To the true city-born, city-bread heart, nothing less than the city itself is home, and nothing less than the city family; and, more than in our hearts, do we look in the city for the memorials that keep our dead in vital reach of us.

Identity & Preservation

As historian Thomas Kselman has noted, "the creation of the modern cemetery and the inculcation of a devout atmosphere toward those who lie there are among the most important innovations that occurred in the nineteenth-century cult of the dead". Yet how have these sites been transformed through the intervening years? In America during the latter half of the nineteenth century, many older colonial burying grounds, long discontinued as primary places of interment, became powerful symbols of veneration in the construction of a national mythology based on the memorializing of those associated with the origins and founding of the country. Similar to the interest paid to houses and sites associated with Revolutionary personages and a colonial past, seventeenth and eighteenth century burial grounds provided tangible connections for the commemoration of individuals as public ancestors as well as the national virtues associated with their thoughts and deeds.

This commemoration of earlier shared ideals also sought to heal the social and psychological trauma inflicted by the Civil War. Such interests were also largely promoted in affirming the primacy and dominance of Anglo-Americans as the primi genitori of the American nation, especially as waves of new immigrants from non-English speaking countries flooded into the United States at the end of the century.

As early as 1840, Thomas Bridgeman crusaded for the preservation of Boston's ancient burying grounds, providing one of the first scholarly arguments for the cultural and historical value of American burial grounds and their protection. Similarly antiquarian interest in the study and recordation of early tombs and grave markers as stylistic and epigraphic documents began to focus attention on the preservation of these artifacts and grounds. At Trinity Church, New York City, the church fathers, citing the sanctity of hallowed ground, erected a large monument over the unmarked graves of martyred colonists to prevent the city from cutting a street through its ancient churchyard. A broader-based commemoration of the anonymous dead through place-event association was promulgated nationally by the creation of Gettysburg in 1863, ushering in the subsequent proliferation of battlefield preservation in America.

Opening quote: Grace King. New Orleans: The Place and the People (1895)

Text adapted from Frank G. Matero, Dead Space: Defining the New Orleans' Creole Cemetery, Exhibit at Graduate School of Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania, April 2002.