“Lesson Plan for Chapter 2: The Crown Jewel of Kentucky: Louisville’s Cave Hill Cemetery by Joy M. Giguere” in “A Resource for Instructors”
Lesson Plan for Chapter 2: The Crown Jewel of Kentucky: Louisville’s Cave Hill Cemetery by Joy M. Giguere
The learning exercises outlined in this section could be completed at Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville but are equally applicable to any of the similarly designed rural cemeteries established east of the Mississippi River during the nineteenth century. The following list provides a selection of major rural cemeteries by year of establishment:
Mount Auburn Cemetery (1831), Cambridge, Mass.
Mount Hope Cemetery (1834), Bangor, Maine
Laurel Hill Cemetery (1836), Philadelphia, Pa.
Green-Wood Cemetery (1838), Brooklyn, N.Y.
Green Mount Cemetery (1839), Baltimore, Md.
Allegheny Cemetery (1844), Pittsburgh, Pa.
Albany Rural Cemetery (1844), Albany, N.Y.
Spring Grove Cemetery (1844), Cincinnati, Ohio
Frankfort Cemetery (1844), Frankfort, Ky.
Swan Point Cemetery (1846), Providence, R.I.
Cave Hill Cemetery (1848), Louisville, Ky.
Bellefontaine Cemetery (1849), St. Louis, Mo.
Hollywood Cemetery (1849), Richmond, Va.
Lexington Cemetery (1849), Lexington, Ky.
Magnolia Cemetery (1850), Charleston, S.C.
Oakland Cemetery (1850), Atlanta, Ga.1
Elmwood Cemetery (1852), Memphis, Tenn.
Oakdale Cemetery (1852), Wilmington, N.C.
Greenwood Cemetery (1852), New Orleans, La.
Landscape Design Exercise
Upon arrival to the cemetery, first visit the main office, where you should be able to get a cemetery map. Depending on the size of the cemetery, you may choose to walk or drive from section to section.
Rural cemeteries incorporated a variety of common elements, regardless of where they were established. Take note of the following aspects of the landscape and try to answer the accompanying questions:
- Does the cemetery have a principal gateway at the entrance? If so, can you identify the architectural style (e.g., Gothic Revival, Egyptian Revival, Romanesque)? Are there only entrance posts, an archway, or a full carriage gateway with lodges on either side? Are there any signs that indicate when the entrance was constructed, and if so, is it the original entrance?
- As you travel from section to section in the cemetery, observe the design of the landscape--the size of the roadways and footpaths, whether the ground is hilly, whether there are water features (ponds, streams, etc.), the kinds of plant life (trees, bushes, flowers). Based on the landscaping details alone, can you identify older versus newer sections of the cemetery that may have been added in the years or decades after it was first established? How does the landscaping design change from one area of the cemetery to the next? What does this tell us about the aesthetic values of the public and how they changed over time?
- As an extension of #2, take note of the gravestone and monument designs, styles, sizes, and materials. What kind(s) of iconography (imagery) do you see on the grave markers and from what time periods? What trends and changes can you observe in terms of material and style from one section of the cemetery to the next?2 How are the grave markers laid out within the section--are they in neat rows, or do they appear to be more in a scattered pattern? Are they vertical or flush to the ground? If there are side-hill tombs or freestanding mausoleums, where are they located? Are they all concentrated together within the cemetery or scattered around?
- Taking all together your observations from #1 through #3, consider the following: What changes can you observe in the landscape over the course of time? What do these changes indicate about public taste in landscape design, attitudes toward death and mourning, and advances in technology?
Necrogeography Exercise
For this exercise, you will consider the necrogeography of the cemetery--that is, the locations of the dead within the cemetery landscape.
- As you travel through the cemetery, consider how the ranks and status of the living were preserved in death--for example, the size and complexity of grave markers and monuments provide an indication as to the relative wealth of an individual or family, as well as their standing within the community. Some rural cemeteries were designed so that the burials of wealthy and working-class people appear intermixed on the landscape. In others, public lots for individual burials were separate from those areas where larger family lots were available for sale. By observing the distribution of monument sizes and family versus individual burial plots, consider not only how socioeconomic rank was preserved, but the degree to which the classes were physically separated or allowed to intermingle in death.
- The identification of race in any historical landscape presents a greater challenge to students and scholars alike. If possible, before entering the cemetery, inquire at the front office whether a separate section containing the burials for people of color is located anywhere in the cemetery. Some cemeteries, such as Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, barred the burials of African Americans and the poor when it was founded. Others, such as Frankfort Cemetery in Kentucky, established a separate "colored" section. Many cemeteries maintained segregationist burial policies and practices until well into the twentieth century, so in addition to identifying the absence or presence of "colored" burial sections, you may be able to acquire information from the cemetery office concerning integrated Black burials, when they began, and their locations in the cemetery. By examining the necrogeography of race in the rural cemetery, you can then consider the broader nature of racial politics and segregation within the community of the living in that particular city or state.
- In many rural cemeteries across the country, soldiers' burial sections and national cemeteries were established within their boundaries during or shortly after the Civil War. As you look at the cemetery map, ask yourself: Is there a national cemetery or soldiers' section present? Is there a Confederate soldiers' burial section? If both exist, how are they related geographically--are they near each other, or on opposite ends of the cemetery? How large are the soldiers' burial sections compared to each other? Is there a central soldiers' monument in either or both sections? How might the presence or absence of a central monument speak to the popular sentiment of the community in the aftermath of the war?
- Based on your observations of the cemetery landscape (including plants and other landscaping features), monuments, and the necrogeography of the space, how does the cemetery you are in possibly reflect the region where it is located? Does it bear features that make it more distinctively northern or southern? What aspects of the cemetery landscape, in your view, appear universal and transcend regional variation, and what others might be inherently unique to the local area? Is there visual evidence contained within the landscape that, if you didn't know what town or city you were in, could tell you whether this was a northern or a southern burial landscape?
Notes
- Oakland Cemetery, which originally consisted of six acres when it was established in 1850, was not initially designed as a rural cemetery, but the rural cemetery aesthetic was increasingly applied as the cemetery expanded during the 1850s and 1860s.
- A good resource to help with understanding gravestone symbolism/iconography is Douglas Keister, Stories in Stone: A Field Guide to Cemetery Symbolism and Iconography (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 2004).
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