Graceland Cemetery: A Design History

Chapter 4. A Decade of Expansion

65 four A Decade of Expansion I n April 1865, back east in Thomas Bryan’s native Virginia, Robert E. Lee surrendered on behalf of the Confederate forces after four long years of war. Only six days after peace descended, however , Abraham Lincoln’s assassination violently replaced jubilation with grief. The nation had lost its leader, Illinois its adopted son, and Bryan a personal friend. So close was their friendship that he was awarded the privilege of serving as a pallbearer both in the Chicago funerary procession on May 1 and at the martyred president’s final funeral service in Springfield on May 4. Lincoln was interred at the Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, designed in the late 1850s by William Saunders, one of Graceland’s first landscape gardeners. In the coming months, Saunders would lay out the tomb’s six-acre surrounds and position the National Lincoln Monument within them. Although his home state had joined the Confederacy, Bryan was “ardently pro-Union,” holding the view that “Southern leaders were ‘arch traitors, alone responsible for the war.’”1 During the war, Bryan patriotically assumed a leadership role, “organizing forces, and providing for them in the field”; he presided over the Northwestern Sanitary Fair of 1865, which was held in Chicago and raised over $300,000 in war relief funds.2 He also spearheaded the effort to construct a soldiers’ home in the city and served as its president.3 In that capacity, “he purchased and gave to his wounded veterans the original copy of the Emancipation Proclamation ,” which enabled them to raise funds by selling lithographed copies.4 Bryan’s initiatives did not escape President Lincoln’s atten- 66 Graceland Cemetery tion. Moreover, in recognition of his “faithful services in maintaining the honor, integrity and supremacy of the government of the United States,” Bryan was later elected, by unanimous vote, to the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States.5 More broadly, the Civil War was, as the historian Theodore J. Karamanski observes, “a crucial event in the development of nineteenth-century Chicago,” and he cites the Union Stock Yard, which opened on December 25, 1865, as a symbol of the effect of the war on the city’s growth: The war directed the flow of vital food commodities away from Chicago’s most persistent urban rivals, which were too close to the front lines during the first two years of the war and were hurt by stoppages of trade on the Mississippi Rivers . Because the war cost St. Louis its status as the major grain distribution center and Cincinnati lost its distinction as the pork-packing capital, Chicago emerged as the logical center for the meatpacking, wheat distribution, and related industries. Heavy industry took root in Chicago during the war to provide Union forces with the rolling stock and rails needed to transport troops and supplies.”6 Chicago was also home to one of the Union’s largest prisoner-of-war camps, Camp Douglas, which at times held more than ten thousand Confederate soldiers. The mortality rate among the prisoners was extremely high, in large part because of poor sanitation and lack of medical care. By the war’s end, the city itself had lost nearly four thousand men.7 Some of these casualties, including at least one who “died in rebel service,” were interred at Graceland.8 the Gr acel and cemetery improVement f und In December 1862 the Chicago Tribune reported on what it considered the “fatal defects” of Rosehill and Graceland cemeteries, its scrutiny ostensibly attracted to the pair by their beauty and Chicagoans’ nascent pride in them.9 The problem lay in the cemeteries’ charters. As long as Graceland and Rosehill “have lots to sell,” the newspaper argued, “it is for their interest to keep their improvements in good order.” But what would happen, it asked, after all the lots were sold? Who would maintain the cemetery then? Could “Mr. Bryan” be ex- A Decade of Expansion 67 pected to “incur an annual charge of three thousand to five thousand dollars for doing that which will yield no return?” Neither charter included a provision “compelling the proprietors, as they sell lots, to place a certain percentage of the proceeds of each sale in the hands of trustees for investment,” with the income specifically earmarked for maintenance of the grounds. A few days later, however, Bryan revealed that when he...