Houston's Silent Garden: Glenwood Cemetery 1871-2009

by Suzanne Turner and Joanne Seale Wilson, with photographs by Paul Hester

Texas A&M University Press, 304 pages, ISBN-10: 1603441638; ISBN-13: 978-1603441636; 2010, list price $60.

Reviewed by Davyd Foard Hood

For far too long the South's important nineteenth-century garden cemeteries have remained a peripheral interest of its landscape historians. The causes of this inattention are not unlike those which affect American garden and landscape history generally, namely the small number of scholars addressing a field in which cemetery design is low on the hierarchy of scholarly interests. There is also the matter of survival--and integrity. Although virtually none retain the horticultural richness they enjoyed at the height of their popularity, reflecting both changes in taste and reduced expenditures for replanting and maintenance, a relatively small number retain both their plans, significant plant materials, and furnishings, while others, like Oakland in Atlanta and Spring Hill in Lynchburg to name but two, have been systemically diminished by the decisions of their stewards and the forces of nature. A small, rare group of survivals, including Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Cave Hill in Lexington, and Oakdale in Wilmington, have long been recognized. Another small number, including Thornrose in Staunton, Virginia, have remained locally appreciated but little-known beyond their area. Until now, Houston's Glenwood Cemetery, has languished in that category of historic landscapes deserving study and recognition.

A splendid new book, Houston's Silent Garden: Glenwood Cemetery, 1871-2009, altogether satisfies that need. Its authors, Suzanne Turner and Joanne Seale Wilson, bring a remarkable combination of skills to their collaboration, those of a landscape architect, an architectural historian, historic preservationists, and landscape historians. Their erudite, easily readable text is supplemented by handsome color photographs by Paul Hester, apparently commissioned for this publication, and a wealth of documentary plans, black and white period photographs, and a series of twelve postal views made in about 1907-1908 of Glenwood by a photographer known only as "Allen."

Houston's Silent Garden is well-designed, handsomely produced, and an important contribution to American landscape history. Its achievement is two-fold: it serves its subject well, introducing readers to a landscape that was little known nationally until now and gaining their admiration, and it accomplishes this in a format that is a model for the successful treatment of like cemetery landscapes in the South and beyond. The narrative history of the cemetery is told in four opening chapters that comprise about one-half of the book's pages. The design and planting of the cemetery beginning with its concept as a picturesque landscape, is addressed in the fifth chapter, "Glenwood's Landscape Character: Styles of the Times." Glenwood's distinguished monuments, funerary art, and sculpture, making the graves of some 16,000-plus burials are represented in a long separate chapter with large-format illustrations. The concluding chapter, "A Houston Community," comprises biographical sketches of many of Houston's leading citizens interred in its lush green grounds. This text is preceded by a valuable, multi-page chronology, which begins in 1794 with the publication of Uvedale Price's Essay on the Picturesque and carries to the adoption of a cemetery master plan in 2007. It traces Glenwood's development in a larger historic context and, appropriately, in a timeline that effectively parallels the evolution of Houston from its roots as an agricultural and small-scale manufacturing center to its long twentieth-century history as a metropolis of the international petroleum industry.

Established in 1871, Glenwood Cemetery is one of the youngest of America's important garden cemeteries, but no less significant for its late status. The authors first outline the development of the rural cemetery movement, paying homage to Père Lachaise opened in 1804 in Paris, and then address the creation of the three major American garden cemeteries in the 1830s: Mt. Auburn in Cambridge/Boston, Laurel Hill in Philadelphia, and Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn/New York. Individually, and collectively, all had an extraordinary impact on American landscape and municipal history, and they were soon joined by like burying grounds in both smaller and Southern cities. Leading citizens in Baltimore succeeded first, in 1839, with Greenmount Cemetery. Local initiatives in Richmond, Louisville, and Washington, D.C., supported the creation of Hollywood Cemetery in 1847, Cave Hill in 1848, and Oak Hill Cemetery in 1849, respectively. These three, others in the 1840s, and many more organized in the 1850s enjoyed the literary underpinnings of Andrew Jackson Davis's Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America (1841) and John Claudius Loudon's On the Laying Out, Planting, and Managing of Cemeteries and on the Improvement of Churchyards (1843).

Houston's "silent garden" also reflects the cosmopolitan background of the garden cemetery movement. So, too, do its organizers. While Houston traces its origin as a place to 1836, its growth as a city came with the influx of enterprising settlers from other states and nations, including Germany, England, Scotland, and Ireland, in the mid-nineteenth century. Their success attracted yet others, and Houston was a sizable, prosperous city by 1901, when the Spindletop oil discovery was made. This discovery and others in the 1900s forever changed the fortunes of Houston and its residents. This unmatched prosperity also found expression in the landscape and monuments of Glenwood Cemetery.

Although several residents of the then young city had voices in the organization of the Houston Cemetery Company in 1870, those of two men, John Haywood Manly and Alfred Whitaker, were primary. John Haywood Manly (1820-1874), the eldest son of Charles Manly (1795-1871), migrated to Texas from Raleigh in the early 1850s, soon after his father's term as governor of North Carolina ended in 1851. He settled first in Galveston and opened a law practice, but relocated by 1858 to Houston, where he continued to practice law, invested in real estate, and found further profit in the management of market gardens and orchards to feed Houston's growing population. Alfred Whitaker (ca. 1832— after 1910) was an experienced English-born gardener who came to Houston in about 1858 and established garden and nursery operations that greatly prospered in the 1860s. By 1870, Mr. Whitaker's household included not only his wife, five children—the youngest of whom was a son named Manly Whitaker, and two servants, but also four employees in horticultural operations. The 1870 Census identifies Finley McIvor as a Scottish-born "Nurseryman," while the French-born ______ Aleck, the English-born ______ Dunn, and Frank Kemp, a Texas native, were listed as "Gardener(s)."

John Haywood Manly and Alfred Whitaker are believed to have collaborated on the design of Houston's new cemetery that was laid on grounds of 54.25 acres located about one-and-a-half miles west of Houston's center. Like its distinguished antecedents, Mt. Auburn, Laurel Hill, and Hollywood cemeteries, the acreage was held in the embrace of a major river, here Buffalo Bayou. As for specific Influences on the cemetery's design, the authors have identified Oakwood Cemetery in Raleigh, North Carolina, as a source for its design featuring a curvilinear pattern of lanes. Comparative maps of the two cemeteries strongly support this attribution. There is also the fact that John Haywood Manly probably visited Oakwood Cemetery in 1871, as the design of the Houston cemetery was being resolved, when he is known to have returned to Raleigh. Whether Mr. Manly attended his father's funeral at Christ Church and burial in Raleigh's older City Cemetery in early May or came later to attend to the settlement of his estate is unconfirmed. However, the picturesque cemetery, newly laid-out and attracting burials in spring 1871, would have drawn his attention, and he would have known many of the men who established Oakwood.

John Haywood Manly was the founding president of the Houston Cemetery Company and served until 1873, when ill health forced his retirement. He died in New York City in December 1874. The matter of his later burial in Glenwood Cemetery and that of his wife, who died in 1876, in unmarked graves, is unresolved. Alfred Whitaker served both as secretary of the Houston Cemetery Company and the first superintendent of Glenwood Cemetery. He both oversaw operations at the cemetery and the plantings during its first sixteen years of existence, until being discharged by the cemetery board in 1887. In that period he effectively established the landscape character of the cemetery that survives in a measurable degree to the present. His critical contributions, those of his contemporaries, and others, who followed as superintendents, including his immediate successor, Frank Perry Noland, are well told in the closing pages of the historical narrative and the chapter, "Glenwood's Landscape Character," that specifically addresses the plantings of its grounds.

Like other important nineteenth-century cemeteries, Glenwood Cemetery contains a distinguished collection of funerary art, monuments, and plot enclosures that span its period of existence. The authors examine these as types or forms of monument design and as reflections of successive styles in mortuary art and architecture. The figurative sculpture, mostly in the form of angels, is particularly noteworthy. Many of the grave markers, monuments, and other stone furnishings of Glenwood dating from its first half-century were the work of local stone carvers and marble yards. Houston Marble Works, operated by members of the Byrnes family, and Teich Monument Works, most often in the sculpture of Frank Teich, produced remarkably handsome works of gravestone art.

Biographical accounts of prominent men and women interred in Glenwood Cemetery appear in the book's final chapter, "Some Glenwood Biographies." These include the expected worthies who figured in the founding of Houston and its political, religious, commercial, professional, and civic life, as well as the petroleum industry that dominated its twentieth-century history. The last entry is for a man who achieved fame in Houston, in Texas, and the nation, and world-wide notoriety: Howard R. Hughes, Jr. (1905-1976). He also made an important contribution to the landscape of Glenwood Cemetery. As the authors recount, in 1935 he engaged architect William Ward Watkin to design a family memorial for his parents who had died in the 1920s. Following Mr. Hughes's death, the memorial was redesigned to its present appearance by Charles Tapley and Ralph Ellis Gunn. Its incorporates a simply-curved stone arcade, featuring six bronze trumpets mounted in recessed arches, that stands at the back of the landscaped plot, where it embraces a large, ground-level stone memorial medallion. The redesign is a work of genius and a handsome complement to memorials of the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries that ornament Glenwood's grounds.

A Caveat. Readers and users of the index to Houston's Silent Garden will find it frustrating. Some of the page references are correct while numerous others are off by a page, or two, or three. The references to Mr. Watkin, whose work intrigued this reviewer, are a case in point. Five page references follow his name in the index: "97, 141, 190, 219 cap., 237 cap." His name does appear in the text of page 97 and in the captions on pages 219 and 237, however, the citation of page 141 should read 143 and 190 should be 192.