A Little History

I found what follows stuck in a folder in my computer. I'm no longer quite sure why I wrote it, but it's not a bad summary of the situation.

Cemeteries are, first and foremost, living spaces. Like any other cultural artifact, be it school, factory, town, library, shopping center, state, what-have-you, each cemetery has a life of its own. Living cemeteries are those still in use. They are not static. Their changes may be slow and subtle, but they continue all the time.

Dead cemeteries tend to disappear through neglect, forgetfulness, or conscious removal or destruction. Forgotten cemeteries continually reappear in the process of digging for foundations, road cuts, pipe lines, etc., while other dead cemeteries are among the best preserved, and best known, structures on the face of the Earth: the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, and Stonehenge come quickly to mind. To be sure, given the considerable length of time humans have been here, most cemeteries have long been irretrievably lost. Nonetheless, long lost burial grounds are constantly discovered. In rediscovered cemeteries, aside from the bodies themselves, the most important findings are the trappings left with the corpse, the grave objects. One can often make the case that the single best window we have unto an ancient culture comes through through its grave offerings. Without them, our knowledge of the past would be much less full. And certainly when it comes to our most famous cemeteries, said Pyramids, etc., the cemeteries and their attendant objects far outweigh the bodies in importance. King Tut’s okay, but it’s his paraphernalia which really excites and informs us.

But there’s a disconnect between how we view ancient cemeteries and how we view our own, although the disconnect is not uniform across our culture. The disconnect is more than academic; it’s led to enormous changes in our burial practices which in turn are having a commensurate impact on the cemetery industry. A headline in The Oregonian from August 5, 2007, encapsulates the problem: Oregon cemetery plots go begging. The problem, author Anna Griffin contends, is that “more and more, particularly on the West Coast, consumers are choosing cremation over burial.” In Oregon, Griffin says, the cremation rate is now 65%, which corresponds to Portland Metro’s data of 67%. Just forty year ago the rate was 5%. The problem affects virtually all the state’s major cemeteries with the notable exception of the Veterans Administration cemeteries, which are constantly looking to expand; but their reason is simple: they give away their plots and pick up the burial tab. It’s an offer veterans and their wives find hard to refuse. Even in non-VA cemeteries, the incidence of government supplied markers often dominates the graveyard, but even that hasn’t stemmed the drain away from using the major cemeteries servicing the cities of the region. The stark truth is that cemeteries are now competing for a severely shrunken market. It’s bad enough that only 35% of people now opt for burial, but many of those left come from cultures which frown upon not being able to have upright, visible grave markers and hence shun the major cemeteries, which are invariably lawn cemeteries.

But it is a mistake to think that cremation is the cause of the cemeteries’ problems. The cemeteries’ problems are self-inflicted and cremations are a response to the problem; at worst they’re a symptom. There is nothing that prevents cremains from being buried. The problems are related to the disconnect, and much of the secret lies in the cultural response that requires some people to have upright monuments versus flush memorials. What might seem a minor cultural eccentricity affecting a small minority of non-assimilated Americans is in truth symptomatic of an underlying yearning of many people that is not being satisfied in conventional lawn cemeteries; a yearning that drives potential customers away from cemeteries and paradoxically towards cremation. What author Griffin failed to notice is that there is a whole class of cemeteries largely unaffected by the switch to cremation, ones right under the nose of the problem, as it were: the vernacular cemeteries.

Cemeteries for the most part can be divided into two classes: designer and vernacular, the difference in which is fairly self-explanatory and contained within their names. The designer cemetery appeared in Paris in 1804 under the name Père Lachaise. It’s still there and contains, among other luminaries, Jim Morrison. It was the first time anyone had tried to place the dead in a landscaped park designed especially for that purpose. (In fact, the idea for parks came out of cemetery design.) The intention of such early cemeteries was that the dead would have edifying monuments built over them which would be instructive to the masses who, hopefully, would come to visit them, bringing art and culture, as it were, to an artificially tamed landscape where the teaming masses can be enlightened in the open air. The first such cemetery built in the United States was Mt. Auburn in Cambridge, MA, in 1831, and it and many early similar ventures were started by horticultural societies. And they were extremely successful with thousands of people streaming to visit them on fine weekends to such as extent that traffic rules often had to be promulgated to contend with the throngs, with sometimes only plot-owners allowed to bring horses or carriages onto the grounds. The Eugene Masonic Cemetery, for example, had a city trolly come to its front door.

Two things happened to stem that tide of popularity: one was the invention of parks per se drawing the throngs of cemetery visitors to them instead. That invention, though, might have altered the use patterns of cemeteries, but wouldn’t alone have significantly affected the primary role of the cemetery: that of memorial ground had not cemeteries gone through further design changes that drastically altered their function.

By 1855 Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati had begun the process of consolidating management of the cemetery under one person, in this case Adolph Strauch, who introduced the idea of clustering large monuments on the side of open lawn areas, the size of which he also increased. The process reached its apogee some 58 years later when Hubert Eaton opened Forest Lawn Memorial Gardens in Glendale, CA, doing away with family uprights markers altogether and turning the entire operation into a lawn cemetery with stones flush to the ground for ease of maintenance. Eaton was following the time-honored American tradition of streamlining his business, making it more profitable, and cutting costs. But he took his idea one step further, one that exacerbated the problem begun with the implementation of the flush marker. Neither Eaton nor Strauch knew that in their efforts to maximize their profits and minimize their costs they were sowing the seeds of their own destruction.

Eaton eliminated, not only the monuments to death that dominated the early designer cemeteries and which can still be seen in cemeteries such as Portland’s Lone Fire or Cottage Grove’s Fir Grove, but he tried to eliminate the very idea of death itself, as witnessed by the name change. “Cemetery” carried too much the burden of death with it, so he opted for “memorial garden” which immediately became the code for the new style of cemetery, to such an extent that sometimes older cemeteries changed their names to adopt the new nomenclature, such as Rest Lawn Memorial Park outside Junction City which is a pioneer cemetery that subsequently adopted the “memorial garden” tag. You can be sure that any cemetery you find with the name “memorial garden” attached will be a lawn cemetery. In cases such as Rest Lawn, and in many other vernacular cemeteries, one can see land developed prior to and after the invention of the lawn cemetery. Many pioneer cemeteries mistakenly adopted this approach and in many a charming wooded spot now sits next to a barren open plot.

Eaton didn’t stop their, though. Instead of shroud-draped statues and lamentations for the departed, Eaton erected his own monuments that avoided any mention of death, most often classical reproductions or Christian statuary. Eaton’s goal, essentially, was to chase death from the graveyard, and in this he pretty much succeeded. But in the process, he chased away his raison d’être. He could call his place a “memory garden,” but if there was nothing to remember, why end up there? Slowly, as memorial gardens spread, more and more people took up cremation. It’s not that they necessarily preferred cremation, but given the exorbitant cost of funerals, what’s the point if there’s no place to go remember your loved one? One flush stone next to another in a limitless lawn is hardly conducive to visitation and rumination. The very reason to visit a cemetery was largely eliminated. That was coupled to a cost explosion resulting from the American post-Civil War predilection for embalming and the sales insistence of the funeral industry into more and more expensive coffins. The bottom line became that traditional funerals and burials became exceedingly expensive while the product offered was in equal part diminished. It was a lot of money for something people didn’t use much, and subsequently they began pulling out of the lawn cemeteries altogether. Unless, of course, they were free.

Greatness Large & Small

Eugene Masonic Cemetery
Some are born to greatness, others acquire it after long struggle, and others have it thrust upon them. People? No, cemeteries, of course.

I recently ran across a one-post blog (there are a lot of them out there) that said some tantalizing things about cemeteries and made a number of suggestions as to how to pump more life into them, which may seem a touch counterintuitive. My favorite suggestion was to stick a high class restaurant into the middle of them, although I’m not sure how that would work. You go talk to your local cemetery about it.

The author also suggested some things already being done in some cemeteries such as readings; small, historical drama presentations/reenactments; concerts; etc. All in all, practicality of some ideas aside, it was good to see someone thinking about how to restore cemeteries to their former glory. As anyone with a passing knowledge of cemetery history knows, cemeteries were the precursors to parks; and while parks have evolved to fulfill functions cemeteries couldn’t approach, it doesn’t mean that they have outlived their usefulness as parks.

Lone Fir Cemetery
There are two cemeteries in the Dead Man Talking database that are heading back towards being parks. Indeed, they already are parks as much as they are cemeteries: Portland’s Lone Fir and the Eugene Masonic Cemetery. The Eugene cemetery is an exemplar of the rural cemetery movement and had a streetcar line delivering people to its doorstep, even though it was, like other “rural” cemeteries, out in what was then the countryside. That was being born to greatness. Unlike Portland’s River View, a rural cemetery which also was built for but has continually maintained its greatness, Eugene Masonic had a long period of decline and suffered serious vandal damage (and still does) before being consciously returned to greatness by taking a radical new approach as to how the cemetery is regarded and used. It’s all Eugene and all Oregon and it gets constant use by its neighbors. Lone Fir also gets constant use, though it approaches being a park in a more traditional manner.

River View Cemetery
Eugene Masonic is notable at first glance for its shaggy appearance and at closer inspection for the minute detail with which the cemetery is cared for and presented. It looks shaggy because the site is mowed but twice a year and functions as a local wildlife habitat for both animal and plant species. Walking paths throughout the cemetery are kept mowed and are sprinkled with signs ecumenically pointing out significant local species or interesting interments; and to their credit, the interments signaled out for illumination are not necessarily those of city luminaries, but also include short bios of more representative citizenry. (Historical markers always tell as much about the erectors of the markers as the people or events they are commemorating.) They’ve also begun to allow green burials, have erected a charming viewing platform and scatter garden, restored an art deco mausoleum on the property, and a local Jewish organization has reserved part of the cemetery for their members’ use (a practice also found in two Portland pioneer cemeteries). Things are hopping there and neighbors love to come there with their children and dogs, which are kept on the paths and scrupulously cleaned up after (both kids and dogs).

Lone Fir, on the other hand, began life as a Donation Land Claim (DLC) cemetery; which simply means that the original owner of the land set aside part of his or her holdings to serve as a cemetery, one of the most common origins of Oregon Territory cemeteries. Lone Fir grew to greatness due to its location. It too was built in the countryside and soon swallowed by the city outside which it lay. It grew to greatness by having a rich and complex history, which is still evolving. Not designed as a “rural cemetery,” it nonetheless is a major city arboretum and that lone fir (which still stands) has been joined by an astounding variety of trees. It also contains some nice little niche areas, such as a firemen’s section, a heritage rose garden, a Gothic mausoleum, and an emerging Chinese memorial commemorating the Chinese who were disinterred from this cemetery and shipped back to China, providing, of course, that they were adult males. Chinese women and children were left behind. Lone Fir is also the repository for the lion’s share of the interesting monuments in the city; and this goes back to the early days, as it harbors by far the city’s largest collection of Woodmen of the World faux stumps. Yet the modern revival of individualized memorials is well represented here too, with striking new monuments. Not to mentions the proliferation of Russian tombstones with their fanciful scenes and babushkaed photos laser-etched onto black granite. They are ubiquitous. Along with their gardens. The Russians love to create miniature gardens on their cemetery plots, and all summer long you’ll see well dressed women hiking back and forth between water spigots and small garden plots. As a consequence, the once somber tones of the cemetery have been enlivened by countless color spots. It’s all good.

And as a consequence Lone Fir gets heavy use. Not only are the plots going fast (we bought two), but the place is always attended by people. All manner of folk drift though reading the stones or stopping by for a picnic lunch, weather permitting. Musicians can sometimes be found playing quietly in the marble forest, and many a reader has found a comfortable stone to rest their back upon. Drinking isn’t a problem; the grounds are much more likely to be used for smoking a joint. It’s still peaceful, after all.

But greatness in a cemetery is not necessarily defined by its use as a park. Most of the cemeteries in the database that I’d mark as “great” (and surely greatness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder), get little or no park use. Which may be too bad, but it’s true.

Mountain View Corbett Cemetery
“Great” has more to do with ambiance than size. Location helps. Mountain View Corbett Cemetery, the eastern most of Metro’s fourteen pioneer cemeteries, has such a close-up view of Mt. Hood and the surrounding agricultural fairyland that, if the wind’s not blowing, makes it a delightful place to be. For a tiny cemetery, it has more than its fair share of personalized monuments, another mark of a great cemetery. Taft Pioneer Cemetery with its majestic view of the Pacific Coast has also inspired above average memorializations. Pleasant Hill Cemetery, on the other hand, while having one of the best caches of personalizations in the state, is located smack alongside busy Hwy. 58 southeast of Eugene. I attribute its lively character to being close to Ken Kesey’s ancestral home. There’s still many a Merry Prankster hiding in the woods of Lane County. In any event, it proves one can have a splendid cemetery in a mediocre setting.

Pleasant Hill Cemetery
Genealogists and local historians might qualify “great” by who, how many, and what kind of records a cemetery possesses. Willamette National would qualify by many standards as a great cemetery, but other than nice lawns and beautiful committal chambers its really only “great” aspect is the personalized memorials hidden behind berms at committal shelter no. 3. Those moved me to tears. But I can see a genealogist going ga-ga over the records. Though I can’t understand how the Vietnam Wall can get such publicity, while the memorials behind the berm are ignored. Go to Dead Man Talking Flickr site and see for yourself. It only scratches the surface.

Willamette National
I qualify cemeteries by how I feel when I stroll around them. That’s how I began. Inveterate backroaders, cemeteries have long been a pleasurable stopping point for Kay and me while traversing the outback. A good place to check out a few stories, get a grip on community history, and see how the locals handle death. Always a fun trip. Approached that way, a cemetery has to stand on its own merits. The stories behind the tombstones will remain enigmas. The making up of ones own imaginary history is often good enough. In any event, who is buried in a cemetery is of little import for the casual visitor, and what constitutes “good” in a cemetery has to be apparent at first glance. Cemeteries are defined by the memorials they keep.

Taft Pioneer Cemetery
That’s my take, anyway. Thank God you have yours.

See you at the sepulcher.