Baltimore’s Green Mount Cemetery is a prototypical example of the grand landscaped burial grounds of the “rural” cemetery movement. Founded in 1838 on the outskirts of the rapidly growing port city, like all rural cemeteries it was intended to reform burial practice, replacing the crowded, unattractive, and (it was believed) unhealthy inner-city graveyards with a vast, carefully designed green space. It also transformed death culture, providing a park-like setting where visitors could and did linger, conflating death, nature, and religion in a characteristically Romantic manner. Although it shares much with mid nineteenth-century rural cemeteries in other cities, Green Mount is also distinctive to Baltimore. It features exceptional sculpted monuments by renowned local William Henry Rinehart and leading marble workers Gaddess and Sisson, a striking Tudor/Gothic gateway by Robert Cary Long, Jr., and the gravesites of famous residents such as Johns Hopkins, Betsy Bonaparte (briefly Napoleon’s sister-in-law), and the still controversial unmarked resting place of John Wilkes Booth (or is it?). This talk will introduce Green Mount Cemetery in preparation for the Death in American Culture area’s visit during the conference.
About the presenterElisabeth Roark
Elisabeth Roark, Professor of Art History at Chatham University,received her M.A. and Ph.D at the University of Pittsburgh and has taught at the University of Tennessee and Converse College. Her research addresses pre-1900 American art, especially portraiture, artist imagery, and cemetery sculpture. Roark edits Markers: Annual Journal of the Association for Gravestone Studies. Publications include the book Artists of Colonial America and articles in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, American Art, Italian American Review, and Nineteenth-Century Art.