Graceland Cemetery: A Design History

Introduction

3 Introduction G raceland Cemetery, laid out over several decades on a sandy ridge in northern Chicago, eventually became one of the best known landscapes in the world. In 1915, more than fifty years after its dedication, the parklike setting was identified by the horticulturist Wilhelm Miller as “perhaps the most famous example of landscape gardening designed by a western man.” Miller rhapsodically continued: “It is more than a mere cemetery, for it is full of spiritual suggestion, and its wonderful effects produced by trees and shrubs native to Illinois have profoundly influenced the planting of home grounds.”1 Graceland’s naturelike planting compositions also influenced the design of parks, campuses, and institutional grounds throughout the Midwest and beyond, bolstering an indigenous “Prairie School” of landscape design whose most famous practitioner was the Danish-born landscape architect Jens Jensen. The planting compositions that transformed Graceland were the work of Ossian Cole Simonds, the cemetery’s superintendent for more than three decades. Simonds used Graceland as his private design laboratory, experimenting with lyrical combinations of common trees and shrubs—such as oak, maple, ash, hornbeam, hawthorn, witch hazel, dogwood, and elder—many of which he transplanted from the wild. Carefully cultivated in the cemetery setting, these plants eventually achieved great stature and beauty, stirring not only aesthetic admiration but pride over the burgeoning American movement in landscape design. Photographs of Graceland were featured in many period publications, conveying 4 Graceland Cemetery an appreciation for the quiet beauties of native vegetation, preferred by “cultured” persons over the “showiest plants from all foreign lands.”2 In the years leading up to the First World War, nativist language laced increasingly polemical writings by Miller and others. Graceland’s beauty was breathtaking, but more important to some, it had become a symbol of American purity. To most visitors Graceland was also a source of solace and peace, a welcoming haven in an urban setting. The beauty of this place owed much to Simonds, but it also owed much to the layers of design that shaped the framework on which Simonds worked. This work was accomplished by a sequence of practitioners that included two looming figures in the history of American landscape, H. W. S. Cleveland and William Le Baron Jenney. These men, and those that came before, firmly believed in the salutary force of nature. And, in fact, legions of admiring visitors regularly made the trip to Graceland to lose themselves in the mirrorlike perfection of Lake Willowmere, to watch spring-blooming bulbs emerge under the wide-spreading branches of native oaks, and to observe native haws and maples take on the russet tones of autumn. They continue to do so today. There is little question that Graceland’s status as one of America ’s most important cemeteries is attributable to its conception as a work of landscape art. This book aims to recover the multilayered history of this iconic landscape. Design does not occur in a vacuum; along with the aesthetic vision of designer and client, the designs of gardens, parks, and cemeteries also encapsulate broader social concerns. Consequently, our study of Graceland Cemetery must begin with a consideration of its wider context. Chicago’s origins can be traced back to the late 1700s, with the founding of a trading post at the mouth of the Chicago River. In 1803 the U.S. Army built Fort Dearborn on a small hill overlooking the river. The site of the future city, as the architectural historian Robert Bruegmann describes it, was “an inhospitable stretch of marshy terrain that smelled of [wild] onions” on the southwestern shores of Lake Michigan .3 The area was first used as a portage between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River, which would enable the city’s growth as a continental transportation hub. From its original lakeshore environs, Chicago—and soon the nation—would expand westward into one of Introduction 5 America’s most distinctive natural landscapes, the prairies; although greatly altered by agriculture today, the gently undulating prairies once covered much of the midwestern and western United States and Canada. Chicago had just over four thousand residents when it was incorporated as a city in 1837—officially adopting the motto Urbs in Horto, or “City in a Garden.” Urbs in Horto registered more an aspiration than it did the fledgling city’s reality. City boosters such as William B. Ogden (Chicago ’s first mayor and later a member...