book, writing another, and researching a third. I've always loved research, so this is a great deal of fun. Of course, it remains to be seen if anyone other than me finds my current topic as fascinating as I do.

Here are a couple of gems I've gleaned from The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History by David Charles Sloane:

• Early American funerals were communal events. Family members prepared the body, dug the grave, informed the neighbors, put together a small service--the whole bit. At that point clergy usually attended the funeral as a mourner rather than "officiating." Usually, the wake ended up being akin to a big party complete with food, drink, and gossip. (Not all that different from my Southern funeral home experience aside from the drink. Come to think of it, a little nip might have been in order...)
• In cities, the deceased were usually buried in a church graveyard or a potter's field. On the frontier, families had to create their own graveyards--usually on a high hill.
• In the late 18th century, the old Colonial graveyards fell into disfavor. For one thing, they were becoming overcrowded AND continually being moved as cities grew. Also, people began to fear that diseases from the dead. Finally, there were vandalism and upkeep issues--two things that plague cemeteries today.
• Because these in-town graveyards were falling out of favor, the rural cemetery, a pastoral place on the outskirts of town, was born. Mount Auburn Cemetery (estb. 1831) was "on strikingly beautiful terrain...[and] promised to provide a pleasant botanical tour, a local and national historical museum, and an arboretum, all on grounds that provided space for the burial of generations of area residents." (If you haven't been there, it's quite lovely)
•  Mount Auburn, the first of its kind was a pattern for several national cemeteries including Oakland in Atlanta. (I haven't been, and they have walking tours! Field trip, anyone?)

Photo of Oakland taken from their official site

• Part of this change in burying habits seeped into the nomenclature itself. The word cemetery comes from the Greek for "sleeping chamber." As Sloane says, "rural cemeteries were different than previous burial places, and their founders believed that they deserved a distinct name. Cemetery contained the suggestion of death as sleep, a transition from life to eternal life, which was more in keeping with America's emerging optimistic religion and exuberant nationalism."
• The best part? These rural cemeteries were incredibly popular. People gathered there not just for graveside services or for quietly remembering the dead but also for relaxing, taking a walk, family gatherings, and just about everything else. After all, these rural cemeteries were some of the first "planned landscapes" open to the public. 
• These first cemeteries were a place to remember community and to BE a community. As Sloane says so eloquently, "the rural cemetery became the American resting place for the living as well as the dead."

Stay tuned for part two in the evolution of American cemeteries...