Existing comment:
The 19th Century Garden Cemetery: A Comforting Place to Contemplate Death:
"And the hope I feel musing on a sepulcher, Resting on Faith, discloses a world more pure. What pious throng now welcomes me with tears?"
-- Meditations, Alphonse Lamartine, 1820
In a break with traditional church yard burial grounds that offered little in the way of comfort for the bereaved, cemeteries that were constructed in the 19th Century were designed to be embodiments of the comforting land of death.
Beginning in the England in the 1820s, "Garden Cemeteries" were built by secular organizations, outside of towns and apart from existing church cemeteries.
The first Garden Cemetery in the United States was Mt. Auburn, which was begun west of Boston by the Massachusetts Horticultural Society in 1831.
Such cemeteries soon became popular places to visit departed loved ones, enjoy picnics, and contemplate Death and Nature.
"Then let this haunt be sacred.
For the feet Of strangers,
here in future days shall turn,
As to some Mecca of philosophy;
And here the admiring youth
shall come to seek Some relic
of the great and good -- whos [sic]
fame Shall gather greenness
from the hand of time."
-- Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Mount Auburn Illustrated, 1847
Garden Cemeteries spread throughout America. Mt. Olivet in Frederick is one such example, as is the National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where President Lincoln delivered his "Gettysburg Address" during the dedication in November 1863.
The Beautiful Death culture included melancholy rituals of mourning and depictions of death.
American mourning ritual included the making of bracelets and other jewelry from the deceased's hair. (Examples are in the case below.) |