Graceland Cemetery: A Tour of Chicago History
By Mark Masek
5/5
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About this ebook
Chicago -- the “City of the Big Shoulders,” according to Carl Sandburg -- is in many ways the most unique and genuinely American of all American cities. Proud, sprawling, tough, industrious, artistic, powerful, sinful and influential, Chicago was one of the nation’s largest and most important cities when it spectacularly burned to the ground in 1871, and then quickly rose up from the ashes to become even bigger and stronger.
Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery perfectly reflects the city, its history and its residents, and contains the final resting places of some of the city’s -- and the world’s -- most notable names in business, architecture, politics and sports. Buried on its grounds are Chicago’s first white settler, four former Chicago mayors, two former Illinois governors, a former chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, two world heavyweight boxing champions, and a statue of a beautiful little girl that reportedly wanders around the cemetery during thunderstorms.
This book provides a detailed history of the cemetery, as well as a walking tour to the final resting places of nearly three dozen people who made Chicago the city it is today, as well as detailed biographies.
The Chicagoans buried here are the names that will forever be associated with the city, the men who designed and built Chicago, and then rebuilt it from the ashes. The men who created the businesses that will forever be associated with Chicago, and the men after whom many of the city streets are named -- Palmer, Field, Pullman, Kimball, Sullivan, Goodman, Wacker, Armour, McCormick, Medill, Lawson and so many others.
For many of Chicago’s wealthiest and most powerful residents who now rest forever at Graceland, their graves are almost unbelievably ornate and lavish, massive and powerful displays of marble, granite and bronze. As they did with their homes, they hired the city’s top architects to design their tombs -- often spending more on their tombs than many of the city's residents did on their homes. Graceland is often referred to as the “Cemetery of Architects,” both because it contains the final resting places of a large number of well-known and influential members of that profession, and because so many of the impressive and notable tombs and mausoleums within its walls are architecturally significant. In some cases, the architect and his work are both here.
Chicago’s early movers and shakers had an image and a reputation of success and achievement at the highest levels, and they wanted their memorials to reflect that, for eternity. What they were in life, so they would be in death -- forever.
Mark Masek
Mark Masek was born and raised in Joliet, Ill., about 40 miles southwest of Chicago. He was always interested in history and Hollywood and, when he moved to the Los Angeles area in 1999, he was able to combine his interests, and wrote "Hollywood Remains to Be Seen: A Guide to the Movie Stars' Final Homes," a detailed history and guidebook to 14 cemeteries in the Los Angeles area, as well as a guide to find the final burial locations of more than 300 entertainment celebrities. He is also a member of the Hollywood Underground, a group of people with the similar interests of finding and documenting the final resting places of celebrities. If they're famous, and they're dead, and they're buried somewhere in the Los Angeles area, he probably knows where to find them.
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Reviews for Graceland Cemetery
1 rating1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I enjoyed this history, was hoping for more pictures of the Graves mentioned , not just a description.
Book preview
Graceland Cemetery - Mark Masek
Graceland Cemetery: A Tour of Chicago History
Mark Masek
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2012 Mark Masek
Discover other titles by Mark Masek at Smashwords.com
or visit his website at http://www.CemeteryGuide.com.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Graceland Cemetery: A Tour of Chicago History
By Mark Masek
ISBN: 978-1-3010-5785-6
Copyright 2012, Mark Masek
mjmasek@sbcglobal.net
Graceland
by Carl Sandburg
First published in Chicago Poems
(1916)
TOMB of a millionaire,
A multi-millionaire, ladies and gentlemen,
Place of the dead where they spend every year
The usury of twenty-five thousand dollars
For upkeep and flowers
To keep fresh the memory of the dead.
The merchant prince gone to dust
Commanded in his written will
Over the signed name of his last testament
Twenty-five thousand dollars be set aside
For roses, lilacs, hydrangeas, tulips,
For perfume and color, sweetness of remembrance
Around his last long home.
(A hundred cash girls want nickels to go to the movies to-night.
In the back stalls of a hundred saloons, women are at tables
Drinking with men or waiting for men jingling loose
silver dollars in their pockets.
In a hundred furnished rooms is a girl who sells silk or
dress goods or leather stuff for six dollars a week wages
And when she pulls on her stockings in the morning she
is reckless about God and the newspapers and the
police, the talk of her home town or the name
people call her.)
Graceland Cemetery
4001 North Clark St.
Chicago, Illinois
Chicago – the City of the Big Shoulders,
according to Carl Sandburg’s more famous poem – is in many ways the most unique and genuinely American of all American cities. Proud, sprawling, tough, industrious, artistic, powerful, sinful and influential, Chicago was one of the nation’s largest and most important cities when it spectacularly burned to the ground in 1871, and then quickly rose up from the ashes to become even bigger and stronger.
Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery perfectly reflects the city, its history and its residents, and contains the final resting places of some of the city’s – and the world’s – most notable names in business, architecture, politics and sports. Buried on its grounds are Chicago’s first white settler, four former mayors of Chicago, two former Illinois governors, a former chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, two world heavyweight boxing champions, and a statue of a beautiful little girl that reportedly wanders around the cemetery during thunderstorms.
The Chicagoans buried here are the names that will forever be associated with the city, the men who designed and built Chicago, and then rebuilt it from the ashes. The men who created the businesses that will forever be associated with Chicago, and the men after whom many of the city streets are named – Palmer, Field, Pullman, Kimball, Sullivan, Goodman, Wacker, Armour, McCormick, Medill, Lawson and so many others.
For many of Chicago’s wealthiest and most powerful residents who now rest at Graceland, their graves are almost unbelievably ornate and lavish, massive and powerful displays of marble, granite and bronze. As they did with their homes, they hired the city’s top architects to design their tombs – often spending more on their tombs than many residents did on their homes. Graceland is often referred to as the Cemetery of Architects,
both because it contains the final resting places of a large number of well-known and influential members of that profession, and because so many of the impressive and notable tombs and mausoleums within its walls are architecturally significant. In some cases, the architect and his work are both here.
Architects Louis Henri Sullivan, Howard Van Doren Shaw and Richard Schmidt all designed private mausoleums or memorials at Graceland, and all three are also buried here. Other Chicago architects who were laid to rest at Graceland include Daniel Burnham, John Wellborn Root, William Le Baron Jenney, Richard Nickel, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Fazlur Khan, Marion Mahony Griffin, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Dwight Heald Perkins, Henry Bacon and Bruce Goff. And how many cemeteries have private mausoleums that have been officially designated as a city landmark and listed on the National Register of Historic Places – not because of the person interred inside, but because of the architectural design?
Chicago’s early movers and shakers had an image and a reputation of success and achievement at the highest levels, and they wanted their memorials to reflect that, for eternity. What they were in life, so they would be in death, forever.
Chicago’s Cemetery History
In the early days of Chicago, long before the city was officially a city, settlers buried their dead at two locations, at the northern and southern ends of the growing settlement, along Lake Michigan. The northside cemetery was located in an area roughly bordered by the lake on the east, Clark Street on the west, Chicago Avenue on the south, and Oak Street on the north – the current location of the John Hancock Center and Water Tower Place. In 1837, the federal government gave a tract of land that includes today’s Lincoln Park to the state of Illinois. The state gave part of that land to the city of Chicago, and the city decided to use some of the property for a cemetery. The first burials in the new Chicago City Cemetery were in 1843, and the cemetery was eventually divided into a Catholic section, a Jewish section, a general section and a potter’s field.
With the new cemetery, the city banned additional burials in the two lakeside cemeteries, and many bodies that were buried in those locations were moved. As the population of the city grew, so did the new cemetery, expanding north along the lakefront. An additional strain on the new cemetery was a cholera outbreak that hit the city in the early 1850s, killing thousands of Chicagoans. In 1857, Ira Couch, a wealthy Chicago hotelier, died and was buried in a family mausoleum at the City Cemetery. (We’ll discuss more about him later.)
By the mid-1850s, as the city expanded and surrounded the cemetery, residents began to call for the cemetery to be closed, and a new location to be found further outside the city limits. Residents cited the health concerns of having a cemetery so close to the city’s population, and the fears of dangerous run-off from the cemetery leaking into the lake and contaminating the city’s water supply. They also thought the property could better benefit the city’s residents as a lakefront park.
Eventually, the city agreed, and halted new burials at the City Cemetery, except for the potter’s field section. Rosehill Cemetery opened north of the city in August 1859, and Graceland Cemetery and Calvary Cemetery opened in 1860. Each of the new cemeteries was, at the time, located several miles outside the Chicago city limits. Meanwhile, the unused portion at the north end of the City Cemetery was officially converted into a city park, which was originally known first as Cemetery Park, then Lake Park, and then Lincoln Park following President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865.
With the opening of the new cemeteries, the remains buried at the City Cemetery were relocated, and the park gradually expanded to cover the entire cemetery property. The relocation of the remains, however, was not a smooth, orderly and comprehensive process. In many cases, families were responsible for arranging the relocations. Owners of plots at the City Cemetery were given the option to exchange their lots for equal-sized lots at one of the new cemeteries. One of the notable exceptions was the family mausoleum of Ira Couch, which still stands in Lincoln Park, behind the Chicago History Museum. Officially, the Couch mausoleum is the only physical reminder of the City Cemetery, which