Lithograph, woman mourning by tomb, D. W. Kellogg & Co., between 1840 and 1842.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION, POPULAR GRAPHIC ARTS COLLECTION, LC-USZC4-1840 (COLOR FILM COPY TRANSPARENCY).
In southeast Atlanta, Memorial Drive and Boulevard meet at a crush of hip new lofts, tire shops with hand-painted signs, tree-shaded Victorians, and cars careening too fast down asphalt that’s potholed and gritty. Walled in at the corner of these two thoroughfares lies Oakland Cemetery. It sits quietly here, has for years, at the center of a number of neighborhoods described at various times as substandard, crime ridden, revitalizing, gentrifying, exorbitant, blighted, and rejuvenated. You can see its sculpture from the street, elaborate statues and obelisks poking out above the tall brick wall that separates Oakland’s extravagant decay from The World.
Like so many things launched in the Victorian and Edwardian eras—the architecture of our nation’s great libraries and the Coca-Cola Santa Claus among them—burial grounds like this one have set a blueprint in the collective imagination. Oakland is everything we think of when presented, out of context, with the word “cemetery”: wrought-iron gates and crosses poking out of grassy ground, some straight and others at jauntier angles—all the ingredients of childhood drawings at Halloween. Oakland is the cemetery’s cemetery. It’s a place to lose oneself in the strange beauty of a verdurous death playground built by our Victorian ancestors, a place to learn why this kind of cemetery is what we think of when we think of cemeteries and to find out why cemeteries like this aren’t built anymore.
Lithograph, woman mourning by tomb, D. W. Kellogg & Co., between 1840 and 1842.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION, POPULAR GRAPHIC ARTS COLLECTION, LC-USZC4-1840 (COLOR FILM COPY TRANSPARENCY).
I love tours. Tours with guides and tours with books. Official tours in buses and unofficial tours with friends on bicycle. I even love self-guided tours with out-of-date museum-issued pamphlets characterized by bewildering layout and syntax. So I’m undaunted when Mary Woodlan, who coordinates the volunteers and special events at Oakland, tells me one March day in 2008 that I’ve missed the guided-tour season by exactly one week and will have to guide myself.
“And I’m sorry. This is really hard to follow,” she says, handing me the cream-colored self-guided-tour pamphlet. “New pamphlets are actually coming out next week.”
Like most people in charge of outreach at successful places that depend on the public’s generosity to survive, Mary is accommodating and friendly. She agreed to an interview on very short notice, interrupting her packed-to-the-gills part-time workweek. And now she has given me the booklet, which costs three dollars at the gift shop, while apologizing for its shortcomings. I take it, nodding a lot and thanking her, hardly glancing at the thing as I fold it into my bag.
So the next day, I’m armed for my tour. When my friend Jon and I pull up and park, we take out the pamphlet. Its cover features an ink-jet print of the cemetery’s Victorian obelisks, headstones, and mausoleums, a skyline of sorts against the backdrop of Atlanta’s real skyline. It’s a fuzzy picture that somehow manages to make Oakland look less impressive than it is in real life. Superimposed across it are the words “Oakland Cemetery: Atlanta’s Most Tangible Link.”
“Link to what? The underworld?” Jon asks when I charge him with holding the booklet. Later I learn it’s actually a quote from historian Franklin Garrett, who called this place “Atlanta’s most tangible link between the past and present.” And it’s exactly this sense that draws us here. In a city with a serious reputation for tearing down the old in favor of the new, places with any real connection to history feel especially charmed. In the case of Oakland—a rambling old park literally dedicated to the dead—the atmosphere is almost otherworldly.
Jon has come along with me because he’s an old friend whose geeky interest in all things historic intersects handily with my geeky interest in old cemeteries. I also need someone to help juggle my array of gear. For aside from (1) the Most Tangible Link booklet, whose centerfold includes a map with numbered landmarks, I’ve also brought along (2) a second map. This one color-codes the cemetery’s twelve sections and contains its own numbering system to highlight the set of graves it deems notable. During our walk, I will also charge Jon periodically with carrying (3) a trade paperback I bought at the cemetery gift shop, a book that forced $19.99 from my credit card through the sheer power of cool historic photos. (Possibly the coolest was snapped around 1910. It’s taken from the same spot as the Tangible Link pamphlet’s cover, so the photo features an earlier version of the city skyline, in which the chalk-white headstones swim in a tangle of knee-length grass, hedges, and spindly trees.) My camera (4) is slung around my neck, and finally, I have (5) a handheld audio recorder at the ready to capture the epiphanies we’re bound to have along the way.
I am properly outfitted. Ready. To interpret, document, and record. As if there’s a proper beginning, middle, and end to this stroll through forty-eight sprawling and only sort-of organized acres; it’s just up to me to locate and tag them.
When we set foot inside the black iron gates that mark Oakland’s main entrance, there’s a palpable hush as the hubbub of the outside world disappears into a wash of green-gold light. We set about orienting ourselves. The canopy of tall oaks the place is named for, some of the oldest in the city, filters the sunlight percolating down through the draped Spanish moss onto a wide, black avenue with raised blocks on every side. The blocks are populated with all manner of headstones, obelisks, and statuary. The temperature seems to drop a little.
This is the cemetery’s oldest section, the original six acres purchased from a farmer named Alfred Wooding in 1850. We are ready to start my neat chronological arc, beginning with the cemetery’s very first burial. Jon pulls out the Most Tangible Link and I pull out the small map. We consult.
Then we start off in different directions.
Instead of neat city blocks—or something like, say, a tree farm—each square’s forty by seventy feet or so is really more like an actual forest. In my search for the first grave, I trip around markers of all sizes, shapes, and materials. The stones perch all over, in relationships to one another we can hardly begin to detect. There are individual stones standing alone and others in small familial clumps, facing every direction. Most are so old that their writing has been worn down to nothing. They are flat, round, rectangular, flush with the ground, or fashioned into statues. There are small pillars and granite trees climbing with granite vines. Then again, I think, it is something like a real city: We try for organization, we live on this road or that block, but our actual lives, unkempt things, spill out all over.
We have to grant some latitude to the people who created burial places like these back in the mid-1800s. When shovel first hit dirt to lay someone to rest here, the cemetery as we know it was a concept brand new to the United States. The term was used occasionally in Europe, but in early nineteenth-century America there were only graveyards, and city graveyards were little more than places to bury bodies. No one thought of them as places you’d visit, so not much planning went into their design.
One nasty night in Paris helped change all that. In his wonderfully detailed book on cemetery development in this country, The Last Great Necessity, David Sloane tells of an extraordinary convergence of events that began with a centuries-old graveyard in downtown Paris called the Cimetière des Innocents. One evening in 1780, residents in an apartment building next to the cimetière “were overwhelmed by a stench rising from below, and several became seriously ill from mephitic gas.” The overcrowded graveyard had “broken down the basement walls and sent over two-thousand partially decomposed bodies into basements.”1
At this time citizens from London to Boston were complaining of overcrowded family crypts raising a stink, and of poorly buried bodies popping up here and there. These dismal episodes helped spur the movement that resulted in the founding of France’s famous Père Lachais Cemetery in 1804. Père Lachais was the first of the great rural cemeteries, the funerary answer to the burgeoning romantic movement. Unlike plain old graveyards, which were like landfills for bodies, rural cemeteries were designed to be visited by the living. Like the popular public parks that were being established at the same time, rural cemeteries were restful, reflective places of tamed nature. Families were encouraged to stroll along the new, winding pathways, to plant greenery and place pretty monuments on their loved ones’ plots.
As a cultural movement, romanticism was obsessed with nature and questions of the life/death divide. In the rural cemetery movement, this focus translated to an environment that would inspire reflection about both. Rural cemeteries were pastoral, picturesque places outside the busy city centers, where tamed natural beauty and works of art met to inspire contemplation.2 Within three decades the trend had hopped the Atlantic, and rural cemeteries began to spring up along the east coast right when the accompanying Victorian death craze was at its height in the mid-1800s.
As in a lot of other towns, the public graveyard that Oakland replaced was located in Atlanta’s center, and though no grisly cave-ins had taken place there, city leaders were concerned about the possibility of nearby residents becoming ill from corpse-tainted soil and groundwater. The city purchased a remote, pastoral property for the new cemetery primarily because of its perch high on a hill east of the city (almost a full mile!).
Still, while Oakland was pleasant compared to the dismal old graveyard, like most rural cemeteries of the era, it was still far from neatly organized. As with most new cemeteries started around this time, historical records on the identities of those buried here are few, and after nearly thirty years of restoration work, Historic Oakland Foundation volunteers still come upon undiscovered old graves and pieces of ancient monuments and statuary in their work mending and gardening. It’s less museum, more archeological site.
It hasn’t been ten minutes and already the cemetery is working its glamour on us. Already it has beguiled me out of my straightforward quasi-academic mission. Jon has disappeared several blocks away behind a thicket of taller monuments, and several more minutes go by before he calls out, “Dr. James Nissan?”
“That’s it!” I click on my audio recorder and rush over. They’re two slightly different realities, the locations of Oakland’s first burial in the three-dimensional world and on my map.
Looking at Dr. Nissan’s headstone, there’s frankly not much to remark upon. Despite the ostensible glory of being number one, his grave is nothing like those of some of his neighbors whose large headstones are engraved with Bible verses, poetry, flowers, and crosses. His headstone is both small and, at this late date, blank. The first person to be buried in Atlanta’s oldest cemetery is no town native. Instead, Dr. N was just passing through from parts unknown when he died of a mysterious illness. Like so many people of his time, he had a tremendous fear of being buried alive and asked the attending doctor to cut his jugular vein after he was pronounced dead. At least that’s how the story goes, according to the modern bronze plaque sitting in front of the old headstone, its five lines the sum total record of what is known about Dr. Nissan’s existence here on earth.
For all the sixty-seven entries in the walking tour and the 126 pages in my paperback, a handful of stories like this one are really all that’s known about most of the people Mary Woodlan endearingly calls “our residents.” A sort of motherly affection invaded her voice when she spoke of those buried here. It was sweet, as if these dead were her helpless wards.
And in a way, they are orphans. From the beginning, the city had no caretaker role over Oakland’s plots, but instead sold them outright. People bought them and then held complete responsibility over the graves forever after, from choosing what plants or markers to place at the graves, to tending to their upkeep forever. This was in line with common practice all over the country before the late nineteenth century, when in a matter of decades, the process of death and dying was taken over by professionals and jobs like landscaper and embalmer began to distinguish themselves. There were other inventions too: The notion of uniform cemetery landscaping. The funeral home.
And perpetual care—the notion that a cemetery would be responsible for basic upkeep forever. Oakland never instituted perpetual care. While the nation’s other cemeteries began to establish funds for maintenance and keep track of the histories behind the people they buried, Oakland just kept doing things the old way. Some individual families established trusts with local banks or the City of Atlanta for upkeep of their family plots, but many of those have long since run dry.
“Oakland is essentially unknowable,” said Kevin Kuharic, the cemetery’s landscaping and restoration director. For a long time there was a dispute over the number of Atlanta mayors buried at Oakland—was it twenty-five or twenty-six? (At the time of this printing, Oakland has placed the official number at twenty-seven. Former mayor Ivan Allen was moved here from another cemetery in 2009.) History here is pieced together year by year, by historians and archaeologists. No wonder Mary feels such ownership. These graves—of people without living descendants—are all hers.
What is known about Oakland is just as compelling: It’s the final resting ground of five Confederate generals and six Georgia governors. Author Margaret Mitchell and golfer Bobby Jones are buried here, too. There is no special section for celebrities or politicians; they’re mingled in with some seventy thousand others. Oakland has its divisions too; there is the old African American section and the former Potters’ Field. Also specially demarcated are Jewish Hill, the older Jewish Flat, and the Confederate burial grounds. The cemetery’s other, more diverse sections are called Knit Mill, Bell Tower Ridge, and Hogpen Corner, where Farmer Wooding’s swine once lived. There’s also Greenhouse Valley and Roger’s Hill. No one knows why Roger’s Hill is called Roger’s Hill.
As we walk along the southern edge, the cemetery blocks soon grow thick with showy monuments. We negotiate obelisks, statues, and mausoleums—those one-story granite cabins for all the family—and soon we’re standing at the foot of an imposing arch that looks ancient in these surroundings. The arch is seven feet high and emblazoned with the name “Kontz” in heavy block lettering, above which flies the spread-winged sun god Ra. A pair of carved lotus plants blossom on the arch’s two legs. The Kontz arch looks like it belongs at the foot of the Sphinx instead of here in this green place. Egyptian Revival architecture was all the rage in the mid-1800s, when Christian Kontz was hard at work designing his family’s death monument. By weird coincidence, this popularity intersected with the American rebirth of embalming, a practice first perfected by King Tut’s people.
As status symbols, showy grave markers like this one were hot items in the 1800s, an era when people were spending a lot more time at cemeteries than generations who came before or after. Cemeteries grew to be popular weekend haunts for courting couples and picnicking families, just like the new public parks that were sprouting up at the time.
But for the sentimental Victorians, the new cemeteries had a special something that no regular park could match: death. Reading some Wordsworth at a park to that girl you were courting was fine—but it took on a special thrill when “’Mid crowded obelisks and urns.”
All over the country, rural cemeteries had become so heavily trafficked with pedestrians that newspapers ran opinion pieces about them, such as this wry 1861 take on Mount Hope Cemetery: “Drinking saloons are being erected in the vicinity of the Cemetery and dance houses were [sic] expected to soon be seen there. The time will soon come when painted harlots will revel with freedom in the grounds.”3
Of course, the newspaperman who wrote that opinion didn’t know it, but the popularity of the cemetery had reached its height. And since the people who bought the plots held carte blanche in terms of their appearance, it made for a bold, anything-goes period in cemetery development. As a result, many old cemeteries like this one resemble competitive sculpture gardens, with one family’s intricately carved mausoleum dwarfed by another family’s angel with outstretched arms, both of these surrounded by soaring obelisks built ten or twenty years later as the industrial age steamed ahead. Christian Kontz wanted a monument that would stand out, one that would last for the ages, like the Egyptian pyramids that inspired him. If the one-hundred-plus years between Kontz’s death and this moment is any measure, the man succeeded. Any time you drive by the cemetery and glance up, the Kontz arch is the first monument you’ll notice, the one that stands out from the jungle of elaborate markers just inside Oakland’s walls, all competing for attention still, years after the courting couples and gardening families have gone home forever to their own reward. Still, even with the noise of cars flying past on the gritty commercial strip on the other side of the wall, one can almost hear the popcorn hawker’s voice on the breeze.
To say that the Kontz arch stands apart is not to say that it stands alone, not in terms of elaborate design. Beyond inventing evangelical death mottoes like “Not Dead—Only Sleeping” and “Gone Home,” the Victorians also developed their own language of death symbols. For example, in this section of Oakland, tall angels grasp long torches. These translate to a life snuffed out too soon. One wouldn’t place a torch-bearing angel atop the grave of an aged father who died peacefully in his sleep. Two clasped hands on a headstone mean the deceased are a set of parents. Meanwhile, the founding fathers’ obelisks and columns, vying for attention with their impressive heights and girths, stand, not surprisingly, for “abiding life.” Which, when looking up at one, reads rather like a euphemism for something more anatomical.
Small sculptures of cradles or lambs mark the graves of infants—except in the case of Ms. Molly Weimer’s mockingbird, named Tweet. When Tweet flew on to the next life in August 1874, Ms. Weimer requested that the sculptor carve his likeness to perch on his plot. The stonecutter, however, did not know how to make birds, only lambs; so a lamb is what Tweet got.
It’s comforting to look at a stone anchor leaning against a cross and know what to make of it (the deceased’s hope and faith, and maybe a seafaring life). At least in this sense, my mission to decode the cemetery feels like a success. In an age when the Grim Reaper held terrifying and unpredictable sway, the ability to use graves to tell stories about one’s dead mother or husband must have granted some comfort to surviving kin, too. If death saddened and destroyed, at least you could put up a monument whose evangelically influenced language would transfigure an individual life into something easily decipherable and lasting. Religious faith aside, these stones gave the deceased a life beyond death itself, just as memorial markers do today. But step back and trip on the monument behind you, lose your focus for just a moment, and the place is again rendered incomprehensible.
If Oakland looks wild now—and it does, compared to your average memorial park—it’s nothing compared to how it looked in your great-great-grandmother’s day. As it was the vogue for rural-style cemeteries to maintain a pastoral air, Oakland’s founders allowed many of the trees and much of the shrubbery from Farmer Wooding’s days to stand. Grass grew long around the monuments in Oakland’s heyday, and families planted their own gardens and trees, too. It retained much of its undomesticated feel as late as the 1950s, when the city removed a number of hedges and plants to cut back on maintenance costs. By then, the cemetery had fallen into great neglect.
With the passing of years, the funeral world had become the funeral industry. Other cemeteries streamlined their landscapes and instituted special maintenance fees for the upkeep of graves and walkways and monuments. The city of Atlanta, which ran Oakland, did none of this. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries passed, and with them so did many of the original families who had purchased graves and held funerals here. They’d moved away, stopped coming, or just died out.
Even today, with nine or ten burials still taking place here each year, the old Victorian policy holds: People are responsible for their own burial plots, forever, period. While paid contractors mow the grass, pick up leaves, and empty trashcans, families are supposed to take care of everything else. In reality, most upkeep is done by the Foundation, which runs overwhelmingly on volunteer power. Restoration director Kevin Kuharic calls the issue of maintenance at Oakland “the problem that never goes away.” The city still operates the cemetery at a financial loss, and now that all the grave spaces have been bought, burials will decline year by year, and conditions will continue to deteriorate. The only hope for the place is the tourists.
A lot of tourists come to see the cemetery’s next section. Jon and I are heady with Victorian flamboyance, drunk on angels and flowers and finery, so when we round the next bend, I’m taken off guard. There’s something of a visual stun when we reach the Confederate Memorial. Small plain markers of white march on, row upon endless row. This section was modeled after Arlington National Cemetery, and though it’s smaller, the effect still astonishes: between where we stand and the next ridge, the arrangement of thirty-nine hundred evenly spaced graves lobs a sucker punch at one’s perspective. (It’s interesting that Oakland should mimic the style of Arlington, a cemetery whose acreage was bitterly appropriated in 1864 strictly for the burial of Union dead. It was Northern general Montgomery C. Meigs who, at the height of the war, proposed taking over the Lee family estate for the interment of Northern soldiers. “His intention,” reads that cemetery’s website, “was to render the house uninhabitable should the Lee family ever attempt to return.”)
At the foot of the hill, the markers surround a three-story obelisk, which remained the city’s tallest structure for years after it was dedicated by the Atlanta Ladies’ Memorial Association in 1874. In this way, Oakland is reminiscent of another cemetery dedicated about the same time: Gettysburg, where soldiers’ graves surround Soldiers National Monument, commemorating the Union victory there. Gettysburg is also known for pioneering a design in which every solder’s grave is identical, regardless of rank or station—a design repeated at Arlington and also here at Oakland, to slightly dizzying effect.
The work of the Atlanta Ladies’ Memorial Association, or ALMA—which raised the funds to put up the Confederate obelisk—transcended mere show. First, keep in mind the time frame. The day the obelisk went up was the same day Robert E. Lee was buried at Arlington. Second, remember the Battle of Atlanta, in which General Sherman burned a wide swath of utter ruin to the sea? That went right through this neighborhood. Spent minié balls and Confederate coins still pop up in nearby backyards. Battlefields in the Civil War were not specially designated places away from the lives and homes of civilians. The farming fields, woods, and railroads surrounding this spot were war zone, and at the time a lot more than coins were turning up in people’s yards.
Kevin tells me about the principal task taken up by alma. The organization gave out boot-sized shoeboxes to people so they could collect soldiers’ remains from fields and woodlands. The boxes were so diminutive simply because there wasn’t much left of the bodies found years after the war’s end. According to one account, “[t]he soldiers had been wrapped in their blankets, face up, hands crossed over their chests and kepi hats covering their faces.” In the intervening years, many “had crumbled to dust.”4
“We actually have a reproduction box somewhere here in the office, and it’s quite small, basically just long enough for a femur bone to lie in,” says Kevin.
ALMA buried three thousand boxes around a huge sculpture of a dying lion with a look of convulsed grief frozen in its face. It’s a replica of Switzerland’s Lion of Lucerne. The original sculpture from which this one is modeled commemorates the mercenary Swiss Guard soldiers who died while France’s King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and family fled Paris’s Tuileries Palace—another lost cause of sorts. Looking at this version of the lion now, and at the smooth lawn surrounding it, I think about all those small boxes buried below. We are both very quiet.
In my paperback guide to Oakland, there are a number of pictures of this place from different decades. Here’s the Confederate pillar surrounded by top-hatted gentleman, parasoled ladies, and children pushing hoops and buying snacks from vendors; it all resembles farmland in this newspaper sketch. The next picture shows the pillar during an 1890s Confederate Memorial Day ceremony; a third is from 1950. Last night I tried to trace a single tree from picture to picture, a single building, but the perspective changes just enough so that you can’t tell, can’t hold the thread. Nothing would stand still the way I wanted it to.
Here at this spot, though, I think of Kevin’s story of the little boxes of bones. The small scraps of paper that soldiers would pin to their deceased comrades’ blankets, in hope that the men and boys might be found before those scraps disintegrated. How they did disintegrate as the weeks wore on into months, and longer. Some combination of these things, and also Jon’s old story about finding two buttons from Civil War uniforms in his own backyard, all work on me, and the experience I sought from all those photos in books arises without my permission. For just a moment, time accordions in on itself. The reason we’re here and the moment become one, and my heart is in my mouth for it.
In the grassy field along the cemetery’s eastern diagonal, a beautiful German shepherd trots by, accompanied by his owner. There is always a woman with her dogs here, just as there are always runners and people drawing charcoal sketches all over the cemetery. The Historic Oakland Foundation strongly encourages these visitors, in the name of interest, support, money.
The dog woman smiles at us as we stop to scratch the ears of her pup. He leans hard into my hand and proceeds to roll around on his back in the lush, green grass. This was Potters’ Field, the approximately seven-and-a-half acre space where the city buried the penniless and unknown dead starting in the mid-1860s.
By the summer of 1864, many of Atlanta’s inhabitants had fled the city to escape the violent ruination that war would bring. Just six years later, in the thick of Reconstruction, the population had shot up to twenty-one thousand, more than twice what it had been just a decade prior.
“After the Civil War, a lot of rural people who were destitute came to Atlanta looking for work,” says Kevin, who I insist is not a dreary man. “And there were not enough jobs to go around, and so you would have droves of homeless people. And they would be living in squalid conditions and would be victims of crime.” Observers of the rebuilding reported that Atlanta was a hive of industry, its red-mud streets “alive from morning to night with carts, barrows, and wagonloads of timber, brick and sand.” It was a boomtown, and it developed both the squalor and the lawlessness associated with boom-towns. Many white and recently freed black families lived in government camps in shelters with roofs of “jagged … tin sheeting held down by rocks.”5
At that time, this quiet field was uneven ground dotted with markers crafted from fugitive materials: makeshift plywood or stones or whatever else people had on hand. It’s a brutal picture that’s hard to reconjure now that the old Potters’ Field looks like a triangle of rolling parkland. It’s probably safe to say that this was not the cemetery section visited by all those young couples and families in the cemetery’s romantic heyday, but if there’s any place in Oakland you’re likely to see folks picnicking now, it’s here.
In this way, Oakland Cemetery resembles nothing so much as a city complete with its own class system. In one neighborhood, you’ve got the beautiful and tacky high-rise statuary of the wealthy and climbing. You have a whole lot of average middle-class headstones, and then you have spaces like one we ran across in the old African American section just before this: a dingy patch of dirt, with tiny brown rock markers jutting up like broken teeth. And then there are those who get nothing.
The oldest cemetery tells the story of its city in more ways than one. It is significant, for example, that the first body interred here was that of Dr. Nissan the Unknown Transient. When Oakland was founded in 1850, Atlanta was little more than a brash railroad hub. The otherwise sensible and fairly dull website for Georgia’s Secretary of State says outright that in these fledgling years, Atlanta was “more saloons than churches; more bawdy houses than banks.” The surge in railroad routes had rapidly populated the city with people hoping to improve their lot: Business impresarios. Railroad men. Prostitutes. For years, Atlanta had a lot more in common with the town of Deadwood than with the town of Savannah.
The establishment of a tasteful rural-style cemetery like this one was on par with the opening of the town’s first theater, the Athenaeum, four years later. Oakland was the railroad man showing off, donning top hat and tails, trying to establish this money-clogged burg as a place of substance and to further its bid to be made state capital.
That wish was granted in 1868, a time when the city’s primary endeavor was rebuilding from the ground up, post-Sherman—inaugurating Atlanta’s pattern of continually razing itself to reinvent. Standing in this place amounts not only to observing dead history; it’s witnessing an earlier facelift, one of the first of the city’s many attempts to remake itself in the national gaze.
We start back toward the car. A stiff breeze blows across the lawns as we pass the Kiser statue, an eight-foot Romanesque lady who points ominously up at the dark clouds now rolling through the sky. The rain predicted all afternoon feels close, and we pick up our pace, loaded down as we are with paper and small, expensive digital machines.
Mausoleums, those burial vaults that stood as icons of industrial wealth and renown so fashionable in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, perch all over the place here on Oakland’s highest hills. I peek into one belonging to the family of J. C. Peck. Even in today’s overcast gloom, bright shards of light from a stained-glass window picturing Christ on the cross light up the inside vestibule. As I peer through the bars of the cold, wrought-iron door, taking in the interior hallway with its elegant black-and-white checked floor, marble bench, and wall of stacked burial chambers, a shockingly chill breeze reverberates through the chamber and hits me.
These vaults denoted the ultimate in success and power, but I can’t help but feel unnerved and just sorry for the people entombed here. There’s a vulnerability in how their closed coroner-style drawers are on display for any stranger like me who wants to take a gander.
Something Charles-Foster-Kane lonely, too, about the idea of being stuck inside some ornate granite gargoyled house, even after your own death. So close to the earth, but not united with it. These men, the industrial martyrs in the battle to establish Atlanta as a city of distinction, with their wives and children. It makes me shiver. I cannot keep my eyes from those drawers. You look at them and there is no doubt as to their purpose and contents—and for the first time, the wonder of this place feels like something more than pure history. Cold mortality stirs and says Hello. I unclasp my fingers and skip away from here like a child, fast.
The cemetery is one of those subjects that divides people into ideological camps. Some people hate the memorial parks with the markers made flat so maintenance workers can easily mow right over them; they call them the worst example of craven, corporate-owned funeral business. Or they hate mausoleums, or they reserve a special dislike for cremation.
And then there are people like my dad’s mother. Her ashes are buried at Valley Forge Memorial Gardens near Philadelphia. It’s a sedate place. Some of the markers are flush with the ground and some are not, but the whole thing is ordered and neat, a later iteration of cemetery. More French garden than English, more golf course than either. The orderliness gives the place a propriety the rambling acres at Oakland will never achieve.
By the time my grandmother hit her teens, her father had wrested the family to a measure of affluence. There were white tablecloths and servants. Unsurprisingly, a streak of the mannered ran through my grandmother to the end of her days. I cannot imagine her finding much appealing about Oakland. She was a woman of those generations just following the Victorians, and I know she would hate the gaudy statues and the broken bricks. I have a mostly rational view of the world, but if we had laid Jeanne Sweeney’s ashes to rest amid this beautiful, broken tumult, I just know: She would haunt us.
Places like Valley Forge or your local Shady Acres Memorial Park (whose name I am fabricating; I intend no criticism toward any of the real Shady Acreses) are logistically more user-friendly than Oakland ever was, even in its prime, but these successive articulations of the graveyard did not spring from nothing. Some people may hold up two examples in opposition, the “old, creepy cemeteries” and the “new, orderly cemeteries,” but the latter would never have existed had it not been for Oakland. In a way, Oakland was a grandmother, the first in an evolutionary chain: the cemetery conscious of itself.
And then there are people like Mary Woodlan, who, at one point in conversation, used the word “love” to describe her feelings for Oakland no fewer than five times in five minutes. There are societies and websites and publications like Epitaphs magazine, created by and for rabid fans of old boneyards.
But for all the people who think Victorian rural cemeteries, with their riot of monuments and trees, are lovely places, no one is building new ones. Part of the reason has to do with the popularity of cremation and the transience of Americans today. Part of it might also be an effect of income taxes; the wealthy among us can no longer so freely import Italian marble and have workers spend ten years handcrafting a gothic mausoleum.
Really, though, I think the reason no one’s building more Oak-lands is this: The very quality that endears such places to us is their feel of the ancient and the unknowable. The rural cemetery is the archetypical cemetery, but we’ve mostly moved on from the Victorian view of death. Today, we tend to think of such places as tourist sites, not as potential spots to spend eternity ourselves.
In that irony inherent in so many things decades past their heyday, Oakland means more to the preservationists of today than it did to the people who buried their dead here while the cemetery was in its prime. Sure, the Victorians put up monuments and held picnics, but they didn’t worry constantly about Oakland’s cultural and historic importance or plan very well for its future. The cemetery was in decay back in 1976 when the Historic Oakland Foundation commenced its restoration efforts. Its primary goal was to preserve Oakland, not to attract new burials. And I think this is one reason we can stand to visit. Instead of reminding us too much of our own mortality, Oakland makes us think mostly of mythic anecdotes, of history.
And frankly, we like the decay. We enjoy the sense of historical connection here, but we’re also attracted to how decrepit it all feels. We like the feeling that we’re seeing an endangered piece of the past. How long will that crumbling arch remain that crumbling arch? Lucky we caught it before it became just a pile of rubble. A week after my visit to Oakland, a tornado blew through Atlanta, one of very few in recorded history. As such storms are wont to do, its capricious dance devastated a few neighborhoods and left others untouched. But it ripped through Cabbagetown’s blocks of historic shotgun houses, and it also gutted Oakland. Fallen trees and broken monuments crowded walkways and cemetery blocks for weeks after, and the place was closed to visitors for months. The rebuilding process took more than a year. “Rebuilding” means restoring what monuments can be restored and planting new trees. But what’s gone is irreparably lost and will never come back.
As the first drops of rain begin to fall, Jon and I continue back toward the entrance and his car, out there waiting for us in the present day. We rush past the marker for Atlanta’s first baby (Julia Carlyle Withers, 1842–1919) and the one for Confederate captain William Fuller (1836–1905), who led the capture of the three Yankee spies who had absconded with The General, a Confederate locomotive. One block away, the spies were hanged and buried here before being reinterred at the National Cemetery in Chattanooga. We pass a sign pointing the way to Margaret Mitchell’s grave and to that of former Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson, and we almost—but don’t quite—miss a nondescript flat marker that I beg Jon to photograph since the battery on my camera’s almost dead. The marble stone, small and flush with the weeds and the browning grass on the leaf-littered ground, reads only “This Man Lived.”