Death in the Heart of the City
Oakwood Cemetery — Syracuse, New York
When asking any number of friends to visit Oakwood Cemetery with me I received more than a few strange looks. The only answers that I usually got were eyes that slid sideways into judgmental stares and mouths that quirked into smiles that really only poorly hid a concern for my sanity.
This did not surprise me. I’ve spent much more time than the average person in graveyards. Not because I have any morbidly fascinated reason. But rather because my family values our personal memorial culture more than the average American seems to. I’ve learned the importance of bringing the right flowers to the right family member at any given holiday. I know that anything left at a grave needs to be recollected within two weeks of its placement or the invisible workers of the cemetery will take the flags, and vases, and pinwheels away. Never to be seen by their original placers ever again. And, I also know the superstitions of the graveyard. I do not mean just the general unease that a cemetery tends to impart. But, the actual concrete rules of being alive in space of death.
I couldn’t tell you the exact chain of custody this rule followed before arriving at me. I suspect that the storytelling tradition of this belief is not linear. I’ve heard people from all over the country say it, and I’ve also heard my younger siblings following it with no instruction from me. This rule being that no matter if one is flying past a churchyard on a highway or creeping past one in town at night, you must hold your breath. Whether that’s because a wandering soul will slip inside your life if you let them, or if it would just offend those who are no longer breathing, this is a tradition that is as important as wearing black to the funeral.
Only, I was not able to follow this rule when I finally made my way to Oakwood Cemetery. For the first, most simple and practical reason, I would never be able to hold my breath long enough to walk past this graveyard. Here in the middle of bustling Syracuse, New York is a verifiable 160 acres of rural land to maneuver around. This is not a space tucked away between buildings. It is as if a cemetery from the part of the country that fades away into rolling plains was plucked up and dropped in this urban center. And secondly, Oakwood’s founding mission was never to be a place that the living hurried past. Whether holding their breath, or not. Howard Daniels, the landscape designer behind the lush expanse of Oakwood, wanted this to be a place that housed the dead while being “Planned for the enjoyment and enrichment of the living”. Way before me and my superstition of holding my breath landed at the entrance of this cemetery, Oakwood was established based on contradicting tradition.
As a rule breaker, Oakwood can only be understood in the context of the pattern it is disrupting. That pattern is twofold. In Oakwood’s rural physicality, the tradition of American urban cemetery planning is destroyed. This is not the usual handful of headstones crowded under the shadow of a city’s downtown district. Oakwood much more resembles the sprawling, specifically English, countryside. And in Oakwood’s dueling nature of life and death, this cemetery at once exemplifies the Victorian Era understanding of death that it was founded under, while defying that death culture by being a place for the living. At the time of its founding, when Syracuse’s citizens would escape the city into the quiet of Oakwood, and in today, when students of the nearby University escape into it for the freedom of a drink, this space is not only for peaceful rest. Oakwood Cemetery is unique in its historical and nonlocal contexts because it at once breaks the patterns it fits into.
History of Oakwood
Syracuse, New York, a salt-based metropolis resting on the banks of Onondaga lake, was officially founded in eighteen forty-seven. The city was still in its infancy when it constructed its major cemetery. Oakwood, at one hundred and sixty acres large, was established in eighteen fifty-nine. The project was finished only a few short years before the onset of the Civil War, making that conflict the first mass casualty event that the cemetery faced in its long history.
The city, as it boomed with an industrialized population, called for a solution to its graveyard problem. No longer could the single church burial sites handle the capacity of the death in this city. The need for building a new cemetery was undertaken by an association committee. This group was made up primarily of city officials and members of the most powerful Syracuse families of the era. They were determined to create a respectful final resting place for the city’s inhabitants, especially relatives in their own illustrious families. Given that the Victorian memorial culture called for overt showcasing of grief, the founders of Oakwood needed to design of cemetery that could house the magnificent mausoleums of the period. Crowded patches of headstones on the side lawn of a church were not going to suffice.
But, this was not a project of the elite alone. Oakwood was to be a cemetery for all of Syracuse. In their founding charter, that association behind Oakwood’s construction said that “Oakwood Cemetery is to-day, and ever will be, in the fullest sense a public institution, founded for the public welfare, and is wholly unconnected with any purpose whatever of profit or gain to any one”. The graveyard was going to be a public space, not belonging to any one religious institution or family. This ensures that Oakwood belongs to the city, in both a legislative and public use sense. If Oakwood was to be a place of the living and the dead, then there could be no gatekeeping against who could use the land.
As the landscape architect behind the rural design, Howard Daniels is the name most associated with the founding of Oakwood. But, Daniels and his landscape blueprints were not alone in his work. Because Oakwood is an urban cemetery, despite its appearance, there was considerable bureaucratic paperwork to file before any ground could be broken. Oakwood may have been unveiled in eighteen fifty-nine, but earliest talks on the project occurred seven years prior to that opening date. The land that Oakwood covers was officially purchased by its association of Trustees in eighteen fifty-two. The land was left dormant for five years. When that time passed, and in the summer of eighteen fifty-seven, the eventual founders of Oakwood really started the project. Those founders including the “Messrs” of “Leavenworth, White, Bagg, Longstreet, Redfield, Powell, Dillaye, and Wilkinson” among others.
These numerous “Messrs” had decided to place Oakwood on the land it occupies for a reason. Originally, the cemetery was oriented West. The Western sections of the cemetery contain the oldest graves today. The cemetery was structured to rise along a hilltop and overlook Syracuse and the distant lake. This space was open, and unutilized. A problem that Syracuse’s previous, larger cemeteries faced was their land being needed for expansion of the city. Oakwood’s untapped nature made this piece of land suitable for dedication to burial rather than industry. It was named Oakwood because it was originally an unmanicured oak grove, and the cemetery was designed with the intention of keeping the natural knolls and hillocks intact.
Victorian Landscape Design: Urban and Rural
One of the main aspects of Oakwood’s contradictory nature is its layout. This is a city cemetery that looks like it belongs in the country. The primary reason behind this unique design choice can be attributed back to the Industrial Revolution.
In pre-industrialized America, most of the population lived in rural expanses or in relatively small towns and villages. The number of large cities in the United States did not increase, closer to what it is today, until after the industrialization process. During the Industrial Revolution, which in America started just prior to the nineteenth century and continued through that century, people moved from rural to urban spaces. They were following the demand for labor as it increased in those city centers. This migration deeply impacted cemetery practices. Graveyards became overcrowded. And an overcrowded graveyard is a place of anxiety over public health risks.
This anxiety meant that the face of the American cemetery needed an overhaul. Typically, the image of the early American graveyard looks like those small assemblages preserved in cities like Boston, Massachusetts. The model is the tiny, crooked stoned graveyard that is tucked away in the city. Burial plots are pushed up against each other, and no room is left for any monument bigger than a thin, engraved slab. But Boston actually was one of the first cities in the United States to adopt the rural cemetery design. The new Boston cemetery style is identical to what can be seen in Oakwood, at its founding and through to today.
That style more closely resembled a park, than a graveyard. There is as much open green space in these cemeteries as there are grave plots. The graves themselves are orderly, but not cramped together. These new cemetery types had manicured grounds and sculpture works. Paths lead visitors throughout the space, offering leisurely strolls to those who have no family to visit there. Every aspect of this design was meant to attract people looking to picnic or otherwise get fresh air in the city. And, it worked exactly how Daniels and his fellow landscape architects intended. Urban citizens did flock to these spaces as relief from the city, whether or not their families used this cemetery for burial.
Daniels studied landscape design in Europe, not America. This European influence is there in all his work, and even more so in Oakwood. His primary education in the landscape field was during a tour of English parks and gardens in eighteen fifty-five and six. He had a “20-year career as a landscape gardener covering a broad range of work from cemetery and park design to institutional grounds”. Inspired by the European style, he had narrowed down his views on desirable elements of designed landscapes to a few notable traits. Those traits including lush greenery, indigenous plants, and paths that loop along the curves of the land. Daniels designed for not only cemeteries, but for parks, farms, and orchards as well as the gardens for mansions, villas, and conservatories. From this diverse career, he gained much experience in working with spaces of both life and death long before he even got to his opus with Oakwood.
In urban cities, the park and the cemetery both equally became important spaces of outdoor recreation. Like every other aspect of the Victorian death culture, there was a specific trend to follow for cemetery design. This trend was the Romantic. Not romantic in the loving sense, but in the mode of the pastoral fantasy of nineteenth century England. This pastoral Romantic was based in the idea of the “domesticated landscape”. Unlike other design eras, nature to the Romantic was not a force to be beaten back. There was no call for building over the land. The idea instead was to retain natural features, be them ponds, or forests, or native shrubbery, and tame them minimally for human use. The forest should be kept intact, but a path simply be added for the use of human enjoyment. It was not a process of civilizing nature. But instead, a trend that brought civilization into nature in a way that did not destroy what was already there. It only made that nature usable to these cities’ citizens. Oakwood would not be complete until a little over halfway through the century, but the trendsetter of these cemeteries opened in the early eighteen hundreds in Paris.
By being an example of the new rural cemetery trend, in a major American city, Oakwood was a contradiction of its time. The rural landscape design was a direct reaction against the overcrowding of churchyards, which happened as people moved to the cities post Industrial Revolution. This was a time that was changing the mold of life in the United States. The mold of death practices similarly needed to be broken. With its secular departure from a specific church, and Daniels’ decision to preserve the rolling features of the original oak forest, Oakwood does that breaking.
Victorian Death Culture: English and American
In the Victorian Era, from the middle of the nineteenth century to the end, death was a huge part of life. Every aspect of the mourning process was strictly outlined and adhered to in this society. This deep attention to detail in the processes of grief lead to the creation of a kind of “Cult of Death”.
Like most things in her namesake era, Queen Victoria started this trend of mourning practices. Her husband, Albert, died after they shared twenty-one years of marriage. In her spectacular grief, the Queen wore black to commemorate his passing for the rest of her life. Like all aesthetic trends, the Victorian death culture was about a showing of mourning. The intent with these death practices was to bring the private act of grief into the public sphere. In Victoria’s example, the people of this period wanted others to know the state of their bereavement. Graveyards were a place to publicly proclaim these death trends. Dress, funeral services, and decorum all had very strict guidelines.
Mourning for the Victorian person was a more formal practice than in today’s mainstream Western society. There was a strictly adhered to window of observation, depending on one’s relationship to the deceased. Two years was the absolute maximum and was ascribed to windows. The current expectation of wearing black to a funeral was followed for the majority of that time frame, with there being strict style rules as to the look of the clothing. These rules, mostly of modesty, were used to show that the mourner was properly removed from the bustle of society. These requirements were so well known, they were featured in popular magazines of the time.
As a modern, in use, cemetery, Oakwood has its own associations. It is those associations, of creepy ghosts and horror movies, that made finding a person to visit this graveyard with me so difficult for this project. But, the graveyard also meant something to Victorians. Their death culture was a prominent part of society. Because death played such a large role in their lives, the cemetery took center stage.
In the Victorian Era, the cemetery became a public and acceptable place to display one’s dedication to death. Lavish grave markers and mausoleums were not only ways for a family to celebrate a lost member but were a status symbol of the family’s power. As Patricia Jalland says, in her book on the Victorian family’s relationship with death, “There is no doubt that the early Victorian middle and upper classes spent a good deal of money on impressive funerals”. She goes on the explain in her research that the Victorian Era family could spend so lavishly on death because this was a time of upward mobility for the middle class. Again, the Industrial Revolution deeply impacted death practices of the period.
Beyond the landscape layout, the Victorians changed the nature of cemeteries in two more ways. This is the period that the profession of Undertaking emerged. Before this, people died in their homes and were buried on family land. But now, with the urban expansion, people died in their homes but had no family land in the city. Bodies needed to be transported respectfully from the place of death to the public cemeteries. And then, at those cemeteries, the tradition of leaving flowers at graves really emerged in the Anglophone world.
Oakwood, in its breaking of trends, was at the forefront of these changes. By being a place that exemplifies what the Victorian Era mourning looked for in a cemetery, with its space for massive family mausoleums and memorials, but by still being a place for non-mourning recreation, Oakwood cannot be defined singularly within or outside the mold.
Historiography
Just like Oakwood could not be fully understood without the context of the patterns it finds itself surrounded by, any research of this cemetery must find itself within in the greater research on cemeteries and death practices.
On the topic of Victorian Era landscape design trends, Gian Luca Amadei’s piece on the era’s cemeteries outlines how the trend was shaped by economically spurred urban growth. Then, Hazel Conway’s thesis on the Victorian park demonstrates how much the new urban citizens of these industrial cities valued public green space. Specifically on the rural cemetery movement, there is Erica and James Danylchak and R. Cothran’s work with the American side of the Victorian design. They outline the new model of cemetery, with the example of Boston’s graveyards. And, finally, there is David Charles Sloane’s book on American cemetery tradition. Sloane’s connection to Oakwood is highlighted in this text and fits this Syracuse cemetery into a larger picture.
On the topic of Victorian death practices, there is Adam Bradford’s cultural analysis of the era’s obsession with the morbid. Bradford examines primarily literature from that period, to psychoanalyze what death meant to those living in that world. And there is Patricia Jalland’s research on Victorian Era death rituals. By looking at letters, diaries, and other written artifacts, she is able to illustrate exactly the processes taken in grief by the Victorians.
The Oakwood Difference
When I finally made it in through the gates of Oakwood, I seemed to be the only person anywhere in the cemetery that was worried about holding my breath.
In the graveyards I’ve visited in the past, the hush that falls over the car the second you enter is absolute. But, beyond even the bustling activity of the street just outside, Oakwood was alive with noise and movement the day that I visited.
My guide was a friend who mountain bikes. His tour of the place included various trails, some more hidden than others, that snake between the grave markers and in from the woods that still line the perimeter of the cemetery. It was along some of these trails that I could hear the whooping and hollering of bike riders as they sailed through the green space.
On our expedition we passed more than one group of young people lounging on the steps of monuments and mausoleums, enjoying the uncharacteristically warm Syracuse day. There was no breath holding as the sound of their chatter floated over the headstones. Maybe it was just my expectation from our proximity to Syracuse University’s campus, but I could have sworn I saw someone raise a glass in cheers on the front threshold of the abandoned chapel.
To say that the originally founding mission of Oakwood Cemetery is upheld even today is an understatement. With over fifty thousand memorials marking the final resting places of Syracuse inhabitants, Oakwood has succeeded in fulfilling its role as a rural graveyard for the metropolis Syracuse. And, with all the activity I witnessed in just my hour-long visit, it’s safe to say that the living residents of the city feel just as welcomed in this place.
Oakwood Cemetery would have been a necessary and important part of Syracuse’s topography no matter how the space had been designed. With the city booming with Victorian Era post-industrialization, the need for a large cemetery became clear within the first ten years of its founding. What gave Oakwood it’s unique existence in the world of graveyards and death culture is how it was designed to break the mold.
The design characteristics of a rural cemetery call for very little intervention with the layout of the land. Trees sound remain where they are naturally planted, and hills should be left rolling and covered with the indigenous shrubbery. Oakwood does fall under all these characteristics. To step into this space is to leave the urban concrete of Syracuse far behind. But why Oakwood is a break in the trend of cemetery design, is because it was one of the first to utilize this style; in both the United Kingdom which pioneered this look and in the United States which adopted it. With this unusual design for the period, but the adherence with which it commits to that uniqueness, Oakwood is rooted in contradiction.
And beyond its physicality, Oakwood contradicts every cultural notion of death. In the Victorian Era, mourning was strictly observed. The rites surrounding death were as elaborate as any concerning life. Because of this fascination with the morbid, graveyards carried heavy cultural symbolism. These were somber places. They were haunted places too, if one leaned into the dramatic. To establish a cemetery with the idea that it would be as much a home for the living as for the dead was a shattering of tradition. Oakwood cemetery, like its fellow pioneer rural graveyards, was founded to do that shattering. City spaces needed room for the dead. But, could not waste any room that could be utilized by the living. The straddling of both the world of the alive and the world of the dead is another, fundamental, grounding in contradictions.
In eighteen fifty-nine, Oakwood was founded based on its dual mission. And, in twenty nineteen, it continues its existence under that same goal. As long as Syracuse is a place of life and death, as those two are intricately linked everywhere that humans settle but especially in major cities, then Oakwood will continue on in its pattern breaking contradictions.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Civil War Veterans Burial Log, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries, Syracuse, New York.
Jalland, Patricia. Death in the Victorian Family. New York;Oxford;: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Oakwood Cemetery (Syracuse, N. Y. ). The History, Incorporation, Rules and Regulations of Oakwood Cemetery, at Syracuse, N.Y. : Together with Dedication Odes and Addresses : With Other Papers 1860.
“Our History.” Oakwood of Syracuse. 2016. Accessed March 26, 2019. http://www.oakwoodofsyracuse.com/our-history/.
Smith, H. P. (Henry Perry), 1839–1925 and Jacob Miller. History of Oakwood Cemetery. Syracuse: H.P. Smith & Co, 1871.
Secondary Sources
Amadei, Gian Luca. “The Evolving Paradigm of the Victorian Cemeteries: Their Emergence and Contribution to London’s Urban Growth since 1833.”ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2014.
Bradford, Adam C. and Project Muse. Communities of Death: Whitman, Poe, and the American Culture of Mourning. Baltimore, Maryland: Project Muse, 2014.
Conway, Hazel. 1991. People’s parks: The design and development of Victorian parks in Britain. Cambridge [England];New York;: Cambridge University Press.
Cothran, R., James Danylchak, and Erica. Grave Landscapes: The Nineteenth-Century Rural Cemetary Movement. US: University Of South Carolina Press, 2018.
Sloane, David Charles. Is the Cemetery Dead? Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2018.
