Oakland Cemetery sits in an eerie silence. It’s July, the resting souls are summer-cloaked by huge oak and magnolia trees that mute the bustle of southeast Atlanta which surrounds Oakland’s many acres. It is a quiet unlike any I’ve heard and its penetrating stillness keeps returning to me long after my visit.
The disassociated silence could be so many things because this Victorian memorial site is unlike any of the many burial grounds I have visited. It is a time capsule adorned in the garden traditions of its own period with a studied look into the Confederacy, 19th century Jewish rites, aristocratic Atlantan burial plots, and the resting places of slaves and paupers. In fact, the visual history of Oakland is so thick that the more modern gravesites, like those of golfer Bobby Jones and Mayor Maynard Jackson, seem out of place.
A main attraction of Oakland is how accessible it is. People are obviously using its beautiful, sometimes age-crumbled, pathways for contemplative walks or serious runs connected to Atlanta’s Beltline. Others are just strolling around, reading gravestones randomly. We went on a tour. Actually we went on two tours. It was hot, but it was too interesting to leave. That’s Jasper “Jack” Smith who sits at the entrance to the oldest burial plots in Oakland.
His is one of 55 mausolea within the "park," which is what Victorians liked to call their burial gardens. Here the Vics wanted living relatives to enjoy themselves while honoring the memories of their dead. They shared picnics, pruned exotic plants, and lazed away long afternoons among the groomed plots of their neighbors and the “residents” of Oakland, as the guide called the 70,000 spending eternity here.
Garden cemeteries were a fairly new idea when the city fathers of Atlanta purchased grounds for Oakland in 1850. Prior to this, burials took place in family plots or churchyards where the the most favored sites faced east so the dead could be assured of being on the right side of the sun on Judgment Day. Souls of lesser importance – like bastards, the stillborn, suicides, and strangers - were generally buried in the northern corner of a yard, far from the sight of redemption (prairieghost.com/cemeteryhistory).
Large, pubic graveyards didn’t exist in the United States (or Europe) until 1831. Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts launched the movement, according to Keith Eggener ‘s book Cemeteries. The professor of American art and architecture (University of Missouri) reports that the Transcendentalists of the time were “fascinated by burial grounds, by the coming together of these disparate states of life and death, nature and culture.”
Like Eggener, I am attracted to cemeteries, (see previous blog), and I’ve loved the Transcendentalists since I first met them in a college class in Boston a long time ago, so I’m delighted it is they who cultivated the idea of the “rural cemetery park.” According to the professor’s history, the concept preceded all public spaces - recreational ones, as well as art museums or even botanical gardens. Consequently, when rural cemeteries opened in the 1830s, the living were drawn by their green stretches of horticultural magnificence amid artistic sculptures in locations apart from the city.
All of this is evident at Oakland where tireless volunteers, even on the hottest of days, tell visitors as many spirit stories as the allotted time allows. One of my favorites is the record of a letter held by the custodians of Oakland. It was written to the parents of a dead Confederate soldier from a different state. The missive tells the family that their son’s stone is supported by a magnolia sapling. Today the marker leans against the massive trunk of a 150-year-old tree, pictured below:
The last plots in Oakland were sold in 1884, but there are still regular burials today and those, too, come with interesting stories. Consider the gravesite of Ollivette Eugenia Smith Allison (1923-2010) who was the executive director of Carrie Steele-Pitts Home for years. The first residence for Atlanta’s black orphans was founded in 1888 by Carrie Steele who, when working as a maid in Union Station, was astonished by the number of black babies abandoned there. Decades later, Ollivette Allison came to the home as a 12-year-old orphan and never left. She became known as “Great Mother.” Her monument is adorned with an elephant because elephants never abandon orphaned calves, but immediately accept them into the fold. Ms. Allison did this for an estimated 5,000 babies over the course of her career.
There are symbolic touches like this all around Oakland. They may be in a memorial depicting a cut tree trunk, indicating a life cut short in youth or in a tall arch, representing one's soul being at death's door to paradise. There are also symbols of the times - like a hitching post at a corner, black iron with a wrought ring to hold a horse's harness or a stepping stone near the wall of a family's gravesite, placed there for the visitors to disembark easily from their carriages.
The Transcendentalists of the 1830s said that garden cemeteries brought death into life. Oakland brings the deaths and the lives of Victorians to the forefront in ways that one can experience few other places.
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Suzanne McLain Rosenwasser is the author of several books:
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