I love exploring a new cemetery I’ve never been to. Looking for symbols on old tombstones I don’t have a picture of ( I collect cemetery symbols like baseball cards), or reading a great legend about devil’s chairs or glowing tombstones are all part of the wonder and mystery in our cemeteries. Cemeteries have long been the subject of midnight stories and superstitions around the world. The word cemetery comes from Greece and means, “sleeping place.” Our modern idea of a cemetery is a relatively new concept considering the span of history. Read on for a small history of our final resting place.
Cemeteries used to be the hot place to hang out. Too bad it’s considered “creepy” by today’s standards by most if you enjoy hanging out in one. Plenty of people run, ride bikes or walk in their local cemeteries, but going to the cemetery to socialize or have a picnic? That’s just too strange for most Americans, unless you’re a ghost hunter. But it wasn’t that odd for the Victorians and the beginning of the “rural cemetery movement.”
“Ok people, the bodies are falling out onto the sidewalk…”
One could say our modern cemeteries were spawned from greed, overcrowding and disease. Other cultures and earlier people practiced cremation and other forms of corpse removal that involved a lost less space. Religion in our society played a large role when it came to the disposal of a dead body. Hindu’s and Buddhists have practiced cremation for a long time, but Christianity didn’t believe in cremation like the other religions. The body was a temple of the Holy Spirit. Internment into the ground or some type of burial chamber was preferred. Cremation was shunned because it was what those “pagans” did and it destroyed the physical body that needed to be around for the Resurrection and Judgment Day.
As time progressed and people started to spread like an ameba, countries like England and France found they were running into a few problems with their dead. Everyone wanted to be buried in the churchyard. The closer to God, the better. The Church turned the buying of grave sites into a lucrative practice. Selling expensive spots inside of the church was even more profitable because people felt they were “closer to God within the church.” Churches such as West Minster Abby in London are brimming with bodies. And those plain people getting buried outside the church? Well, once their bodies were decomposed (or not decomposed), they could sell the lot over again and make even more money on the same space. It wasn’t uncommon to find seven or more bodies buried in the same grave. Churchyards would be so packed with dead bodies, one could be walking along the street and find the churchyard ten feet or higher than the ground level they were walking on. Some churches even experienced a rising of their interior floors due to the people buried within the floors.
Imagine the stench that permeated the air when someone passed one of these overcrowded graveyards. If the smell didn’t get you, then the sickness that was being caused from such terrible decay in close proximity to you would. Improper burial and general overcrowding in every graveyard was spreading illness to people.
L’Empire de la Morte – The Empire of the Dead
The city of Paris realized they had to do something about the epic corpse problem and sought out a solution: the catacombs. Paris started a project that would eventually be the final resting place of over seven million people. The catacombs exist under the city of Paris in old Roman quarries. This massive bone storage project began in 1786.
(Catacomb photos from www.lightningfield.com) 
The grotesque excuses for burial grounds were emptied and the bones of the dead were organized by type and what cemetery
they came from within the many miles of the new underground “kingdom of the dead”. The tunnels run a total of 186 miles but only a few miles are open to the public for tours.
The Rural Cemetery Movement & The Victorians
While the catacombs were a solution, they were a cold place and not somewhere to go and pay respects to your dead relatives, seeing you wouldn’t even know where to find them anyways. So another solution came out of Paris as well: the rural cemetery movement.
The idea was to create a beautiful, peaceful area away from the bustling cities where the dead could rest. These new “garden cemeteries” as they were called, would be places where people could picnic, take walks and it even “show off” with fancy mausoleums and other elaborate grave markers. The first garden cemetery in Paris was Pere Lachaise, which opened in 1804. The United States followed suit twenty-seven years later with Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1831. Cities across the United States followed suit. These new cemeteries were actually responsible for establishing our current idea of a park as well. Central Park in New York City was inspired by the cemetery movement. Cities nation wide followed suit. Bodies were moved from the crowed city cemeteries and large plots of land were purchased on the outskirts of many towns for the new cemeteries.
The Victorians can be given credit for making the garden cemetery successful in the United States. The Victorians were much more accustomed to death in their lives then we are today. The average person died before they hit forty. Death was more natural for them and when the first garden cemeteries were created, they became places for picnics, relaxing and having family outings. So with that in mind and with the cemetery being the popular hangout, you had better make your tombstone something grand! The Victorian era was one of the most extravagant times in terms of architecture in the United States. The flashier the better. Some of the most beautiful tombstone art comes from this era.
Even though our modern cemetery was designed to be a place of peace, what is it that still tugs our fears about cemeteries?
More cemetery history to come!
Written by Amberrose Hammond
Sources
- Keister, Douglas. Going Out in Style: The Architecture of Eternity. New York: Facts on File Inc, 1997.
- Marion, John Francis. Famous and Curious Cemeteries. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1977.
- Brown, John G. Soul in the Stone: Cemetery Art From America’s Heartland . Kansas: University Press, 1994.