Localism and Nationalism in the City of the Dead: The Rural Cemetery Movement in the Antebellum South

While visiting Boston in the spring of 1847, Richmond, Virginia, businessmen Joshua J. Fry and William H. Haxall toured Mount Auburn Cemetery in nearby Cambridge. Established in 1831 as the nation's first rural cemetery—so named because of its adherence to a natural, rural aesthetic despite its suburban location—Mount Auburn was famous throughout the United States and Western Europe for its beautiful landscape, splendid monuments, and "solemn grandeur." Inspired by their experience, Fry and Haxall resolved to establish a similar cemetery for their own city. After making appeals to silversmith William Mitchell Jr. and Isaac Davenport, a senior partner in the firm of Davenport and Allen, the four men purchased Harvie's Woods, a plot of land that "bordered several sites already popular with those escaping the bustle of the city, including Clarke's Springs, the grounds of Major John Clarke's estate, and Belvidere, the former home of William Byrd III." In August, the men organized a board of directors, whose members included Thomas H. Ellis, president of the James River and Kanawha Canal Company, and New England transplants James Henry Gardner, a shoe merchant, and Horace L. Kent, a wholesale dry goods merchant. In February 1848 Philadelphia architect John Notman furnished the design for the proposed cemetery as well as its name—Hollywood Cemetery, due to the abundance of holly trees on the grounds. At the cemetery's formal dedication on June 25, 1849, Oliver P. Baldwin compared the newly established burial place with its counterparts in the Northeast, declaring "that a more beautiful place could not have been selected for a tabernacle for the dead."¹

At the time of Hollywood Cemetery's dedication, the development of rural cemeteries had expanded well beyond the confines of the Northeast, as civic-minded urban citizens across much of the nation joined what would come to be called the rural cemetery movement. From Baltimore to St. Louis and south to Savannah and New Orleans, rural cemeteries not only answered the immediate needs of expanding urban communities that required more burial space, but also offered those communities the opportunity to experiment with landscaping for the purposes of aesthetics and public leisure in an era before the widespread establishment of public parks. The literature on the rural cemetery movement and its significance to antebellum American culture is extensive, but most of the extant scholarship focuses on examples in the Northeast, especially Mount Auburn in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, and Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.² While studies of specific southern rural cemeteries have been published, these explorations lack attention to regional patterns and to the significance of rural cemeteries to antebellum urban southern culture and identity. Such studies have largely taken for granted the idea that white urban southerners, driven by universally shared middle-class ideals regarding land use, gentility, and care for the dead, blindly imitated northern models.³

The absence of any broad treatment of the rural cemetery movement and its meaning for the urban South is likely due, at least in part, to the cultural transformation of southern rural cemeteries in the aftermath of the Civil War. For example, Americans since the late nineteenth century have regarded Richmond's Hollywood Cemetery as a shrine to the Confederate dead, and with good reason. In addition to serving as the final resting place of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and numerous Confederate generals, most notably George E. Pickett and J. E. B. Stuart, Hollywood's Confederate burial section contains the bodies of more than 18,000 soldiers from throughout the South, whose sacrifice to the Confederate cause is marked in perpetuity by the looming ninety-foot pyramid completed in 1869 by city engineer Charles H. Dimmock. A number of historians of Civil War memory and the Lost Cause have observed that Hollywood, like other rural cemeteries throughout the South, became the central landscape in which white southerners fashioned a postwar regional identity steeped in Confederate heritage and articulated through the language of southern exceptionalism. As...