Houston's Silent Garden: Glenwood Cemetery, 1871-2009 (review)

Extensively researched, skillfully written, carefully organized, and beautifully illustrated, Houston's Silent Garden: Glenwood Cemetery, 1871-2009, is quite simply a stunning book. Suzanne Turner and Joanne Seale Wilson begin by placing the history of Houston's most famous cemetery within a broad international and national context by delving into European burial traditions and their eventual translations into New World practices. An introductory chronology combining elements of landscape design, cemetery development, and Houston history sets the stage for the book's main chapters, in which the authors masterfully weave history, geography, biography, horticulture, institutional development, culture, and art into a fascinating tale.

As the young city of Houston developed in the mid-nineteenth century, several small graveyards that served the growing population tragically began to fill with victims of numerous epidemics of yellow fever, cholera, and other highly communicable diseases. By the late 1860s, Houston's city officials and leading citizens began to address sanitation and public health issues, including those exacerbated by overtaxed and poorly maintained graveyards. Influenced by the growing garden cemetery movement taking hold in the eastern United States, as evidenced by such bucolic settings as Mount Auburn Cemetery in Boston, Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, and Oakwood Cemetery in Raleigh, a group of Houston businessmen came up with a plan for a new, park-like cemetery to be located on more than fifty wooded acres along Buffalo Bayou west of downtown. Officially established by legislative charter in 1871—the first for a private cemetery company in Texas—the Houston Cemetery Company began as a publicly owned stock company run by some of Houston's most prominent citizens, including banker and cotton broker T. W. House, businessman and town promoter John T. Brady, attorney and surveyor John H. Manly, who is credited with the initial design of the cemetery, and nurseryman Alfred Whitaker, whose horticultural expertise helped set the stage for the site's landscape development.

With a design markedly similar to that of Raleigh's Oakwood Cemetery—with which Manly was intimately familiar—the new Glenwood Cemetery, with its winding roads and paths, water features, and carefully landscaped grounds, quickly became not only the preferred burial place for prominent Houstonians, but also an excursion destination for citizens of the larger Gulf Coast region. Quoting the Galveston Daily News in 1885: "The cemetery has become one of the most beautiful spots in the whole State. As the grass increases, and it grows bright with flowers blending in harmony, and the cultivated trees and shrubbery expand with luxurious leaves, Glenwood may then perhaps be compared with the finest cemeteries in the land" (71).

Beyond the story of the cemetery's founding and its impressive cultural and landscape history, the authors devote a large section to the monumental art of the cemetery, and this is where Paul Hester's photography truly shines. With carefully chosen images and informative captions, the photography enhances the book's story to a great degree and makes it a visually stunning volume. Combined with the excellent drawings and maps, the images serve to complete the picture, so to speak, of the cemetery and its significance to Houston's history. A chapter containing brief biographies of prominent Houstonians buried at Glenwood further establishes Houston's Silent Garden as an important social history, detailing the lives of pioneers, religious and business leaders, artists, and elected officials. Appendices list tree species and bird species at the site, as well as officers and directors of the nonprofit Glenwood Cemetery Association.

Although its large format and extensive illustrations might at first attract potential buyers who wish to add to their coffee table book collections, closer examination of this volume by serious readers will reveal an impressive narrative that adds significantly to the literature of Texas history, horticulture, cemetery design, city...