Lindenwood Cemetery and the American Cemetery Movement
Thanks to my dear friend and college roommate Onie, I have this picture of me with at my great-great-great grandparents's grave. Hello, Myron and Jane Barbour!
L is for Lindenwood Cemetery
We’d been driving in circles for more than an hour. Onie pulled over amid the graves and looked at her phone. “I have an idea, Roomie,” she said. We met almost forty years earlier, when we were both still 17, freshmen in college, paired randomly as roommates. She was from Fort Wayne; I grew up in North Carolina and as a freshman had no idea I had any family history in the Summit City. It was a discovery I wouldn’t make till 2008.
By now lifelong friends, I’d driven up from North Carolina to visit Onie, and while there, to check out the amazing Genealogy Center at the Allen County Public Library. I also came to Lindenwood Cemetery specifically to find the grave of my great-great-great grandfather, Myron Fitch Barbour. It was the last day of my stay, and we weren’t having any luck.
Onie pulled up the Find a Grave website memorial for Myron, clicked on the photo of his grave - an impressive obelisk - and enlarged it as much as possible. “Maybe we can see something in the background that will help us,” she suggested. The photo was taken in winter and we were there in summer. There were evergreens at a distance behind the grave, and a leafless hardwood tree. Was that a fence we saw in the background? What was the object in the far left corner amidst the pines?
She drove to a spot where pines brushed up against a fence. We got out and wandered around, feeling like sleuths.
Myron Barbour moved to Fort Wayne, a little “outpost in the wilderness,” in 1835. There was an old burial ground outside the fort where soldiers were buried, without the care we are accustomed to today. Shortly before Myron, in 1833, a young lawyer named Hugh McCulloch, son of a wealthy New England shipbuilder, arrived in Fort Wayne on horseback. He quickly became a community leader and director of the Fort Wayne branch of the state bank of Indiana.
“Soon after I became a resident of Fort Wayne I discovered that there was, neither in the town nor near it, a public burial ground,” McCulloch wrote nearly fifty years later, and, “That the interments had been, and were being made, in a lot to which the town had no title and consequently there could be no assurance that the bodies would remain undisturbed.” He bought four acres from Samuel Hanna, by then an uncle-in-law of Myron’s, fenced it and began selling plots. He set aside a small space for paupers. There were no provisions made for perpetual care, no funds to maintain the property, as was usual for the time. It was referred to simply as the burial ground or sometimes Broadway burial ground.
In less than twenty years city residents began to say that something should be done about it. The burial ground was a disgrace. It was a dumping ground of overgrown weeds, overturned gravestones, and broken fencing. Animals sometimes grazed there. By that time, McCulloch had moved on to Indianapolis.(1)
The shambles of the old burial ground was typical of cemeteries all over the U.S. They were invariably small, with no funds or plan for perpetual care, and became unsightly. As they ran out of space, bodies were sometimes buried on top of other graves. In New York City the Board of Health appointed a committee to look into the problem describing the city graveyards as “receptacles of putrefying matter and hotbeds of miasmata.”(2) A Scottish traveler described the standard American burial place as a yard “where the mourners sink ankle deep in a rank and offensive mould, mixed with broken bones and fragments of coffins.”(3) A graveyard was a place to avoid.
Fort Wayne became part of a Rural Cemetery Movement that swept the country in the last half of the nineteenth century, changing graveyards, renaming them cemeteries. The movement both responded to and created new attitudes about burial grounds. The movement began with Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn and Laurel Hill in Philadelphia were other early examples. These were planned, landscaped, parklike places with hills, trees and streams. They were designed with winding carriage avenues and graveled footpaths rather than a grid, compelling slower traffic. They were promoted as wholesome places for family outings, a place that promoted morality and contemplation.
At the dedication ceremony for Mount Auburn, Justice Joseph Story helped establish this new view of a cemetery as a place of instruction and morals. There, amid the beauty of nature and artistic, tasteful headstones and mausoleums, the graves held silent lessons. Here one could heed the lessons the memorials had to give, and in wandering among the graves, amidst trees and flowers, see the evidence of God’s power and creation. This captured the imagination of Americans and became a much more convincing argument for new cemeteries than talk of overcrowding or unsanitary conditions. Cemeteries could create a new awareness of history, reinvigorate patriotism, and complement an appreciation of art.
An 1843 book by English landscape architect John C. Loudon laid out his view of the purposes for a cemetery. First was the obvious: providing a decent burial space for the dead. But second was, “the improvement of the moral sentiments and general taste of all classes, and more especially of the great masses of society.” Much, then, was pinned upon the cemetery. It became a “school of instruction” in architecture, sculpture, general gardening, neatness and order, lessons especially needed by the lower classes, it was believed. The cemetery was no longer a place to shun, but one of renewal amid beauty.(4)
Mount Auburn had rules, too. A sense of decorum prevailed. Gates were open only sunup to sundown; food was not permitted. There was no picking of flowers on the grounds, no play or boisterous behavior. This, too, was copied at other new cemeteries.
People responded in droves. Carriages were often lined up waiting to get into Mount Auburn. It averaged 600 visitors a day. Two early guide books were sold to visitors, with descriptions of graves and moralistic poetry to ponder while one wandered. At Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill in 1848, over 30,000 visitors streamed in between April and December alone.(5) Other cities built and promoted their cemeteries as must-see excursions stops for tourists.
In Fort Wayne
In the 1850s twelve prominent Fort Wayne leaders raised capital to form a nonprofit cemetery corporation. One was a member of the family, Ochmig Bird, Myron’s brother-in-law.(5)
July 5, 1859 the corporation purchased 152 acres of former Pottawatomie land, virgin forest and marsh, at a cost of $7,627. They hired an architect, John Chislett and a horticulturalist/landscape architect, John Doswell, both English-born. Doswell stayed on as superintendent of the cemetery until 1900. He was succeeded by his son, who was in term succeeded by his son. For 95 years Doswells were the caretakers of the cemetery.
Like Mount Auburn, Lindenwood was designed with winding lanes and took advantage of the natural gentle hills on the property. It was named for an abundance of linden trees in the area. Rustic stone bridges, grottos, and pagodas were constructed. The first plots sold for five dollars. A dedication ceremony was held May 1860 with speeches by all the town ministers and the president of Fort Wayne Female Seminary.
By November, Dawson’s Fort Wayne Daily Times reported that removals from the old burying ground were “progressing in earnest.” Forty graves were moved the first year. The graves at the shabby old burial ground were moved at family expense. Broadway burial ground wasn’t officially closed until 1886, though, and it continued to elicit complaints. In 1869 the editor of the Daily Gazette called it, “not only a daily reproach to the city but a sad commentary on the swiftness with which we fade from memory…. It presents the most neglected and dilapidated appearance of any “city of the dead” it has ever been our lot to witness. Not only are the grounds and paths and shrubs totally uncared for and the undergrowth so dense and wild as to resemble a Mexican chaparral, but the railings and monuments that once adorned the lots or marking places of the departed are broken and scattered or bent and twisted..making the scene all the more desolate…”
In 1875 the Fort Wayne Daily News said, “It is a disgrace to a community that pretends to be even half civilized….there cattle, horses, pigs, and any animal wandering at large can and do enter the sacred ground, ruminate on the spare grass, perhaps ruminating over the fearful condition of things there…Every kind of vandalism has been practiced there, and the place looks as if any army has passed over it…”
It was such a complete contrast with Lindenwood. Ochmig left provisions in his will to move his mother and his father-in-law, William Suttenfield, who died in 1836. Myron moved his and Jane’s firstborn son, William Barbour, who died as a baby in 1840.
Eventually, in 1886 the old burial grounds were closed and disinterred, and Hugh McCullough, who by then had served as the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury under both President Lincoln and President Grant, deeded the four acres to the city to be used as a park. It remains as McCulloch Park today and has one grave, that of Indiana’s seventh governor, Samuel Bigger.
At Lindenwood each year the Decoration Day - later to be named Memorial Day - festivities were described in the city newspapers, with crowds typically estimated at about 2,000. The full address of the key orator usually ran in the paper, too.
In 1886 Isaac De Groff Nelson, president of the cemetery board, wrote a booklet offering suggestions as to correct behavior. Ostentatious displays of mourning were “out.” The solemn ritual of burial should be made a labor of love, to the exclusion, as far as possible, of paid labor. A plain wooden coffin that would return the body to nature as soon as possible was preferable.
By 1900, the city street cars went right to the gate. Near the entrance were lagoons with an estimated 75,000 goldfish who weathered the Indiana winters, and a flock of swans whom children enjoyed feeding. By 1914, a single swan known as Joe remained, the others the unfortunate victims of dogs and disease. Cars were allowed only between 9 a.m. and noon. The superintendent of the cemetery promoted the name “burial park” and predicted that cremation was the way of the future.
Today, the old part of Lindenwood is still beautiful, with huge oaks and gentle rolling hills. The lagoon and its flashing goldfish are long gone. I was ready to give up and accept that I just wasn’t going to find the grave. Onie refused to abandon the idea. At her suggestion, in desperation, I called a reference librarian at the Genealogy Center to ask if she could look up the section of the cemetery where Myron is buried. She bristled at first as they do not do people’s research for them, and I knew that. They’ll be glad to point you in the direction of the resources you need. But Onie and I didn't have time to go to the library to look up the information and get back to Lindenwood before the gates closed. I begged. Please – I am here from North Carolina, my last day.
The librarian yielded, and it took her less than a minute to find the Barbour family plot. When Onie and I reached the section, we couldn’t believe it. Somehow, it was located along the one drive we hadn’t gone down, near the entrance to the cemetery. That made sense, since Myron was an early purchaser of plots. So it was that I hugged his obelisk and Onie took pictures.
Notes:
McCulloch would later serve as U.S. Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S Grant.
French.
Ibid.
Blanche Linden-Ward.
Personal Note: Here’s a list of family members who I know are buried at Lindenwood: Myron Fitch Barbour, Jane Suttenfield Barbour, Ella Barbour, William A. Barbour, William Suttenfield, Laura Taylor Suttenfield, Asa More Suttenfield, Louisa Bennett Suttenfield, Bird Suttenfield, William Suttenfield (Asa and Louisa’s son), Laura Suttenfield Kelsey, Christian Ochmig Bird, Ann Suttenfield Bird, James Ochmig Bird, Samuel Hanna, Eliza Taylor Hanna and their ten children, Elvira Taylor Dubois (Laura and Eliza Taylor's sister), Horace Taylor (Laura, Eliza, Elvira and Nellie's brother), Ellen P. "Nellie" Taylor Lane (Laura Suttenfield's half-sister), Ophelia Dubois Bourie (Elvira's daughter). Also buried in the Myron Barbour plot are his grandchildren Clara and Jesse Lipes and possibly Sophia L. Lipes.
Here are people in the family tree (all through marriage) who were incorporators of Lindenwood:
Ochmig Bird. Ochmig and Myron were two years apart and arrived in Fort Wayne at about the same time. Myron married Jane Suttenfield and Ochmig married her sister Ann. Ochmig, a Pennsylvania native, was an engineer who was instrumental in the construction of the Wabash and Erie Canal, and later with railroad building. He was elected city surveyor in 1842 and in the 1850s he served on the city council and as Allen County treasurer. He also served three terms in the Indiana State Legislature.
Alfred D. Brandriff, father of Martha “Mattie” Brandriff, who married Samuel and Eliza Hanna’s son Samuel Telford Hanna.
Charles D. Bond, father of Hugh McCulloch Bond, who married Samuel Hanna’s granddaughter Jessie Hanna. (Her father was Horace Hovey Hanna.)
Sources:
Beatty, John. “Lindenwood Cemetery at 150,” History Center Notes & Queries, Allen County-Fort Wayne Historical Society, 26 May 2010, https://historycenterfw.blogspot.com/2010/05/lindenwood-cemetery-at-150.html
French, Stanley. “The Cemetery as Cultural Institution: The Establishment of Mount Auburn and the “Rural Cemetery” Movement,” American Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 1 (March 1974), pp. 37-59.
Linden-Ward, Blanche. “Strange But Genteel Pleasure Grounds: Tourists and Leisure Uses of Nineteenth-Century Rural Cemeteries,” from Cemeteries and Gravemarkers, 1989.
Lindenwood Cemetery: Articles of Incorporation of the Lindenwood Cemetery, Fort Wayne: Lindenwood Cemetery, 1886.
Paulison, Arthur M.. The Lindenwood Story 1860-1979, Fort Wayne: Lindenwood Historical Foundation, 1995.
Walvin, James. "Dust To Dust: Celebrations of Death in Victorian England," Historical Reflections, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Fall 1982), pp. 353-371.
Newspapers:
“The Old Cemetery,” The Fort Wayne Daily Gazette, 24 May 1869, p. 4.
Condition of Old Cemetery: Fort Wayne Daily News, 15 June 1875, p. 3.
“Homes! In the Silent City of the Dead. A Pen Picture of Lindenwood, Its Promoters, Its Price and Its Improvements,” Fort Wayne Sentinel, 29 March 1886, p. 1.
“The Silent Cities,” The Fort Wayne News, 26 May 1900, p. 4.
“Beautiful Lindenwood, The Silent City of the Dead,” The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, 23 Aug 1914, p. 17.
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