In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Cities of the Dead for the Living in the Ohio Valley
  • Jeffrey Smith (bio)

Morning dawned on July 25, 1848, as on any other Tuesday in Louisville, Kentucky. River levels were rising, steamboats came and went, news arrived via the “magnetic telegraph,” and businesses hummed along. At Cave Hill Cemetery on the far eastern outskirts of the city, people were making final preparations for the dedication ceremony at 5:00 p.m. The Morning Courier expressed its excitement on the front page: “We trust that the services for this occasion, with the interest that every citizen should feel in this most important subject, will draw a large assemblage of ladies and gentlemen to the groves of the Cemetery grounds this afternoon.”1 This was not to be just any graveyard, though, but a “rural cemetery,” a new breed of burial ground spreading across American cities. Less than two decades before, in September 1831, people had gathered for a similar dedication of Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the first of the rural cemeteries. More followed— Mount Hope in Bangor, Maine, in 1834, Laurel Hill in Philadelphia in 1836, Green Mount in Baltimore in 1838, Green-Wood in Brooklyn, New York, the following year, and a number of others in the next handful of years. By mid-century, cemeteries that stood on their design and business nomenclature became one of the defining characteristics of American cities. These cemeteries spread quickly in the Ohio Valley during those two decades, with cities and towns creating burial grounds on the rural cemetery model (see table 1).2

Select rural cemeteries in the Ohio Valley
Cemetery City Year founded
Woodland Dayton, Ohio 1841
Linden Grove Covington, Kentucky 1843
Frankfort Frankfort, Kentucky 1844
Allegheny Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 1844
Spring Grove Cincinnati, Ohio 1845
Cave Hill Louisville, Kentucky 1848
Lexington Lexington, Kentucky 1849
Oak Hill Evansville, Indiana 1852

[End Page 46]

These new rural cemeteries shaped the way people thought about the dead and their commemoration in cities and towns in the Midwest. The rural cemetery movement spread to cities in the Ohio River valley in the 1830s and 1840s as a response to urbanization and the inherent problems that accompanied it. These cemeteries constituted a new type of urban amenity that expanded well beyond the traditional role of burying and warehousing the dead to address a number of new and emerging urban problems for the living. In so doing, these cemeteries shaped the ways people thought about burial grounds in smaller towns as well, throughout the Ohio Valley and beyond transforming the idea of what a cemetery should look like. Whether in cities like Louisville, Cincinnati, and Lexington or smaller communities such as Covington or Bowling Green, cemeteries became places marked by new uses. Visitors came to be near nature and to gain new (albeit highly managed) versions of collective community memory, which changed both cultural ideas about these civic spaces and their appearances.

Rhetoric of memory, hope, and redemption aside, these cemeteries were businesses that needed to be operated as such, a paradox that sat alongside their role in fulfilling both sacred and secular needs. Cemeteries applied for and received state charters that usually outlined the type of business and identified board members, just as any other business. Since almost all of them relied on generating their own revenue, cemetery association boards became mindful of the need to manage and regulate the products they offered—which included visitors’ experiences in and perceptions of the space. Cemeteries regularly published rules and regulations, usually in small booklets that also included other materials to help market the association. The rules conveyed the message that the cemetery was a well-regulated space that would remain attractive over and not start to look like an old and decrepit graveyard. Boards regulated markers, for example, many adopting standard language about the need for tasteful markers and the right of the cemetery to remove anything it found distasteful. Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, for example, admonished lot owners in 1853 to “try to have some regard to private taste in improving lots and erecting monuments—and especially that everybody won’t put up an obelisk.”3 Regulations about marker installation took on similar...

pdf

Share