Graceland Cemetery: Chicago Stories, Symbols and Secrets

“Our dead are never dead to us,” observed nineteenth-century English novelist George Eliot, “until we have forgotten them.” At Chicago's Graceland Cemetery and Arboretum, the dead are never forgotten.In mid-nineteenth-century Chicago, adverse weather conditions, chronic flooding from Lake Michigan, and a fast-growing population hastened the closure of Chicago's City Cemetery (now Lincoln Park) and the transfer of remains to two newly opened North Side “garden cemeteries.” Rosehill (originally “Roe's Hill”), the city's largest burial ground in total acreage, was opened in 1859. Graceland followed a year later, established on an eighty-acre tract of land two miles outside the then city limits, bordering the town of Lake View. Graceland stands as a prime example of the Victorian-era “garden of graves” movement of cemetery design, featuring native plants, gently rolling slopes, curving paths, and elaborately sculptured and colonnaded stone markers, memorials, and mausoleums. These garden cemeteries became popular gathering places for families and friends to socialize and memorialize loved ones and to commune with nature in a quiet and lush park-like picnic setting.As Adam Selzer informs us in his engaging, deeply researched, and highly entertaining new volume, Graceland's founder, the attorney and orator Thomas Barbour Bryan, “is probably the only person who knew both Abraham Lincoln and [serial killer] H. H. Holmes” (p. ix). It hardly seems coincidental that in his lifetime Bryan fell victim to Holmes in one of his notorious business swindles, and that Selzer previously authored H. H. Holmes: The True History of the White City Devil. Bryan played an important role in the development of Chicago's western suburb Elmhurst, where he resided in the 1850s. Recognized as the “father of Elmhurst,” Bryan encouraged thousands of homeless and displaced refugees who lost their homes in the Great Fire of 1871 to resettle there. Although Thomas Bryan is not buried in Graceland's hallowed ground, his son Daniel Page Bryan was among the first to be interred there.Selzer supplies readers with unusual personal sidelights into the lives of the rich and well-born and the occasional downtrodden souls who passed the imposing stone pillars at the intersection of Clark Street and Irving Park Road to their final rest. Tales of prominent Gilded Age Chicago families abound. Selzer expertly guides readers through five do-it-yourself walking tours, including the imposing and aristocratic Potter Palmer Parthenon, the Marshall Field family plot, the grave of railroad car king George Pullman (buried beneath an eighteen-inch concrete base because he feared desecration by disgruntled and vengeful employees), Arthur Larned Ryerson (lost on the Titanic), Cyrus McCormick, piano maker William Kimball, and various other tycoons, old settlers and social register mavens.Tour route 1-B features Lorado Taft's haunting Eternal Silence statue, sculpted for wealthy horseman Henry Graves. Selzer admonishes us not to look too closely. According to folklore and legend, gazing into the eyes of the cloaked and hooded figure might give you a glimpse of your own death.Graceland contains 175,000 graves, including those of eighteen formerly enslaved people, ten prominent civil rights activists, four Civil War generals, four Chicago mayors (Joseph Medill, Carter Harrison I, Carter Harrison II, and Fred Busse), one Illinois governor (John Peter Altgeld), one African American surgeon (Daniel Hale Williams, who performed the first open-heart surgery in the United States), twelve authors and writers, and numerous purveyors of the underground railroad and celebrated abolitionists. Detective Allan Pinkerton, known as the “Eye That Never Sleeps,” is surrounded by an entire lot of Pinkerton employees and agents, including the fabled Kate Warne (1830–1868), one of the nation's first female detectives. Among many interesting juxtapositions: “Mr. Cub” Ernie Banks (“Let's play two!”) rests just a few feet away from the esteemed dance choreographer Ruth Page.For all of its staid, quiet dignity, Graceland is home to several notorious rogues and scoundrels infamous in their day, including Jacob Rehm, a corrupt nineteenth-century Chicago police superintendent caught up in the “Whiskey Ring” scandal of the Ulysses Grant administration, and George Wellington “Cap” Streeter, Chicago's dubious lakefront squatter who defied police and city authorities by claiming what is now the Oak Street beach as the “Dee-strict of Michigan.” For decades, “Cap” and his wife “Ma” Streeter fended off the civil authorities attempting to drive him out of his beached houseboat, both in the courts and at the point of a gun.Graceland Cemetery is Chicago's largest open-air museum, an ode and a sonnet to the past that evokes the spirit and memory of the illustrious and the anonymous. Each of the interred, in their own unique way, contributed to the hustle and flow of this workingman's city aptly described by H. L. Mencken: “I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in every chitling and sparerib. It is alive from snout to tail.” Mencken's words evoke Chicago's stockyard heritage. Undoubtedly meatpacker and recognized “king of the yards” Philip Danforth Armour would echo Mencken's sound judgment. He too took up residence in Graceland upon his passing on January 6, 1901.

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