Landscape Architecture: Tryon Cemetery

Laid out in 1896, this picturesque hilltop cemetery seems ancient. Yet in fact it was modern for that era, reflecting changes in what designers thought cemeteries ought to be like. It survives as an unusual example of a pivotal period in American landscape architecture.

In the history of the United States, outdoor burial grounds have evolved significantly from unregulated places for corpses to meticulously-designed with strict rules and procedure. The earliest were three types: church graveyards, community fields, and family plots. Graveyards were controlled by religious congregations, generally for their members or denominational relations. Fields were designated public land where paupers, strangers or apostates might legally be buried, often with no permanent markers. Plots were on private properties, often off-limits to the uninvited. As ownership of private properties changed and families moved away, family plots lost favor except among the rich.

Church graveyards, meanwhile, became difficult to expand and manage, especially in urban areas. Church buildings increasingly were constructed with no room for an adjacent graveyard. At old churches, congregations ran out of room for new burials.

Community fields were the next type to fall out of favor. Their unregulated character and unsightly lack of maintenance made them public nuisances. Health concerns about shallow graves, grave-robbing, animals plus public need to densify and expand built-up districts, during the 19th century, caused many “fields” to be abandoned and desecrated. Elected officials dreaded all the responsibilities and expense of burials, which set conditions for a new type of cemetery: the entrepreneurial kind.

Formal landscape design of burial places began with the entrepreneurial cemetery during the early 19th century. Sometimes the management were profit-motivated to buy land, designate lots, and sell the space. As with other real-estate activities the location, demand, affluence of market, prestige and amenities drove design, along with maintenance costs, security and competition. In many locales non-profit societies were cemetery entrepreneurs; their management issues essentially the same as for-profits. Ultimately such cemeteries became densely-packed cacophonies, in square grids with narrow walkways, unappealing esthetically and hardly places of which communities could be proud.

The next phase began before the Civil War. Affluent people increasingly rejected densely-packed city grids, and began moving to suburbs. Luxuries of space and ornamental horticulture became their fashion and desire. Their habitations became more stylized and individualistic. The final resting place became, to their preference, some spot reminiscent of an aristocratic family estate. Thus came about the new concept of the Rural Cemetery designed as a spacious, tranquil parkland dotted about with tasteful monuments custom-designed, artfully. The seminal Rural Cemetery was Mount Auburn outside Boston, dedicated in 1831. Set with classical monuments on rolling terrain, it’s a National Historic Landmark, followed by others outside cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cincinnati and New York.

Before the advent of public parks these beautiful rural cemeteries became major tourist destinations. In 1848 some 60,000 admirers came to Mount Auburn alone. Much of its appeal was its innovative landscape design by Henry A.S. Dearborn, first president of Massachusetts Horticultural Society. His concept rejected straight drives and walkways, in favor of curving avenues among stately trees and lush plantings. Dearborn was assisted by botanist Jacob Bigelow and civil engineer Alexander Wadsworth, a cousin of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Their design collaboration was the initial, and most famous, landscape architecture for an American cemetery. The team designated vocabularies for funerary monuments and esthetic criteria for gates and walls.

In North Carolina, as elsewhere, the “rural cemetery” model prevailed through the rest of the 19th century as the epitome of cemetery design. In Asheville, for example, Riverside Cemetery opened in 1885 with extremely hilly topography, lovely landscape maintenance, and steep costs for interment of the well-off. Like in most such cemeteries, one-upsmanship was the norm as the Gilded Age went on. Spectacular monuments, impressive crypts and expensive architect-designed tombs ornament its winding drives.

About 1890, even before the Panic of 1893 and its subsequent Depression that lasted five years, thinking people were reacting to the excesses of the Rural Cemetery model. In the emerging field of landscape architecture, designers began to push back against elaborate funerary extravaganzas and contrived ornamental horticulture. In 1888 Garden and Forest started up in Boston, edited by Charles Sprague Sargent. From the outset the influential periodical’s material included features about conservation, scientific forestry, and prioritizing native American species, and news about cemeteries management.

One re-thinking designer was Samuel Bowne Parsons, Jr of New York who went on in 1899 to become a founder of the formally-organized American Society of Landscape Architects. His 1891 book about landscape, in a chapter about cemeteries, addresses specifically those egotistical aspects that were out of hand such as “tall monuments.” Any fences or hedges around individual lots should be forbidden.

Later that decade, Parsons was invited to Asheville where he designed Albemarle Park. On extremely hilly terrain, Parsons planned low-key rental “cottages” in the Arts & Crafts style, reached through a picturesque, informal entry structure. A high-quality inn (not a “hotel”) was The Manor — also designed to be intimate, not impressive, though equipped with all modern conveniences and comforts. Among other designers for the Albermarle Park project were English-born Richard Sharp Smith, who in 1899 designed a proposed chapel for the Tryon Cemetery, and Bradford Gilbert, New York architect who specialized in railroad depots – and quite probably, though quietly and uncredited – designed the charming small Tryon Depot of 1896. Though we have no documentation Samuel Parsons ever came to Tryon, his influence on design of the 1896 Tryon Cemetery is seen in its result.

Ulysses Doubleday, New York stockbroker who developed Doubleday’s Addition in Asheville during the 1880s, moved to Tryon in 1890 to develop his famous vineyard, and died there in 1893. (Doubleday’s grandson Lawrence, who grew up in Tryon, became a New York architect.) Widower Doubleday’s death at Tryon was unexpected. Although his son Harold was settled at Tryon, with wife and children, there seemed no appropriate place to bury him in North Carolina. After an Episcopalian funeral in Manhattan, his body was taken to Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx for interment. (Now designated a National Historic Landmark, Woodlawn has the character of a 19th century rural cemetery, built on rolling hills with tree-lined roads, the resting place for more than 300,000 people. Woodlawn’s later development shows transition toward trends during the 20th century. For traditionalists, an estate may expense up to $1.5 million to build a family mausoleum. Remains can be in-ground, or cremated ashes placed in an elegant columbarium (including the choice to have a glass-front niche for precious personal artifacts and photos). For a fee, ashes may be scattered in pretty environments designed for the purpose.)

In 1892 the Lanier women’s club of Tryon went into hiatus two years after its founding. (Programs didn’t resume until 1898 under new leadership.) Club members voted to “turn all funds over to The Village Improvement Association to aid purchase of land for a cemetery in Tryon". No Tryon church had any burying ground except Holy Cross Episcopal, where a few parishioners were interred near the walls. Lemuel N. Wilcox, founder and surveyor of the Town, assumed responsibility and pledged to donate a few acres near the outer limit of the little municipality, on a winding rough lane later named Markham Road.

The site was a hill with a view to Tryon Peak. We know from Lily McAboy Wilcox’s 1896 diary that her husband, an experienced surveyor, laid out its lots of varying sizes and shapes with help from their son Edwin. We know from other sources that Wilcox liked nature and agriculture, so saving special trees was part of his vision. Some of the land was left alone, not platted into lots. His thoroughfares aren’t straight lines, but neither are they formal curves of 19th century Rural Cemeteries. Lots are in rows, but headstones don’t line up, one behind the other. His layout seems “organic.”

No early issues of the weekly Tryon Bee survive from the 1890s, to tell us anything about the cemetery, but we know from scant parish records at Holy Cross that bodies interred there were exhumed and transferred for reburial. Some of those must have been Black members.

In 1909 a transaction at county Register of Deeds affirms clear title to part of Tryon Cemetery, to a group of Black men called Negro Trustees, but apparently they constituted no formal organization; a number of early Black interments predate that transaction.

Early records of Cemetery sales and rules are lost, and Wilcox’s plat disappeared. He died in 1900 and was buried on the hill, his modest obelisk the only “tall monument” to be erected there. Tryon Cemetery maintenance was assumed as a municipal function; voters for years elected three Cemetery commissioners to oversee operations.

Historians of the landscape architecture profession have studied cemeteries design a great deal, because so much attention was paid to them, especially during the 19th century. In 1984 Bettina C. Van Dyke authored her masters thesis in landscape architecture at Kansas State University with a thorough review of earlier scholarship. Van Dyke identified the 1890s as a pivotal period for American taste and for professional design theory. She shows the South included communities that, like Tryon, pivoted toward the more “natural” and subtle, and how during the Progressive Era such communities turned to more affordable and less ostentatious burials. During that decade, for example, grave markers became more often executed in sober granite, some with rustic split-face surfaces, while highly-finished white marble became passé.

This approach didn’t last for long. The extant landscape of Tryon Cemetery is unusual. During the 20th century radically-different approaches took over for new cemeteries and for enlargements to existing ones. The most obvious is the Lawn Cemetery where upright markers are forbidden entirely. More formal Beaux-Arts layouts deploying mathematical symmetries became popular, as well, and markers with highly-polished and colorful surfaces. Photographs of the deceased, military cemeteries with rigid design formulas for impressive effect, and buildings housing columbaria were other trends. New burials at old Tryon Cemetery slowed to a trickle well before the start of the 21st century. It’s quaint, it’s history.