The Whole Death Catalog

by Harold Schechter

  Early Christians living in Rome interred their dead in catacombs—underground burial chambers hewn out of the soft volcanic rock surrounding the city. An estimated six million Christians were entombed in these elaborate subterranean networks, which were also used as places of refuge during times of religious persecution. As writer Penny Col-man describes them in her excellent book Corpses, Coffins, and Crypts: A History of Burial (Henry Holt, 1997):

  The actual graves were cut into the walls, and the walls were frequently painted with religious scenes and portraits of religious leaders. In order to reduce odors, the bodies were usually covered in plaster and sealed in the tombs, and perfumes were constantly burned. When the first level of the catacomb was filled, the second level was built under it. Some catacombs went down six levels.

  In succeeding centuries, churches became the sepulchral site of choice for the devout. At first, only martyrs were interred within the sanctuary itself. Gradually, bishops and other members of the ecclesiastical elite were granted the same right, their decaying corpses installed beneath the altars, behind the walls, or under the stone floors. It wasn’t long before kings and aristocrats were demanding the same privilege. People of less exalted rank were consigned to the hallowed ground of the churchyards.

  Eventually, the overstuffed vaults within the churches produced an insufferable atmosphere—an “abominable smell,” as one observer described it, “impossible to conceal however much the sacred edifices were fumigated with incense, myrrh, and other aromatic odors.” At the same time, the churchyards grew so packed with uncoffined remains that it became impossible to dig a new grave without turning up bones, skulls, and other human carrion.

  Early Christian catacombs.

  The most notorious of these early European burial spots was Paris’s Cimitière des Innocents—the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents—a sprawling mass graveyard in the heart of the city where, for eight hundred years, countless corpses from eighteen parishes were brought for disposal. The shockingly crude burial procedure employed at des Innocents—where communal burial trenches were left open for months while they filled with decaying corpses—was graphically described by one eighteenth-century visitor to the city:

  The dead bodies are laid, side by side, without any earth being put over them until the ground tier is full; then, and not till then, a small layer of earth covers them, and another layer of dead comes on, till by layer upon layer, and dead upon dead, the hole is filled with a mass of human corruption.

  By the 1700s, des Innocents had become so gorged with decomposing remains that, as travel writer Tom Weil puts it, the earth “fairly seethed and bubbled” with putrefaction. So noxious was the fetor emanating from this massive charnel pit that, in 1785, it was closed by parliamentary decree, its reeking contents were exhumed, and millions of bones were transferred to an underground gypsum quarry that became known as the Catacombs and still remains a popular Parisian tourist attraction. From that point on, cemeteries were banned from the precincts of the city.

  In early December 1804—the same week that Napoleon was crowned emperor—a landmark event in mortuary history took place outside of Paris. On a hillside in an eastern suburb, the Cimitière du Père-Lachaise was officially opened. Named after a Jesuit friar—François d’Aix de la Chaise, confessor to Louis XIV—Père-Lachaise represented nothing less than “a turning point in one thousand years of Western history” (according to culture scholar Richard A. Etlin). Designed as both a pastoral resting place for the dead and a rural retreat for city dwellers, it became the world’s first modern—which is to say, carefully laid-out and landscaped—cemetery.

  Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Nineteenth-century engraving.

  Because of its distance from the city, Père-Lachaise initially attracted few paying customers. But after a number of notable remains were transferred to the site—including Molière’s, La Fontaine’s, and the purported bones of Abelard and Héloïse—it became wildly popular among wealthy Parisians, who began to erect hundreds of elaborate sarcophagi, often in the form of miniature chapels. Its charming parklike atmosphere did not survive for very long. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was already well on its way to becoming a sprawling, overcrammed necropolis, “full of tombs, not trees” (in the words of cemetery historian Harold Mythum). By then, however, its main innovations—“provisions that bodies lie only side by side, not atop one another; that cemeteries should be made park-like places, garnished with greenery; that families could buy plots in perpetuity; and that survivors could erect monuments for specific decedents”—had already set the standard for other cemeteries on both sides of the Atlantic.

  In the United States, the first modern “garden cemetery” modeled after Père-Lachaise was Boston’s Mount Auburn, established in 1831 just outside Cambridge. Prior to that time—as David Charles Sloane explains in his illuminating book, The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991)—the burial places of white Americans fell into several categories.

  The earliest pioneers were laid to rest in whatever remote part of the landscape they happened to die in, whether forest, plain, or prairie. Their isolated graves might be marked with slabs of stone or wood, “crudely scrawled with the deceased’s initials.” Often, however, they were left completely anonymous.

  Such lonely burial spots were “soon replaced by clusters of graves as the pioneers’ homesteads grew into small settlements,” writes Sloane. By the early 1800s, the family graveyard had become a common feature of the American frontier. Often “set among the trees on the outskirts of a farmer’s field,” these domestic burying grounds were usually surrounded by a simple wood fence or stone wall. “Markers were placed irregularly within the small enclosure, with an occasional child’s grave disturbing the line of the row because of the smaller size of the grave. The farmer periodically cut away the overgrown grass, and his wife tended any flowers planted inside the wall.”

  One notable exception to this practice was found among the early New England Puritans, who buried their dead around their meetinghouses. Early Puritan graveyards tended to be barren, untended plots, their stark slate markers carved with grim reminders of mortality in the form of winged skulls, hourglasses, bones, and coffins.

  As the nation grew and cities expanded, members of other denominations—following contemporary European custom—interred their dead either in cellar vaults beneath their houses of worship or, more commonly, in the soil of the adjoining churchyards. Sloane cites New York City’s Trinity Church as a prime example of this practice:

  Trinity’s church vaults and churchyard were the primary burial places for the city’s English elite and also much of the rest of the Protestant English population. Contemporaries estimated that by 1800, after one hundred years of use, Trinity churchyard held the remains of over one hundred thousand New Yorkers. Vaults were spread throughout the church and tunneled out from the church into the ground surrounding the building. The burial ground encompassed only a few acres, and no corpses were removed, so space was reused many times. Burials raised the level of the churchyard by several yards during the century; by the nineteenth century, it sat well above the surrounding streets.

  As in Europe, the overcrowded conditions in these metropolitan burial places brought increasingly loud protests from health officials. Reformers demanded the closing of all church graveyards within large cities, decrying them as “stinking quagmires”—“receptacles of putrefying matter and hot-beds of miasmata.” Their fears appeared to be confirmed in 1822, when sixteen thousand New Yorkers were carried off in a yellow fever epidemic that was particularly virulent in the vicinity of the Trinity Church burying ground.

  Keenly aware that his own city was vulnerable to the same hazard from its decrepit neighborhood graveyards, a Boston physician, botanist, and Harvard professor named Joseph Bigelow launched a crusade to establish a large rural cemetery, modeled partly on Père-Lachaise, outside the municipal limits. Joining forces with the Massachusetts H
orticultural Society Bigelow and his associates acquired a picturesque seventy-two-acre tract of land along the Charles River where, in 1831, they opened Mount Auburn.

  Entering through an Egyptian-style gateway, visitors found themselves in an oasis of rolling hills, thick woods, charming dells, and pristine lakes—grounds so lovely and serene that, as Emily Dickinson observed, it seemed “as if Nature had formed the spot with a distinct idea of being a resting place for her children.” With its pastoral charm and sophisticated memorial architecture and statuary, Mount Auburn became an immediate draw, not only for Bostonians who flocked to it on weekends but (as Sloane writes) for travelers “from other American cities who came there to admire its magical setting and to plan how to emulate it in their own towns and cities.”

  By 1861, more than sixty of these sylvan burial spots had sprung up across the country: Brooklyn’s Green-Wood, Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill, Cincinnati’s Spring Grove, Cleveland’s Lake View, and many more. Visitors came by the thousands to wander the graveled footpaths, ride along shaded carriage avenues, admire the splendid plantings, and derive consolation from the sheer natural loveliness of the settings.

  It wasn’t until the early decades of the twentieth century that an entirely new type of cemetery appeared on the American scene—a burial place “that captured the attention of the nation unlike any cemetery since Mount Auburn,” writes Sloane. This was the so-called memorial park, of which the first and most famous (or, depending on your point of view, notorious) example was Los Angeles’s Forest Lawn.

  Founded in 1906 on a piece of land that had proved worthless for any other use, Forest Lawn limped along as a dreary, underutilized graveyard until the arrival, in 1913, of a new manager named Hubert Eaton. A visionary midwestern businessman, Eaton fervently believed that cemeteries should, insofar as possible, avoid anything that might depress a visitor by actually reminding him of death. Viewing the Victorian garden cemeteries as excessively grim—“unsightly stoneyards” whose elaborate tombs did nothing but “chill the heart” with reminders of mortality—he resolved to create a “gladsome” new kind of burial ground, “as unlike other cemeteries as sunshine is unlike darkness.” Forest Lawn, he declared, would be a place

  devoid of misshapen monuments and other customary signs of earthly Death, but filled with towering trees, sweeping lawns, splashing fountains, singing birds, beautiful statuary, cheerful flowers; noble memorial architecture, with interiors of light and color, and redolent of the world’s best history and romances … a place where lovers new and old shall love to stroll and watch the sunset’s glow, planning for the future or reminiscing of the past; a place where artists study and sketch; where school teachers bring happy children to see things they read of in books; where little churches invite, triumphant in the knowledge that from their pulpits only words of Love can be spoken.

  To achieve his lofty aim, Eaton—or “the Builder,” as he preferred to be called—introduced a number of radical innovations. To purge any trace of gloom from his “Garden of Memory,” he banned traditional upright tombstones. Only inconspicuous bronze markers, flush with the ground, were permitted. The rolling landscape was kept as neatly manicured as a suburban front lawn, its gentle contours sporadically broken by neatly trimmed shrubs and small stands of evergreens (no deciduous trees were allowed “because the loss of leaves reminded visitors of death”). Burial sections were identified by sugary names: Eventide, Babyland, Sweet Memories, Vesperland, Kindly Light, Sunrise Slope, and Dawn of Tomorrow.

  Though certain activities, such as picnicking and bike riding, were forbidden, the public was actively encouraged to treat the park as a recreation area. Indeed, under Eaton’s leadership, Forest Lawn was turned into a kind of amusement park—a “Disneyland of death,” as it was later dubbed—complete with museums, replicas of famous artworks, thematic courts organized around inspirational and patriotic exhibits, guided tours, and gift shops. Eaton also revolutionized the way cemeteries did business, opening a magnificent mortuary on the premises and turning his “garden of graves” into a one-stop, full-service shopping place that handled its customers’ every postmortem need.

  Forest Lawn was an immediate and stunning success, attracting thousands of paying customers (who were wooed through aggressive marketing techniques unprecedented in the burial business), luring millions of weekend visitors, and even becoming a favorite site for weddings. The original location in Glendale was eventually supplemented by five other branches in the Los Angeles area. At the same time, memorial parks modeled on Eaton’s creation sprang up across the United States—more than six hundred by the mid-1930s. For sheer excess, however, nothing matches the original, which for more than fifty years has served as a ripe target for satirists—a symbol of middlebrow vulgarity unabashed commercialism, and childish refusal to face the harsh facts of mortality that characterize the “American way of death.”

  RECOMMENDED READING

  Besides the works mentioned previously, significant books about the development of the American cemetery include James J. Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830–1920 (Temple University Press, 1980); Kenneth Jackson and Camilo José Vergara, Silent Cities: The Evolution of the American Cemetery (Princeton Architectural Press, 1989); Blanche Linden-Ward, Silent City on a Hill: Landscapes of Memory and Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery (Ohio State University Press, 1989); Barbara Rubin, Robert Carlton, and Arnold Rubin, Forest Lawn: L.A. in Installments (Hennessey and Ingalls, 1979); and Adela Rogers St. Johns, First Step Up Toward Heaven: Hubert Eaton and Forest Lawn (Prentice-Hall, 1959).

  My God! Can it be possible I have

  To die so suddenly? so young to go

  Under the obscure, cold, rotting, wormy ground!

  To be nailed down into a narrow place;

  To see no more sweet sunshine; hear no more

  Blithe voice of living thing; muse not again

  Upon familiar thoughts, sad, yet thus lost!

  How fearful! to be nothing!

  —PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

  ASK DR. DEATH

  Dear Dr. Death:

  Our high school English teacher, Mrs. Grundy, is making us read Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and my local bookstore is out of the Cliffs-Notes, so I’m stuck reading the whole play, which is, like, really hard. There’s one part where Juliet says she’d rather hide “nightly in a charnel house / O’er covered quite with dead men’s rattling bones” than marry some other guy besides Romeo. Here’s my question: what’s a charnel house? It sounds kind of gross.

  Kimberly from Mrs. Grundy’s

  second-period English

  Dear Kimberly:

  A charnel house is a place—often a small chapel-like building—where dead bodies and old human bones are stored. They have existed throughout the ages and can still be found in some parts of the world.

  In medieval Europe, charnel houses could be found in many small villages, sometimes connected to the church. When the cemetery became full, the old graves were dug up to make room for new occupants and the exhumed bones were stacked inside the charnel house. Shakespeare himself was apparently terrified that his corpse would meet this fate and left a famous warning on his tombstone, supposedly composed by himself:

  Good friend, for Jesus sake forbear

  To dig the dust enclosed here:

  Blest be the man that spares these stones,

  And curst be he that moves my bones.

  The world charnel itself is a variant of carnal, meaning “flesh,” though there was little flesh to be found on the skeletal contents of a typical charnel house. When Juliet thinks about hiding there, she pictures herself lying among “reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls”—stinking old leg bones and decaying skulls missing their lower jaws.

  As you so aptly put it, Kimberly—gross!

  Take Me Out

  to the Graveyard

  Just because a graveyard is a hallowed site where grieving people go to memorialize their dead family members doesn’t mean
that it can’t serve as the perfect place for a delightful weekend outing featuring live entertainment and brunch. That, at any rate, is the thinking behind a growing trend among historical American cemeteries.

  Over the past few years, a number of venerable burial grounds have found themselves in dire financial straits. Home to many beautiful old tombs and monuments that require expensive upkeep, they are unable to generate income in the usual way—that is, by selling interment sites—since they have run out of room for new bodies. As a result, they have begun to experiment with a novel approach, raising funds for badly needed maintenance and repairs by luring visitors with a variety of fun-filled events and activities—or, as an article in the May 25, 2007, New York Times puts it, by “rebranding themselves as a destination for weekend tourists.”

  Take Laurel Hill Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, a 170-year-old graveyard containing all kinds of funerary treasures, from mausoleums adorned with Tiffany windows to splendid examples of Victorian mortuary sculpture. Its traditional revenue stream having dried up (less than 1 percent of its space is available for new burials), conservators have cooked up a variety of ingenious fund-raising schemes, including a day devoted to “bird-watching among the buried,” a guided visit to the graves of notorious inhabitants (the “Sinners, Scandals, and Suicides” tour), and—in commemoration of the six Titanic victims buried on the premises—a “nine-course re-creation of the last supper aboard the ill-fated ocean liner,” complete with liveried waiters and an orchestra playing the “Blue Danube Waltz.”

  1902 Sears, Roebuck catalogue tombstone ad. Courtesy of The Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection.