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| Image Credit: The Woodlawn Cemetery |
In 1867 Herman Melville and his wife Elizabeth buried their oldest son Malcolm in Woodlawn Cemetery, and bought their own plots there as well. Jody Logan reviews the choice of Woodlawn over Greenwood in "Melville's Last, Grave Joke?" in Melville Society Extracts 122, February 2002. Points for Woodlawn included the beauty of its pastoral setting, satisfying patriotic and military associations, and practical advantages of the route there by rail.
In April 1871, a literate and reflective newspaper piece titled "Spring Pilgrimage" about the anonymous writer's tour of Woodlawn included the name of "Herman Melville" in a roll of distinguished New Yorkers with lots in the still new (just six years in existence), and splendidly rural cemetery. The selective and alphabetized list has 43 names in all. Thirty names appear before Melville's. Coincidentally, with regard to writing about pilgrimages, Melville by this time had started working on Clarel (published in 1876), his long religious "Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land." Once arrived at Woodlawn, the writer records his dialogue with the caretaker on duty, denoting himself as "P" for Pilgrim and the caretaker as "G" for "Guide." Here is an excerpt with the Melville mention and conclusion of "A Spring Pilgrimage," as published in the New York Evening Post on April 25, 1871:
P.—But all this mass of records supposes an enormous quantity of quiet laborious surveying, mapping and noting.
G.—Why, yes. No large institution or concern of any kind can be managed without just such a mass of toilsome record work. We keep duplicates, moreover, of every line of it, at the city office, so that we have reasonable security against loss by fire.
P.—Well, lastly, tell me some totals or estimates which will represent the whole success of the cemetery in attracting public attention and patronage.
G.—Well, that’s easily done. To begin with, I suppose that the success of the enterprise—every kind of success—was secured when the company of gentlemen undertook it who are at its head. And here’s the complete list of lot-owners. You city scribes know lots of people, if you don’t know people’s lots; so you can pick for yourself out of this list better than I can do it for you.
So the writer picked; but he might very likely have found it difficult to say why. He naturally selected all along the alphabeted initials, from A to W, for variety’s sake; but he is far from assuming to have “got the best;” indeed, he is not sure but the appearance of one’s name in this list is of itself proof of respectability, gentility and eminence. Well, he noted there: Union Adams, J. W. Barker, Hon. Hiram Barney, Judge R. Betts, Hon. G. F. Betts, Judge Bonney, Gail Borden, Ex-Mayor W. V. Brady, Robert Colgate, Rev. B. Dickinson, Rev. R. W. Dickinson, Simeon Draper, Oliver Dyer, J. A. Edgar, T. P. Eldridge, Dr. George T. Elliott, Edward Falle, Admiral Farragut, Rev. E. H. Gillett, Archibald Gracie, James Hall, A. S. Hatch, E. S. Higgins, David Hoadley, Adrien Isellu, A. G. Jerome, W. H. Lee, C. Leland, James Low, Macy—there are fourteen lot owners of the name, holding twenty-seven lots, Herman Melville, S. P. Nash, Thomas Nast, Rev. Dr. Newell, James Parton, Dr. Absalom Peters, Augustus Schell, Charles Scribner, Judge Sutherland, Jonathan Thorne, Julius Wadsworth, W. A. Whitbeck, and Judge Woodruff.
This done, the pilgrim asked for some suggestive total to indicate the strictly business view of the result of the cemetery enterprise thus far. That, the guide replied, is equally easy to discover. There have been in all up to this day eight thousand six hundred and sixty-six interments in the cemetery during its six years’ existence. Any acquaintance with the early years of similar undertakings will show at once that this is an extremely rapid growth in public favor.As time allows I hope eventually to transcribe the whole piece (done! see below for the full transcription). Fine writing with interesting angles and asides, like the passing glimpse of Richard Grant White. Come to think of it, the opening references to Darwin's Descent of Man and Shakespeare are right in Richard Grant White's line, considering RGW's Shakespeare scholarship and pseudonymous authorship of the 1871 satire, The Fall of Man: The Loves of the Gorillas. Richard Grant White certainly would be one to pick out the name of Herman Melville from the long roll of Woodlawn lot owners. White knew Melville from the old Yankee Doodle days and now worked with or over Melville in the New York Custom House. And both could be spotted, and were, browsing in the Luyster Brothers' bookshop--as Hershel Parker recounts in Herman Melville: A Biography V2.757.
By this time the day was somewhat waning, and the pilgrim thought he could hear the distant but peremptory voice of duty down in the roaring city, summoning him back into his mill. So he returned thanks for the civility with which he had been treated; indulged in a few modestly congratulatory remarks upon the obvious prosperity of the cemetery, took leave of the competent and complaisant guide, and set his face homeward. His unaccustomed frame—for he was thoroughly “out of training”—experienced a pervading sense of fatigue, from the extent of his walks on the railroad and within the grounds, and from the stimulatng influence of the pure, fresh oxygenated air; and, a way train stopping at the station, he hastened to ensconce himself therein. He gave one more glance at the quiet lakelet in the corner of the grounds, the foamy miniature waterfall that tumbled down into its steep, rocky channel; the comfortable-looking office, the carefully elaborated slopes of the adjoining part of the cemetery, with their trees and shrubbery, monuments and decorative masonry, and at the wilder hillside further south, and then the train whirled him back to the scene of his daily labor, thoughtful and cheerful from his inspection of the abode of the dead in the budding life of the genial spring day.
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| New York Evening Post / April 25, 1871 |
A SPRING PILGRIMAGE.
The present writer, beholding the other morning a bright, sunshiny sky above him, was seized with a sudden and bird-like instinct of spring migration. He took Darwin’s “Descent of Man” in his hand, therefore, in order to find out how long ago it was that (to use a Shakespearian Darwinism) “the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird,” and eke pencil and paper and out he strolled. He lighted upon a Fourth avenue car; it was going northward—again like the spring birds—and in he jumped. While he perused a few paragraphs of Darwin, the car had reached Twenty-sixth street; an old lady got out; the writer believes that ladies can do no wrong; so he followed suit, and entering the waiting rooms of the wealthy Harlem Railroad, seemed to have come into a poor sort of horse stable. A train was about to start. It was for Williams Bridge. The writer “accepted the omen,” and entered; and to Williams Bridge he went. There was nothing to chronicle along the road. Yes, there was one thing—the numerous and diversified styles of lettering on fences and rocks along the road, in which countless inscriptions in praise of quack potions, hair dyes, and the like, were set down, engaged the writer’s thoughts, and he quickly elaborated two useful reflections, to wit:
How profound will be the conjectures of some able decipherer twenty centuries hence, who shall seek to ascertain whether these innumerable inscriptions are prayers, records of old kings, or epitaphs of eminent men! And, on a similar principle, is there not great reason for the hypothesis that the mysterious inscriptions on the Dighton Rock, on the walls of the Sinaitic passes, at Pasargadae, “and sich,” were simply advertisements of the quack medicines, tooth-washes and hair dyes of the period? What is called a “winged intelligence” by the cuneiformers exactly agrees with the portrait of Doctor Gobler, the pill-man, on his boxes and in the papers. But enough! Rawlinson and Hincks are welcome to the hint, and when they’ve used it properly, there’s more where that came from.
At Williams Bridge the writer did what he had done a hundred times before—when the train stopped he stepped upon the station platform and walked straight on to the far end. Before him lay a long, level, dry-pathed, direct, pedestriable-looking (saving the presence of Mr. Richard Grant White,) stretch of railroad.
“What’s the next station?"
“Woodlawn,” said the railroad man I asked.
“How far?”
“Mile.”
“Well, I’ll go,” said the writer, and he went.
Now it was that he became conscious of the spring. It is not in the city, it is not in the car, it was not on the station platform, for there you smelt the warm oil and steam of the locomotive. But a dozen steps away, as soon as there were open fields on either hand, gray and yellow though they were, the everlasting purity of earth of air enveloped the pilgrim. The city is dirty—physically and morally—and the country as clean. The fresh, vivid breezes that sang through the telegraph wire, lyres whose twenty-eight strings corded either side of the road, were music to the ear, life to the lungs, and fragrance to the nose; while the curly Bronx rippled and flowed in all directions at one side of the way on its devious road to the Sound. The pilgrim laid his ear to a telegraph pole to catch the vibrations of the wires through the denser and more perfect medium of the wood, but just then the wind lulled and the long thrilling notes sank into silence.
“All trespassing is by law forbidden.” Such is the menacing notice that greets the eye of the pilgrim, still northward bent. It is at the boundary fence of a long stretch of woods, overhanging the lefthand side of the track, upon a steep and rough hillside. It was a wise observer who said that it is a capital plan to go in wherever it says, “No admittance,” for at such places there is likely to be something worth seeing. In like manner, where trespassing is forbidden, the grounds are pretty sure to be attractive; and, truly, to whom is not a stretch of wild woods attractive? The pilgrim halted and almost violated the law. But his Puritan-republican self-control sufficed, and notwithstanding a duplicate of the notice a few steps further on and distinct and tempting footpaths winding away within the pilgrim adhered sturdily to the railroad, as did his predecessor of old in the Valley of Humiliation to the Narrow Way, and with better success—or at least with loss of hindrance; for no Apollyon came out before him and “straddled across the whole breadth of the way.” Query: Had a locomotive shot shrieking down upon the wayfarer, wouldn’t it have served very well as an Apollyon? And wouldn’t one have scared Christian as much as did the persistent gentleman in black?
Shortly there appeared two small solid structures, one of Quincy granite and the other of white marble, high up on the steep wooded hill; the pilgrim perceived that they were tombs, and that it was the Woodlawn Cemetery which warned off trespassers, and not a private citizen. In two minutes he reached Woodlawn station; in half a minute more he had executed a right face, had espied sundry carvers’ and stone-masons’ yards, a country road rising steeply to the west, the quiet entrance of the cemetery, and the little waterfall and fountain in the corner nearest the station; and had decided to visit and view the cemetery, thus establishing a “being’s end and aim” for his trip. Proceeding accordingly, he entered the comfortable little office of the cemetery, and was quickly placed under the charge of a competent and willing guide, who escorted him, and informed him about the grounds and the management of the Woodlawn Cemetery, and of rural cemeteries generally. What was thus asked and answered was in substance as follows:
Pilgrim—Is this (namely, close to the railroad,) a natural little lake?
Guide—No. The water supply, as in other parts of the grounds, has been managed carefully, and the reservoirs worked into a useful and ornamental condition. By the way, this fountain is, we believe, the highest of any in or near New York. It will throw a single stream thirty-four feet. While we were about it, too, we have stocked the water heavily with gold and silver fish, and some other kinds.
P.—I would have come up one of your footpaths if I had not been scared by your notice. You might have mantraps and spring guns set for what I know.
G.—Why, did you walk up the road? That’s a man-trap. The stretch between here and Williams Bridge is one of the most dangerous places on the road.
P.—Then a satirist might suggest that the cemetery had been planted on a dangerous part of the railroad for the sake of a convenient supply of customers?
G.—Why, perhaps. But, come; let’s go and look at some of the monuments. [He leads the way, as if feeling that the conversation was taking a frivolous turn]. That freestone obelisk in the Newell lot is accurately proportioned, though reduced, after a celebrated one before the Church of St. John Lateran at Rome. Observe how harmonious a beauty of proportion you perceive in looking at it altogether.
P.—I do. It rests and satisfies the eye. Is not freestone a rather short-lived material in this climate?
G.—Yes. Granite and hard marble are much better suited to outdoor monuments. Here is the grave of the old sea-king, Admiral Farragut.
P.—What! And no monument over the splendid old sailor, and when it would look so nobly on this high sightly spot, too? I thought a hundred thousand dollars had been subscribed to erect a monument to him?
G.—It was. But I believe it is proposed to place it somewhere in New York city.
P.—But could that be the wish of his widow? It is unnatural and unsuitable. A woman’s sensitive taste would dictate more wisely.
G.—I believe Mrs. Farragut would prefer it to be placed here.
P.—Well; I suppose that a man with money and no mind would, if he could, have every public monument, he should subscribe to piled up in his own front yard. But to bury the noble old man here and then erect an empty monument ten miles off looks as if the monument was to the subscribers, not the hero.
G.—I want you to see this white marble front here. It will include a central chapel, with a tomb at each side, connected by an elegantly finished screen wall, so that the whole will from a symmetrical group of edifices in pure white marble. The central structure will be both chapel and tomb, and will be furnished with a dome and lighted through stained glass windows. The style is Roman Doric; a severe but graceful one; and the effect, along the entire front of one hundred feet, will be very rich and imposing. The whole, I suppose, can scarcely be finished for less than forty thousand dollars.
P.—Why, that’s a whole estate! Nobody can afford to die if it requires such an investment as that!
G.—Oh, the gentleman who is erecting this mausoleum is not materially diminishing his estate by that expenditure, I assure you. But look at this noble statue of Faith.
P.—It is wonderfully well cut, considering the intractable nature of the Quincy granite.
J. E. Edgar, it says. He was an old merchant of this city I believe.
G.—Do you see this trefoiled cross and ring, above a steep Gothic roof carved in stone?
P.—With the inscriptions in gilt and in painted letters? What a very lovely combination of form and color. It is entirely unlike anything else on the grounds, and reminds me of some of the elegant old English monumental crosses.
G.—It is in the English style, lettering and all; a recent reproduction of an antique manner. It is not very costly, but it is extremely graceful.
P.—Such erections show real thought and knowledge and feeling and culture. How different the effect is from the snub obelisks and pillars and nondescript blocks without proportion, that you find ready made in the stone cutters’ yards!
G.—That is exactly the way we reason here, and so far as we give any recommendations, they are of similar tone.
P.—What is this large lot with all these old-fashioned gravestones lying flat in the turf?
G.—One of the lots appropriated to the remains removed from some of the old city graveyards. By the way, a fact connected with some of these removals shows how great a difference there is in point of certitude in recognising the remains of the dead between the old ways and our methods here. We can tell, and our records will enable our successors to tell a hundred or five hundred years hence, with immediate and absolute exactness both who was buried in every grave within our limits, and the precise spot where any required interment took place. But out of a total of fifty-five hundred persons whose remains were removed from certain of the old city burying-grounds, so imperfectly had records, monuments and measurements been kept that only eight hundred and fifty identifications were possible. I want you to look at the books and maps in the office, by the way, before you go, and to see for yourself how complete the system is.
P.—I do hope you can keep those ungraceful prison-like fences and copings from chopping up these beautiful broad slopes and lawns?
G.—We shall. All this part of the Cemetery is to be developed on the landscape-lawn plan, which will absolutely prohibit these petty violations of beauty. Indeed, it is probable that in the course of time the proprietors of the lots already enclosed in this heavy, old-fashioned style, will become convinced that the new plan will enhance the beauty of each lot as much as of all the grounds. Whenever that happens the copings and fences can be removed, and the whole of the grounds brought into full unity of design.
P.—An extremely desirable consummation. Please to tell me what country road it is over there, upon which your southwestern Gothic gateway opens?
G.—Country road? Excuse me; that is a hundred-foot avenue, opened and graded throughout all the way from the city. It is already a very pleasant road; but it is to be planted with elms, and will then be the finest drive in the United States.
P.—I beg your pardon. But if there is so easy an approach on that side, do not many people prefer to come by that way rather than by rail?
G.—Yes: an increasing number. Decidedly more, within the year last past, than by the railroad. We have done much, accordingly, to improve our own grounds near that gate. The gatehouse itself, though only a temporary structure, makes as you see a creditable appearance; and the bell over it, though you would not think so to look at it from this distance, weighs nearly one ton.
P.—Indeed? And I suppose that in process of time the avenue entrance, with its lodge and perhaps a chapel, will be enriched into a kind of centre of architectural and sculptural beauty for all this wide stretch of open lawns and woodlands?
G.—It would be a natural feature of the improvements, of course.
P.—Will you now be so good as to afford me the promised glance at your records? I must soon be on my way back to the city. It is with real reluctance that I leave the fragrant purity of your upland air to drive back into the dirt. But what is that broad low monument in white marble?
G.—It is Mr. Hall’s lot. The colossal open Bible on a reading desk, the obelisk, and the statue of Hope, are all within the same lot. Before we go into the office, look in to the receiving tomb. The remains of a hundred and twenty dead are sealed up in those ranges of stone vaults, awaiting choice of lots or removal. Now for the office books. Here is our record of interments: it is kept in the order of interments, with serial numbers, and shows all the facts necessary to fully describe and identify the remains in each case. It also refers by plot and lot, or by range and number, as the case may be, to the maps; and there is an alphabetical register of the names; so that it is the work of only a moment to ascertain any fact whatever that can be required as to any name or any grave in the cemetery or its records. These are our maps. You see there is first, a map of the whole cemetery; second, a set of large maps, all on a uniform scale, of each plot in the cemetery, showing the exact position and boundaries of every lot within it; and third, a series of small maps, also to a uniform scale, one map to each lot, showing the exact size and bearings of each lot and the precise position of each grave within it, as provide for and stipulated when the lot is sold. This arrangement gives us the means, by a perfectly simple measurement upon the ground, of determining exactly where each grave has been dug and where each new one may be. A duplicate of this goes to each lot-owner with his deed, the graves being numbered, noted as occupied, and with the names, so that definite instructions can be sent from any distance for any desired changes, decoration or dispositions of any kind in any lot.
P.—But all this mass of records supposes an enormous quantity of quiet laborious surveying, mapping and noting.
G.—Why, yes. No large institution or concern of any kind can be managed without just such a mass of toilsome record work. We keep duplicates, moreover, of every line of it, at the city office, so that we have reasonable security against loss by fire.
P.—Well, lastly, tell me some totals or estimates which will represent the whole success of the cemetery in attracting public attention and patronage.
G.—Well, that’s easily done. To begin with, I suppose that the success of the enterprise—every kind of success—was secured when the company of gentlemen undertook it who are at its head. And here’s the complete list of lot-owners. You city scribes know lots of people, if you don’t know people’s lots; so you can pick for yourself out of this list better than I can do it for you.
So the writer picked; but he might very likely have found it difficult to say why. He naturally selected all along the alphabeted initials, from A to W, for variety’s sake; but he is far from assuming to have “got the best;” indeed, he is not sure but the appearance of one’s name in this list is of itself proof of respectability, gentility and eminence. Well, he noted there: Union Adams, J. W. Barker, Hon. Hiram Barney, Judge R. Betts, Hon. G. F. Betts, Judge Bonney, Gail Borden, Ex-Mayor W. V. Brady, Robert Colgate, Rev. B. Dickinson, Rev. R. W. Dickinson, Simeon Draper, Oliver Dyer, J. A. Edgar, T. P. Eldridge, Dr. George T. Elliott, Edward Falle, Admiral Farragut, Rev. E. H. Gillett, Archibald Gracie, James Hall, A. S. Hatch, E. S. Higgins, David Hoadley, Adrien Isellu, A. G. Jerome, W. H. Lee, C. Leland, James Low, Macy—there are fourteen lot owners of the name, holding twenty-seven lots, Herman Melville, S. P. Nash, Thomas Nast, Rev. Dr. Newell, James Parton, Dr. Absalom Peters, Augustus Schell, Charles Scribner, Judge Sutherland, Jonathan Thorne, Julius Wadsworth, W. A. Whitbeck, and Judge Woodruff.
This done, the pilgrim asked for some suggestive total to indicate the strictly business view of the result of the cemetery enterprise thus far. That, the guide replied, is equally easy to discover. There have been in all up to this day eight thousand six hundred and sixty-six interments in the cemetery during its six years’ existence. Any acquaintance with the early years of similar undertakings will show at once that this is an extremely rapid growth in public favor.
By this time the day was somewhat waning, and the pilgrim thought he could hear the distant but peremptory voice of duty down in the roaring city, summoning him back into his mill. So he returned thanks for the civility with which he had been treated; indulged in a few modestly congratulatory remarks upon the obvious prosperity of the cemetery, took leave of the competent and complaisant guide, and set his face homeward. His unaccustomed frame—for he was thoroughly “out of training”—experienced a pervading sense of fatigue, from the extent of his walks on the railroad and within the grounds, and from the stimulatng influence of the pure, fresh oxygenated air; and, a way train stopping at the station, he hastened to ensconce himself therein. He gave one more glance at the quiet lakelet in the corner of the grounds, the foamy miniature waterfall that tumbled down into its steep, rocky channel; the comfortable-looking office, the carefully elaborated slopes of the adjoining part of the cemetery, with their trees and shrubbery, monuments and decorative masonry, and at the wilder hillside further south, and then the train whirled him back to the scene of his daily labor, thoughtful and cheerful from his inspection of the abode of the dead in the budding life of the genial spring day.
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