Graceland Cemetery: A Design History by Christopher Vernon (review)

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the publication of Blanche Linden-Ward’s Silent City on a Hill (1989) and David Sloane’s The Last Great Necessity (1991) did much to define the historical conception of the 19th century rural cemetery movement in the United States. These works firmly grounded the cemetery as part of the development of the profession of landscape architecture and also helped build support for the recognition and preservation of cemeteries as important, designed landscapes. Since then, however, the rural cemetery has been something of a “dead” topic in landscape history. With the possible exception of Keith Eggener’s Cemeteries (2010), a lavishly illustrated overview, few innovative full-length works on the subject have been published—until now, with the arrival of Christopher Vernon’s Graceland Cemetery: A Design History. The book breaks new ground by delivering on its subtitle, explicating the evolution of a place rather than discussing the evolution of the typology.

Thankfully, Vernon assumes the reader already knows the social and cultural history of the American cemetery and instead begins his story by contextualizing Graceland within the history of landscape design in Chicago region. Together, the introduction and first chapter provide an overview of Chicago’s urban development in the mid 1800s, reminding us that Chicago’s design history does not begin with the Worlds’ Columbian Exposition in 1893. Vernon contrasts the city’s early conditions with its badly fitting motto Urbs in Horto to squarely situate Graceland within the city’s aspirations to become a “City in a Garden.” Looking at a smaller design scale, chapter one also relates Graceland to the residential landscapes of Chicago via the home grounds of the cemetery’s founder Thomas Bryan, a Chicago lawyer and real estate investor, adding some nuances to our understanding of the mutualistic relationship between the rise of landscape architecture and residential design during the era of A.J. Downing. The context of Chicago, too, is never far away throughout the rest of the book, as Vernon consistently relates Graceland to its surroundings, via descriptions of real estate transactions or other designs in the Chicago area.

Chapters 2 through 7 provide a complete account of the first four decades of the cemetery’s development, from 1860 to 1900. Vernon adeptly covers all facets of the cemetery’s history, from the formation of the cemetery company to the technical aspects of storm-water calculations to the aesthetic details of monument placement. The central historical narrative, however, revolves around the succession of designers—Swain Nelson, William Saunders, H.W.S. Cleveland, William Le Baron Jenney, and O.C. Simonds—who worked on the site. Vernon describes in detail each man’s distinct physical contribution to the design, from Nelson’s and Saunder’s initial layouts to Cleveland’s planting design, Jenney’s drainage, grading, and lakes, and Simonds’ final orchestration of the whole via planting design and scenic composition.

Happily, the book is not just an enumeration of each man’s individual design achievements. Instead, Vernon uses the historical chronology of Graceland’s construction to explore the ways sites are collaboratively or sequentially designed and redesigned. By examining this process the book necessarily rejects the cult of the individual designer so common in much design history as Vernon recounts cases of awkward collaboration (during Nelson’s and Saunders’ apparently simultaneous employment as consultants); stylistic adaptation (Cleveland’s alterations of Saunders’ plans); and wholesale destruction (Simonds’ obliteration of Saunders’ grotto). Vernon also writes at length about the important client-designer relationships that influenced the design. Both Bryan, who supervised the cemetery’s first 20 years of development, and his nephew Bryan Lathrop, who took over as superintendent in 1877, not only selected designers, but also participated in the design process. Lathrop, in particular, had a penchant for planting and, as Vernon recounts, had some major...