Cities of Silence: A Guide to Mobile's Historic Cemeteries

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Summary: The Wakeful Dead
Review: Before the United States was a country, colonial burial grounds were called graveyards. They were unattractive, unhealthy and unsafe places of alcoholic gravediggers, grave robbers, partly dug up corpses, and poisonous gases.

Then, in 1778, French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau was buried in a white marble tomb on the Isle des Peupliers. This grave set the standard of beauty in nature for the 52-acre Pere-Lachaise cemetery outside Paris, in 1804. From France, the first rural garden cemetery of winding lanes, white sculptures and tombs, family care, and cultivated grounds in the United States was Mt Auburn, outside Boston.

In contrast, historic Magnolia, Old Catholic and Sha-arai Shomayim cemeteries were within the city limits of Mobile, Alabama. They were laid out in city-managed and -owned grids, with streets meeting at right angles. Like the rural cemeteries, though, they had artistic entrance gates, fences, plantings and sculptures.

Then, during the 1850s horticulturist Adolph Strauch took markers, trees and walls away from Spring Grove cemetery in Cincinnati, Ohio. He favored mausolea large enough for entire families, kept up by hired staff under a director or superintendent, in open lawns. With the War between the States such lawn-park cemeteries made room for soldiers' rests, such as in Mobile's Magnolia cemetery. The design for these special burial plots and for national cemeteries, such as at Gettysburg, grew out of Frederick Law Olmstead's New York Central Park.

In 1913 entrepreneur Hubert Eaton laid out the first memorial park in the United States, at Forest Lawn cemetery, in Glendale, California. Hired groundskeepers worked easily around slender vases of artificial flowers, limited sculpture, large group vaults, and ground-level bronze plates. Forty years later, the port city's first memorial park opened, as Mobile Memorial Gardens, on the city's west side.

According to author John S Sledge, Mobile's CITIES OF SILENCE have become unattractive, unhealthy, and unsafe. This time around it's from inner city blight, grave robbing, vandalism and weeds. This time around, the answer may be, not in another remodeled style of burial grounds, but in successful historic preservation. In fact, Mobile already has clean-up campaigns, save our cemeteries societies, and walking tours. All this could, once again, make cemetery, from the Greek word for sleeping chamber, the perfect word for Mobile's historic Ahavas Chesed, Church Street, Magnolia, Old Catholic, and Sha-arai Shomyaim cemeteries.