Six Feet Under

A cemetery is history in stone. The Protestant Cemetery in Rome chronicles everything from Caius Cestius’ first century pyramid to the tombs of 19th century English poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. London’s Highgate Cemetery, with its well upholstered tombs, tells us as much about Victorian England as a Dickens novel.

Nashville’s burying grounds offer a similar local history lesson. Their narrative is not merely a chronology of names and dates but the tale of a whole society—its attitudes and customs, fashions and foibles—pieced together from sculpture and inscription. The land of the dead can tell us a great deal about the living.

Death is often described as the great leveler, but the places where the dead are planted reflect the hierarchy of the planters. For a cemetery, after all, is property, and as such it embodies those twin values of real estate: square footage and location, location, location.

A cemetery is history in stone. The Protestant Cemetery in Rome chronicles everything from Caius Cestius’ first century pyramid to the tombs of 19th century English poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. London’s Highgate Cemetery, with its well upholstered tombs, tells us as much about Victorian England as a Dickens novel.

Nashville’s burying grounds offer a similar local history lesson. Their narrative is not merely a chronology of names and dates but the tale of a whole society—its attitudes and customs, fashions and foibles—pieced together from sculpture and inscription. The land of the dead can tell us a great deal about the living.

Death is often described as the great leveler, but the places where the dead are planted reflect the hierarchy of the planters. For a cemetery, after all, is property, and as such it embodies those twin values of real estate: square footage and location, location, location.

Temple Cemetery

When Temple Cemetery was founded in 1851, it lay on the outskirts of the city. Now, it’s Nashville’s most urban graveyard. Its nine acres remain the primary place of interment for the Temple Congregation Ohabai Sholom—the city’s oldest. Together with the nearby cemeteries of West End Synagogue and Congregation Sherith Israel, it forms a Jewish enclave in the heart of North Nashville. For most Nashvillians, though, it’s undiscovered country.

Nashville City Cemetery

The term “cemetery” is derived from the Greek word for sleeping quarters, and City Cemetery is the final bedroom community for many of Nashville’s “firsts.” Established in 1822 to replace the public cemetery, the graveyard is the resting place of first settlers James and Charlotte Robertson and the first Confederate general to bite the dust in the Civil War’s western theater. The city’s “First Lady Schoolteacher” and “First White Male Child” are also there, along with the remains of 20,000 other Nashville pioneers, politicians, educators and warriors. Monuments bear names that summon the very fabric of the city itself: Hume and Fogg, Elliott and Eakin, Cockrill and Shelby.

The buried include a considerable contingent of the “friends of Andy,” those who fought with Andrew Jackson during the War of 1812 and the wars against the Creeks and Seminoles. William Carroll survived Old Hickory’s campaigns to serve multiple terms as Tennessee’s governor (1821-27; 1829-35). His final reward, courtesy of the state, was a towering monument toppd with a defiant eagle.

Most of the grave markers in City Cemetery are more modest. They reflect early evolutions in funerary style, beginning with simple headboards. Some also feature footboards, completing the “big sleep” symbolism. The so-called “false crypt,” a stone coffin look-alike placed over an earthen grave, is also well represented. Much of the funerary furnishings reflect the Classical Revival that dominated architecture during the cemetery’s heyday. Stone tables recall the altars used by the Greeks for funerary sacrifices. Broken columns signify a life cut short.

A more full-blown classicism was the property of that segment of 19th century society that could afford to flaunt family finances. The McNairy family’s vault, which lies below grade, includes an imposing pavilion that recalls the baldachin over Catholic altars. Above-ground versions, such as the one belonging to the family of John Shelby, who once owned much of East Nashville, are actual houses of the dead.

The most sophisticated classical monument in City Cemetery was designed, appropriately enough, by William Strickland, architect of the state Capitol, for the tomb of Sarah Ann Gray Walker. It’s a Roman arch, the kind that marked the triumphs of ancient heroes—Sarah Ann, of course, was no warrior but a bourgeois lady of means.

Some symbolism is more personal. Strickland designed the tomb of John Kane, one of the stonecarvers of the Capitol, replicating stonecarver tools for the monument’s top. They now survive only as fragments. The obelisk of Robert Baxter, an early iron manufacturer, features a carving of his Cumberland furnace. The palmetto of their native South Carolina is inscribed on the pier marking the plot of Henry and Septima Sexta Middleton Rutledge, who lived in a villa on the hill that still bears their name.