The following observations are written at your request. They are based upon a brief examination of Elmwood Cemetery, under the guidance of yourself and others of the Trustees, the Superintendent being unfortunately absent. They are intended to suggest certain general principles to be regarded in the future management of the place. It is possible that fuller and more accurate information would lead to a modification of some of the statements to be made for the purpose of illustration, and to courses somewhat different in detail from those advised, but it is believed that the principles commended, and the general objects advised to be henceforth had in view, are wholly sound.

The ground desirable to be sold for graves in Elmwood Cemetery seems to be nearly all disposed of; even in most of the family lots burials will, before many years, cease to be made. The trust of the Trustees will henceforth chiefly be the fulfillment of obligations that are implied in the term “rural” when given to burial grounds.

If memorials of the dead have been placed within the Cemetery which are of perishable materials, or which stand on insecure foundations, we do not suppose that, as a rule, the Trustees are under obligations to make good the natural results of neglect or miscalculation in these respects, but with regard to the maintenance of rurality in the place as a whole, the duty of the Trustees is, we believe, unquestionable.

The term rurality, as applied to a burial place, we assume to mean at least this: that its scenery is to be predominatingly natural rather than artificial.

Elmwood will soon be in the heart of a great town. On all sides of it there will be haste, bustle, impatience and disquiet, and people will be pressed for room to carry on their business affairs expeditiously. Experience shows that under these circumstances there is great danger that efforts will be made to encroach upon the cemetery property, under the plea that the dead should not stand in the way of the living. If streets shall not be run through it, or other projects carried out requiring graves to be actually opened, there is a liability that its turf will gradually “run out” and not be restored; its trees fall into decay, and their places be left unoccupied; its roads and paths become grass-grown and gullied, and such a general character at length established for the place, that public opinion will welcome any project that promises to put it to another use than that of an undisturbed resting-place of the dead. This has been the history of many burial-places in older towns: places containing the graves, tombs and monuments of many worthies of those towns; places which were at one time [401]apparently much more secure from such a fate than Elmwood can be made by any laws or police provisions, or by any funds established for the purpose, except as these funds shall be used in some way for the lasting well-being of the living. There are many such burial-grounds that are most unattractive. Even if enclosed by strong walls, they have the character of waste places. Some have dilapidated fences, and year after year are resorted to only by vagabonds and dogs. If, as its trees and fences decay, Elmwood is not to have a similar fate, it will be because of a regard that shall have been established for the place, not in the minds of those now interested in it, nor in the minds of their children, but in the minds of people who have personally known nothing of its dead, and who will be no more interested in this particular collection of the dead than they are in many other such collections. It will be because, to many people of Detroit in the future, the place is found a grateful retreat from the town, and it will have become a grateful retreat from the town only because of such natural rural scenery as the Trustees have, long before, made provision to secure.

Regard for this soothing natural scenery will be the deeper, with future visitors, because of the pathos and solemnity of the purpose which will be known to have led to its preservation, and because of the contrast between the sentiment which will thus be nurtured and that which pertains to the purposes of rural grounds or parks originally intended to be used for the gay recreations of thoughtless multitudes.

The conviction thus imperfectly explained is a key to the counsel that we have to offer you.

Elmwood was probably chosen as a site for a cemetery because of the beauty of its natural scenery, and because of the feeling that it is decorous to deposit the remains of our beloved under the shadows, and within the seclusion, of umbrageous trees and screening thickets; that is to say, in places that we call peaceful, and that invite to rest and contemplation. The more nearly Elmwood can now be restored to its original character in these respects, without causing the use which has been made of it to be lost sight of, the more surely will the original sentiment associated with it be preserved and perpetuated, and the more surely will it be allowed to remain a place of unbroken repose.

If the Trustees should adopt this opinion, what course of operations ought they to pursue, and what should be their policy from this time forth? The answer we should give to this question grows from the following course of reflection:

In travelling through Michigan we have seen a good deal of land, the surface of which consists of a series of swells, each swell divided on all sides from other swells by shallow depressions; the swells and depressions merging one into the other by slopes, everywhere gentle and graceful, nowhere steep, abrupt, or in the prosaic form of inclined planes. Where areas of the sort to which we thus refer are wooded, the trees generally stand less densely than those in the woods of the more eastern states, and there are of ten small thickets of underwood among them; rarely a bush standing out singly and to be seen [402]as a detached object. Occasionally a grapevine, Virginia Creeper or Clematis is seen growing up into the trees, combining with the bushes in a thicket, or spreading on the ground. In the less shady places, the ground is covered with turf; but, more generally, coarse grass grows upon it, thinly, and mixed with a variety of low perennial or annual plants.

Most of the upland on the site of Elmwood appears to have been originally of the landscape character thus described.

If we were asked how such a site could best be made a fitting place of burial, having regard to the ordinary burial usages of American communities, we should recommend access for funeral processions to be provided to its different parts by roads; making no greater length of roads, and occupying no more space with them, than would be indispensable to reasonable convenience in the movement of funeral processions. We question if walks through the divisions of the ground made by the roads would be indispensably necessary to reasonable convenience. We are convinced they would not be after interments had come to be infrequent. In laying out the roads, we should seek, as far as convenience will permit, to follow the lines of the depressions, but if, in order to avoid the removal of any particularly fine trees or groups of bushes, or to prevent the spaces between the roads from being over-large, it became necessary to cross the swells, we should aim to make, on the course desirable for the road, an artificial depression which would resemble a natural depression. Thus we should have no road which would not appear to be following a course suggested by the natural surface; no road unnecessarily prominent in a general view over the road, and no road border that would be otherwise than gently sloping to or from the surface of the road in such a manner that the road, when made, would seem to have required no notable disturbance of the original surface.

We should seek to remove enough of the trees growing between the roads as thus laid out, to make room for the burial areas; but in the case of a few particularly promising trees, we should, in order to spare them, sacrifice some space that would otherwise be appropriated to graves. We would not trim up a large, fine tree in such a manner that it would have a long, bare trunk. We should think it better to altogether remove any tree that might not be left with an entirely natural, agreeable aspect, contributive to the general rural character of the place.

We should seek also to retain the natural low thickets, as far as this would be practicable, without sacrificing to the purpose an excessive amount of space for graves. We should, for instance, nearly always retain such thickets where they occur near the borders of the roads, and especially where two roads would come together. We should seek to prevent, by a partial screening, such a display of a multitude of monuments in all directions from the observer as would cause the destruction of that sylvan rurality which had, in the first place, suggested the suitability of the place for the repose of the dead and the rites of mourning. The term rural cemetery does not mean a place the [403]permanent interest of which lies in exhibitions of monuments. When monuments occupy the eye more than all else in a burial ground, it has ceased to be of a rural character.

Having thus indicated the leading motives of what we think would have been a desirable treatment, we need not state that much has been done on the ground, since it was taken for a cemetery, with the very different motive, in a large degree, of exhibiting the results of men’s contrivance, skill and ambition in overruling, rather than in following and preserving nature. The surface of the ground on the margins of the roads, instead of being so modeled that the roads may seem to have been laid out with adaptation to the natural depressions and slopes, and consistently with the undulating character of the surface, has been intentionally thrown into obtrusively artificial banks, the surfaces of these banks of ten being planes so steeply inclined that it has been impossible to satisfactorily maintain turf upon them. In many places, in spite of all care to avoid it, they have a ragged and patched face, as, without great expense in repair, such banks in our American climate nearly always have. Instead of blending the surface of these banks with the more nearly level surface above and below them, by gracefully gentle curves of natural character, the purpose has been to make it as abrupt and as nearly angular as the quality of the material to be dealt with allows.

The trunks of the best of the trees on the ground have been cleared of branches 20 to 50 feet above the roots, giving them not a rural, but a plainly artificial character, like the trees of an orchard. In thick woods, nature gradually removes, by decay, the lower limbs of trees, but the trees to which we refer have been standing on the edges of roads, and of broad spaces occupied by graves, in which situations they would, without artificial pruning, have taken spreading, stately and umbrageous, brooding and protecting forms, very different from those they now have.

Trees and shrubs not native to the region have been planted in considerable numbers, not for the purpose of augmenting the natural beauty of the locality; not as elements of landscape composition, but as objects of interest individually. The present appearance of most of the introduced trees indicates that they are not suited with the soil and climate, and that they are likely to be short-lived. Many have already a forlorn aspect. These should long since have been felled, to make room for other more suitable trees and bushes. At various points, also, young trees which, if favorably treated, would, in 50 years, have an aspect of grandeur and stateliness, are growing into misshapen, uncouth and crippled forms, because crowded by others which are themselves hopelessly poor and undesirable to be retained.

Of late, the aim of your management has been, we judge, to have the surface of the cemetery kept, as far as practicable, in closely shaven turf; trees and shrubs appearing upon it as decorative objects. We doubt if it is practicable, or desirable, to sustain this policy much longer. It is very expensive keeping turf in good order where it is found in so many patches of varying outline, [404]with numerous irregularities of surface, and where much care must be used in working the mowing implements about monuments, trees and shrubs. It has probably been intended to produce as much as possible of the beauty of what is termed the “lawn system” of cemetery management, but Elmwood was not originally laid out with the view to the adoption of this system; the graves are not arranged suitably to it; the monuments and gravestones do not harmonize with it.

We were asked by some of the Trustees whether it would not be better to remodel certain parts of the surface of the ground, in order to simplify the mowing process and to avoid much niggling work necessary to the pursuit of the present policy of keeping. We shall advise such remodeling, especially near the borders of the roads, for another reason; but as to the purpose of keeping as much of the ground as practicable in shaven turf, we recommend that it be abandoned, and that the policy be now adopted of a gradual reduction of the turf area, substituting for turf, in many places, thickets of bushes; mainly, but not entirely, low bushes of the sorts natural to the region, and mats of woody creepers and ground plants. Once established, the expense of keeping these will be much less than that of keeping turf. There should be hardly any pruning, and the very little that may be required to check the excessive straggling of an occasional redundant shoot may be done in Winter by any unskilled laborer that can be trusted to limit the use of his knife to that single purpose.

All trees that are failing, or not promising of continued growth, should soon be removed, and where crowding is not to be apprehended, others planted with reference to future general sylvan effect.

In the choice of species for planting, those trees should be preferred which have been shown by experience to be likely to be most healthy and long-lived in the locality. These will be natives of the region, or foreign plants which have had long trial in it and been found to be perfectly at home. Not much care need be given to landscape composition. The native woods of Southern Michigan contain innumerable combinations of trees, nearly all of which are harmonious and agreeable.

The removal of all trees that are destroying others of greater value, and of all trees that are growing decrepit, like many now on the ground, and an introduction of young trees that will gradually supply the place of those removed, should henceforth be a constant process in all the history of the Cemetery. If the Superintendent is qualified for his responsibility, it will be one of the most important duties of the Trustees to sustain and encourage him in such a course, under the attacks which the ignorance and superstition of the general public will from time to time bring upon him. The Superintendent should in every way be assured of his freedom to use the axe, and should always have a few well-grown nursery trees of different native sorts ready for planting when he sees occasion, having constantly in view the reproduction and perpetuation, as far as possible, of sylvan scenery of a character generally similar to that originally found in the locality.

[405]

With regard to the roadside banks and similar artificial features, we advise the Trustees to enter at once upon a course of operations, of which the result will eventually be as nearly as possible the same with that which would have been obtained, had the policy which we have been suggesting been adopted at the outset and constantly pursued to this time. This course would involve the gradual obliteration of these banks and all other unnatural forms of ground surface, and would allow gracefully sweeping slopes, playing by reverse curves into one another, to take the place of them wherever practicable.

There are a few cases, and but a few, in which there are trees growing in the upper parts of these roadside banks that are of a highly promising character, and which, therefore, should not be removed in order to give natural slopes to the banks. In these cases, if the road cannot be so raised or narrowed that the ground may be thrown into a slope with a convex curve in its upper part and a concave curve in its lower part, it would be better to bed stones so that the tree would appear to have grown from a seed dropped above them, and the bank to be supported and made abrupt by them, the stones showing only so much as would be necessary to this effect.

In a number of places there are stone steps set into the roadside banks. If the banks were graded as we advise, these would have no use, and no pretense of use, and as they greatly mar the beauty of the ground, the Trustees—if they have a legal right to do so—should remove them. If they are not authorized to remove them, they should seek, first, to have as many removed from the Cemetery as they can with the owner’s consent; second, to have as many as they can of those that will be left taken up and replaced at a greater distance from the roads, and to have them more deeply set in their new places than they are now, so that they will be less protruding and conspicuous.

The above suggestions sufficiently indicate the changed aim of management which we would advise the Trustees to have in view. The new policy would involve no abrupt variation from present methods, and no disputes with lot-owners. We assume that the Trustees hold a considerable sum for the maintenance and improvement of so much of the Cemetery property as is under their control. What we would advise is that some of the means thus available should be used to keep at work a larger force of laborers than would otherwise be employed, and that with this additional force, the Superintendent be required to make what progress he finds practicable every year in the direction we have been pointing out. First, perhaps, in removing the absolutely bad trees that are destroying the value of others not yet absolutely bad. Second, in grading down to an agreeably natural character the roadside banks and restoring as much as possible the agreeable, undulating character of the original surface of the ground. Third, in obliterating the useless walks. Not one of these walks, in our opinion, has a degree of use justifying its destructive effect on the rural aspect of the place and the addition which its expense makes to the cost of a suitable keeping of it. Fourth, in the introduction of thickets of native bushes [406]that will soon take care of themselves. Fifth, in the removal, as fast as private owners can be persuaded to consent, of all artificial objects not absolutely essential to the main purpose of the cemetery, more especially useless stone steps and copings and iron fences.

We further advise the Trustees to suggest to lot-owners, the great gain to the beauty and permanent fitness of the place for a resting-place for the dead, which will come from substituting single monuments of simple forms best adapted to be permanent, and bearing successive inscriptions for the dead of the family, in place of tablets or other more destructible forms of monuments for individual graves, and also the desirability in all private planting, of substituting plants likely to be of lasting value, and which will be harmonious with the general natural character of the place, rather than many such as have been planted by lot-owners in the past.

With reference to the increase of hardy shrubbery, creepers and perennials, and to the occupation with them of much ground now attempted to be kept in fine turf, the most economical method of proceeding would probably be to engage some man who makes a business of collecting plants to gather large quantities of young and small plants of various sorts that grow naturally in fields and woods not far from Detroit, and to have these planted in a nursery established for the purpose, where they may be cheaply cultivated by the Superintendent. Then, from time to time, as opportunity offers, let good thriving plants be taken from this nursery and set in the Cemetery; some every Spring and Fall. The cost of plants so collected is small,—generally it would be from two to five cents each; the cost of cultivating them, being mostly done by horse-hose or cultivators, would also be small, and if the work of transplanting them should be pursued systematically with the regular force of the cemetery, the whole cost of the proceeding would not be formidable.

In our judgment, after the general line of policy which we have suggested had been pursued a few years, the lot-owners would find the results increasingly pleasing and would become gradually inclined to proceed further in restoring a simpler and less fugitive and meretricious character of scenery than the Cemetery has at present. The further the Trustees shall be thus enabled to proceed in this direction, the greater will be the security acquired against the gradual lapse of the ground, after burials shall cease to be made in it, into the sad condition in which most of the older burial-places of the world are found. There is no reason why Elmwood should not thus come gradually to be a place of permanent value to the people of Detroit as a retreat from the streets and buildings and bustle of the town. It is necessary to this end that people should be able to pursue within it more or less sequestered walks, to sit under the shade of ancient trees and to find such a degree of seclusion as would be provided by considerable patches of underwood, and by a covering of the ground that will not be as notably artificial as that which it is the present aim of the management to maintain.

A strong fence will soon be necessary to replace the present temporary [407]fence of wood. A wall of masonry will, in the long run, be much the best. If the cost of this wall should be found to place it out of the question, the next best fence would probably be one of iron, perfectly plain and strong, to be covered and hidden by sturdy and long-lived creepers trained over it and so trimmed as to form, in effect, a loose, hedge-like wall of foliage.

With regard to the best mode of treating the glen through which a water-course flows, no definite advice is practicable to be given, without a study of the results of a topographical survey. The present arrangement is most unnatural and is not agreeably artificial, but we doubt whether the suggestion of forming a considerable pond or natural creek, could be carried out except at greater expense than would be justified by the result. Any project of importance for this purpose ought at least to have close study and nothing be done upon it in a fragmentary, piecemeal way.

Yours Respectfully