By John Beatty
One of the historic treasures of Fort Wayne is Lindenwood Cemetery, a beautiful symbol of its Victorian-era past. Those who enter the grounds find a place that has been touched only sparingly by the passage of time, and that fact makes it one of our city’s treasures – a special place where history and nature are blended together. There are large stands of oaks and beech, some more than 200 years old, spreading a canopy of leaves over the grounds in summer and etching the sky with branches in winter. The landscape is pleasantly rolling, with a blend of natural ravines, hills, and winding trails. Marble and granite markers, many of impressive size, along with family mausoleums and the occasional statue, also add to the vista, bringing a sculpted texture to the otherwise natural landscape of trees, shrubs and manicured lawns.
The cemetery, established in 1860 and located at the western end of Main Street, has become a kind of time capsule and outdoor museum of local history. Many of its stones bear the familiar names of the city’s pioneers that you can find in the names of its streets, parks and public buildings. It is also a place where the passage of time is clearly marked and its “natural” environment has been carefully planned. If you stroll through the cemetery, you can see the great variety and progression of gravestone art, with each marker representing a work of skilled craftsmanship by its maker. Some reflect the neo-classical or Greek Revival designs of the 1840s and 1850s: urns and weeping willows, together with elaborate inscriptions and verses. These gave way to a great variety of Victorian styles and ornamentation in marble, sandstone and bronze. They include great obelisks, statues of angels and figures in mourning, sleeping lambs, crosses, hollow logs and tree stumps, and even the whimsical and unexpected – the grave of fireman Frederick Hilsman, the first to die in the line of duty in 1871, whose marker features the shape of a fireman’s hat. The art alone makes a visit to Lindenwood an interesting, worthwhile experience.
The design of Lindenwood reflects the principles of the so-called American “rural cemetery movement” that began with the opening of Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1831. The movement changed the way Americans thought about the dead and how they would repose for eternity, and it reflected a major cultural shift at the time. These park-like cemeteries were very different from the earlier town graveyards and burying places that one found in America up to that time. For one, they were all dramatically larger than the town graveyards and churchyards. For another, they appealed to a new natural aesthetic: they were extensively and artistically landscaped, usually on the outskirts of larger cities, and were placed under the formal management of corporations for their perpetual care. These managers offered the bereaved an important promise: their beloved dead would find eternal rest and their graves would never be disturbed, exhumed or paved over. And because they were designed to be a kind of wooded garden, they attempted to remove the unpleasantness of death. They represented instead a kind of urban oasis – an intentional counterpoint to the smoky grit and commercialism of city life in the mid-nineteenth century.
Lindenwood was designed by John Chislett, an English-born architect of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, whose earlier design of that city’s Allegheny Cemetery had earned him wide acclaim. After completing his drawings, his plans were executed by another English immigrant, John Henry Doswell, who had worked in the gardens of the Earl of Radnor in Salisbury, Wiltshire, and in the Royal Gardens at Kew. Upon its dedication in May 1860, the cemetery won public acclaim. Three generations of Doswell family members stayed on as caretakers well into the twentieth century, providing continuity and integrity for Chislett’s original design.
Nearby the cemetery is the Lindenwood Nature Preserve, a city-owned park with a variety of nature trails, expanding on the flora and wildlife found in the cemetery. So take a stroll through Lindenwood, either the cemetery or the park, and enjoy a blend of the natural beauty and the heritage of landscape architecture in northeastern Indiana. For more information about Lindenwood Nature Preserve, see http://www.fortwayneparks.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=146%3Alindenwood-nature-preserve-&catid=54%3Ahome&Itemid=3.
Photos by Tina Lyons.
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