Graceland Cemetery: A Design History

Chapter 5. Bryan Lathrop and William Le Baron Jenney

87 fiVe Bryan Lathrop and William Le Baron Jenney I n 1877 Thomas Bryan, a consummate politician who was also renowned for his civic stewardship, was called to take a post in the Rutherford Hayes administration as one of the three commissioners of the District of Columbia.1 Just before his nearly twenty-year tenure with Graceland came to an end, he hired the architect and landscape gardener William Le Baron Jenney (1832–1907) for what would prove to be one of the cemetery’s last major landscape initiatives . (Fig. 5.1) In the spring of 1877, as the financial effects of the Panic of 1873 began to abate, the cemetery’s board of managers decided to begin draining Graceland’s undeveloped land, low-lying and to the east, in order to create new burial sites.2 They were perhaps anticipating a ruling by the Illinois Supreme Court that Graceland ’s properties not yet in cemetery use would be subject to taxation ; no doubt in part they sought to avoid any chance of having to pay taxes on this land to the town of Lake View.3 The expansion was announced in a new promotional campaign. In April Graceland ran two different display advertisements in the Chicago Tribune. On April 10, in a short ad ostensibly attempting to dispel the “erroneous impression” that the “best portions of Graceland ” had already been sold, the company announced that it was offering “for the first time, some of the most attractive sections of its grounds” and that its managers had “prepared plans for a comprehensive system of improvements, and purpose to maintain Graceland in the front rank of American Cemeteries.”4 Five 88 Graceland Cemetery days later the company placed a second advertisement that would run six more times during the next few months. This ad extolled the cemetery’s advantages: “great natural beauty,” “undulating surface and fine trees,” and “a gravelly subsoil, giving perfect underdrainage,” attributes Graceland had promoted ever since its dedication nearly twenty years earlier. But it also added that “living springs of water” would “supply the lakes which are to be made and which have been begun.” After noting that the company owned “about 200 acres of land besides that already subdivided ,” the ad promised that “newer sections, and all those which shall be added in the future, will be maintained on the ‘lawn plan.’”5 At a meeting in June the board of managers voted unanimously to construct a “ditch and tile drain” from the “low ground on the eastern side of Graceland Cemetery, along Sulzer Street to Lake Michigan”—the cost to the company not to exceed fifteen hundred dollars.6 Indeed, the board was ever mindful that transforming the sloughs would require “large and costly improvements ” before the area could “by the art of the architect and landscape gardener be made healthful and beautiful.”7 Making the tile drain, along with the design and construction of artificial lakes and laying out new burial sections resonant with Strauch’s 5.1. William Le Baron Jenney (1832–1907). Courtesy Chicago History Museum (ICHi-19760). Bryan Lathrop and William Le Baron Jenney 89 lawn plan ideals, were tasks requiring a professional landscape gardener, ideally one skilled in drainage techniques. William le Baron Jenney Although he is most often remembered today as the architect of the first steel-framed skyscraper, the Home Insurance Building (1885) in Chicago, in Thomas Bryan’s day William Le Baron Jenney was known as a landscape gardener as much as an architect. Indeed, in nineteenth-century Chicago little distinction was made between the two pursuits, so long as the talent and will were present, and it was not anomalous that he won the Graceland commission. And, as Walter L. Creese notes, Jenney was “not only the cool technician-engineer he is often depicted [as], but also, like Olmsted, an environmental strategist.”8 What brought him to Bryan’s notice? For one thing, Bryan was probably already aware that Jenney had been substantially involved in two significant projects in the Chicago area—the newly constructed town of Riverside, and the improvement of Chicago ’s western parklands. He may have known too that Jenney had designed a cemetery in Moline, Illinois, also named Riverside. In 1869, when H. W. S. Cleveland began publishing essays such as The Public Grounds of Chicago to herald his professional arrival, Jenney had already been working in the city for...