Garden of Allusions: Oakwood Cemetery

Stonecutter Gottlieb Pitz prepared this fine example of mortuary art.

In August 1888 while visiting her fiancé Christopher Stein in Detroit, nineteen-year-old Ida went for a carriage ride with him and his mother. In the street the horse was frightened and reared, and the occupants went sprawling, Ida hitting her head on cedar block pavement. From there she was taken to St. Mary's Hospital; five weeks later, on September 27^th, she was dead.

Parents John and Salina returned home to Traverse City with their sad charge. Sympathetic friends and family were at the depot when the train rolled slowly to a stop. On the following Sunday, gray and stormy, a pall on the day, "the well plum'd hearse came nodding / stately and slowly" along Eighth Street to Oakwood cemetery, and Ida Greilick's body was laid to rest.

Ida's thirteen-foot monument consists of a seven-foot plinth with a female figure atop leaning forward in walking pose, her melancholy countenance looking at the earth. This figure evokes thoughts of Byron's "She Walks in Beauty," and her figure of drapery is mindful of a Caryatid's from the Erechtheum. One looks up to see her wearing a star, tiara-like, and the letters IDA chiseled on her sash; she looks framed by heaven.

Ida Greilick, dead at 19 years, is memorialized in stone.

Her distinctive monument, prepared by stonecutter Gottlieb Pitz, is one of the fine examples of mortuary art and architecture at Oakwood. Other examples are the classic cenotaph-design pedestal, column, capital, Doric entablature and urn of Oval Wood Dish Company founder Henry Hull's monument, and the Gothic monument with ivy, turret, and handshake (meaning peace) of the establisher of Novotny's Saloon, Anton Novotny, later becoming Dill's. These somber monuments remind me of the oft-writ inscription Memento mori ("remember that you must die"), yet are relieved by canopies of majestic elms, maples and weeping willows, "waving their graceful drapery," and rosettes of daisies and daffodils bejeweling the area, creating an aura of the serenity of remembrance and an atmosphere of contemplation.

Oakwood is a landscape cemetery following in the shadow of Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the first landscape cemetery in America. Mount Auburn, named for a pastoral place described in "The Deserted Village" by Oliver Goldsmith, defines the past in three ways: homage to family and friends, commemoration of important citizens, and symbolic art and architecture. It was conceived to bring together a joint influence of nature and art that would cast a "cheerful light over the darkness of the grave."

There is a sense of place in Oakwood; besides the art and architecture, it's a place of literary melancholy. Years ago on Fridays I would walk home from Burwood Products through Taverse City's Elysian Field like the Reverend Mr. Hooper in Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil" to get up an appetite, not for a Sunday sermon, but for a feast of literary allusions. Pastoral poetry's metaphors were entwined in the angels, torches, and scythes as I sauntered along, stopping occasionally to read the words of epitaphs. This day I read on a time-stained tiny marker, "Irwin / Infant son of Mr. & Mrs. Emanuel / Wilhelm / Died Oct. 16 1892 / Age 3 ms. / ‘He shall carry the lambs / in his bosom.'"  A sleeping lamb was atop the small tombstone, reminding me of William Blake's "Songs of Innocence and Experience." George Alderton's (1897-1993) rectangular block of marble reads, "The man who named the M.S.U. ‘Spartans'."  A simple stone with cypress and date marks first Parks Commissioner of Traverse City Conrad Foster's rest area. All of which are reminiscent of the Graveyard School of poets.

This literary genre was known for its themes of mortality and melancholy. James Hervey in Meditations among the Tombs dwells upon the grief caused by early death. In "Thanatopsis" (meditation upon death), William Cullen Bryant writes: "She has a voice of gladness, and a smile / And eloquence of beauty." Emily Dickinson, whose early residence in Amherst looked across the street to the graveyard, wrote often about the "flood subject," death ("Because I could not stop for Death- / He kindly stopped for me-").  The path of the Graveyard School eventually led to the Romanticism of  Keats ("My spirit is too weak-mortality / weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep") and Shelley (From the world's bitter wind / Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb.").

Walking by Jay P. Smith's gravestone (he co-founded the National Cherry Festival eighty years ago), its shape is similar to Dante Gabriele Rossetti's marker in London's Highgate Cemetery, a rectanglar piece with sloped shoulders and an Irish clover ornamenting the top. Rossetti, a Pre-Raphaelite artist and Romantic poet, married Elizabeth Siddal (she was the red haired model for Millias' Ophelia), but before their second wedding anniversary she overdosed on laudanum. Distraught, Rossetti placed  his unpublished poems in her coffin at the time of burial. Seven years later he had the coffin exhumed in the dead of night (to avoid public curiosity) to recover the poems. This lugubrious side of Romanticism was the draw bridge to Gothicism's crypts and castles. 

My walk, finished, has stirred my appetite for a weekend of study with bucolic bards. Fifteen years later, as the Chairman of Traverse City Parks and Recreation Commission, I feel no less the effect of Oakwood. As I leave I turn to look at Ida, sun dappled by fall's leaves, and her family and friends, "each in his narrow cell forever laid," and appreciate the allusions of this sense of literary place that are still alive.

Alex Moore is Chairman of the Traverse City Parks and Recreation
Commission and Managing Editor for ForeWord Magazine.