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.
Not everyone buried at City Cemetery belonged to Nashville’s elite. The place plays host to a diverse crowd: paupers and merchant princes, Catholics and Protestants, blacks and whites. Some of the original Jubilee singers are here. So is Confederate Gen. Richard Ewell, who fought at Lee’s side at Gettysburg to keep them enslaved. This was the city’s cemetery, and it reflected the inclusiveness of the urban condition. The cemeteries of the later 19th century anticipate the exclusiveness of the neighborhoods of the living that would later spring up in the territory known as the American suburbs.
Temple Cemetery is an austere place. It’s also immaculately kept, with neatly groomed bushes and trees, a well-manicured lawn and carefully restored stone walls. There are few flowers: Jewish custom is for visitors to leave a stone on the grave. The cemetery was less severe when access was through a multicolored brick arch flanked by vaguely Byzantine towers, beyond which stood a domed chapel. This complex, constructed in 1886 at the height of Victorian architectural folly, was demolished in 1966.
Only the tomb sculpture of Felix Salzkotter, who died in 1872 at age 11, has human figuration, because Jewish belief discourages such depictions. The jaunty lad, in his Saturday best, leans on a pier with a branch of acanthus sprouting from its base as a symbol of eternal life.
Early headstones feature then-fashionable iconography: the weeping willow, praying hands, a he-went-thataway finger pointing skyward. Jewish religious symbolism is represented most often in the form of Hebrew text, less often with the Star of David. A trend beginning in the 1870s was for family plots to be marked with one large monument, and individuals remembered with smaller stones.
Veterans of the Civil War are buried here, although their gravestones typically don’t reflect their military service. Confederates outnumber Union veterans, not merely because the city’s sympathies tended that way. In December 1862, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant ordered that Jews be barred from Union service. Julius Lettman, who lies in the cemetery in an unmarked grave, unfortunately evaded the prohibition, dying on Jan. 9, 1863 of wounds suffered fighting for the Yankee cause at the Battle of Stones River in Murfreesboro.
The Color Line: Mount Ararat and Greenwood
About 4,000 African Americans—slaves and free persons—were buried in City Cemetery after its founding in 1822, according to historian Bobby Lovett. Other slaves were placed in churchyards or in white family burial grounds. But after emancipation, whites no longer wanted black bodies in their private cemeteries. So African Americans made a burial place of their own.
In 1869, black businessman Nelson Walker purchased land near Elm Hill and Murfreesboro pikes to establish the first African American cemetery. It was called Mount Ararat, after the peak in Turkey where Noah was thought to have landed the ark after the flood. Blacks had been through their own travails on the way to freedom. Here they would come to rest.
Mount Ararat organizers staged a mass meeting to involve the churches and their preachers in the sale of lots. Lovett reports that one black leader stated, “We must have education, valuable property, and plenty of money.” Valuable property included burial plots. Just as white families relocated their ancestors from City Cemetery to Mount Olivet and Calvary, so blacks brought their dead to Mount Ararat. The body of the Rev. Nelson Merry, founder of Spruce Street Baptist Church, was moved and now lies under a tall obelisk draped with the cloth of mourning. Sculptor William Edmondson is buried here, along with Dr. Robert Fulton Boyd, a black physician and a leader of the black community.
Mount Ararat was laid out as a garden cemetery, but after periods of deterioration and revival throughout the 20th century, much of the original cemetery now looks like wilderness. The stone of many grave markers is broken, while tall grasses surround the tombs. The headstone of Elizabeth Richardson Payne (1847-1930), under attack by a giant yucca, is inscribed “At Rest,” but only the dead could sleep amid the roar of traffic on Interstate 40 and the hum of trucks in the parking lot of Purity Dairy, paved right to the cemetery’s boundary.
Just down Elm Hill Pike lies Greenwood Cemetery, the African American Mount Olivet.
Preston Taylor, a former slave who fought for the Union in the Civil War, established Greenwood in 1888. He was a prominent minister and undertaker, one of three pioneers who founded Citizens’ Bank. He was also the developer of Greenwood Park, an amusement park for blacks that operated when African Americans were not permitted in public parks.
Taylor’s grave lies just inside the entrance to Greenwood, marked by a classically inspired tomb decorated with soaring angels. Nearby rests Charles S. Johnson, the progressive sixth president of Fisk University who had been a key player in the Harlem Renaissance. Among the massive magnolias and cedars are buried DeFord Bailey, the first black member of the Grand Ole Opry, along with Tennessee State University coach John Merritt and civil rights leaders Kelly Miller Smith Jr. and Z. Alexander Looby. Less well known is “Uncle Billy” Reed, whose headstone is the wheel of a railroad car. Reed worked for the Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Railway at a time when this was a prestige job, as evidenced by the “Creed of Life” inscribed on his grave marker: “I love my Lord; I love my home; I love my job.”
In 1982, Greenwood Cemetery’s board took over Mount Ararat and four years later named it Greenwood West. Together the two graveyards tell the story of Nashville’s African American community in the years after the Civil War.
S.A. Bierfield, a Russian Jew, suffered an even more violent death. A radical Republican, he owned a dry goods store in Franklin, employed an African American clerk and had many African American customers. In 1868, a mob dragged him through the streets, tortured him, and then shot him dead.
Later graves reflect calmer times and growing prosperity. A small forest of obelisks points to that wealth, with the largest obelisk marking the grave of the richest member of the city’s Jewish community, Judah Bloomstein.
Despite their pagan implications, Egyptian forms have always been deemed appropriate for funerary sculpture because of that ancient civilization’s cult of the dead. The most architecturally imposing monuments are the family mausoleums. The Benjamin Herman clan rests in a classical temple constructed in 1899 with the proceeds of wholesale dry goods, boots and shoes. The Kornman-Raskin vault of 1918 is Egyptian Revival, with massive battered walls, columns and the emblem of Amon Ra, the sun god, in the cavetto cornice over the door.
With the loss of the Vine Street Temple and the Gay Street Synagogue, there are few physical remnants of early Jewish community life in Nashville. Temple Cemetery is that rare place where this history is available to all of us.
Memento Mori
With Spring Hill Cemetery on Gallatin Pike we come full circle, back to our funerary roots. This cemetery was founded as the churchyard burying ground for the Spring Hill meeting house in 1785, before Nashville was a town or Tennessee a state. In it are buried the Rev. Thomas Craighead and his wife Elizabeth, who came from North Carolina to found the first Presbyterian church in Middle Tennessee.
Churchyard burial has its origins in medieval times, when churches were often named for the saints whose relics they contained. Those saints were thought to be on good terms with the Almighty. People wanted to be buried as close to the church as possible, according to Architecture and the After-Life by Howard Colvin, so that on judgment day the saint could lead them through the pearly gates—salvation by association.
By the time of Spring Hill, belief in how to achieve the afterlife wasn’t quite so literal. But the churchyard provided a religious alternative to burial on family property—if the family had property—or in municipal space.
Spring Hill evolved into a suburban garden cemetery. And its peace is now eroded by the whine of traffic on Briley Parkway. Because of its long history, Spring Hill features monuments of the type found in City Cemetery as well as those of later cemeteries clear through to today.
One original design worth noting is the rustic boulder surrounded by a collection of smaller rocks marking the grave of A.C. Webb (1888-1975). Webb was a Nashville native and artist who, in a series of highly romantic paintings and drawings of the 1930s, celebrated the exhilarating effect that the modern skyscraper was having on the skyline of Manhattan.
The musical arts are also represented. Roy Acuff is buried here, his grave marked by a combination of classical and country: a broad wall of a headstone is adorned with a classical urn and topped by a bow and fiddle. Nearby is the massive headstone, complete with a portrait, of Jimmy Martin, the “King of Bluegrass” famous for his “high lonesome” sound. According to music historian Michael McCall, Martin chose his plot to be as close to Acuff as possible. He had the headstone placed there years before his death, and would pose for pictures standing beside it. Songwriter Hank Snow’s dark granite headstone is engraved with an old fashioned locomotive chugging through a mountain scene, and the inscription “Still Movin’ On,” after his most famous tune.
This optimistic attitude toward death—the afterlife as a sort of spiritual cyberspace—stands in stark contrast to the ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust philosophy of the much more ancient, by Nashville standards, grave slab in memory of William Neely (1772-1842), as in Neely’s Bend. The lichen-blurred verse expresses that age’s matter-of-fact fatalism, a fatalism that our own age has done its best to suppress:
Remember man asyou pass byAs you are now soonce was I.As I am now soyou must be.Prepare for deathand follow me.
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.
Not everyone buried at City Cemetery belonged to Nashville’s elite. The place plays host to a diverse crowd: paupers and merchant princes, Catholics and Protestants, blacks and whites. Some of the original Jubilee singers are here. So is Confederate Gen. Richard Ewell, who fought at Lee’s side at Gettysburg to keep them enslaved. This was the city’s cemetery, and it reflected the inclusiveness of the urban condition. The cemeteries of the later 19th century anticipate the exclusiveness of the neighborhoods of the living that would later spring up in the territory known as the American suburbs.
Suburbs of the Dead
It seems unlikely that the layout and landscaping of cemeteries would have much impact on those of the neighborhoods of the living. But that is what happend. The American cemetery’s shift in the 19th century from close urban quarters to a park-like setting anticipated the living’s outward migration. In placing cemeteries beyond the city proper, 19th century Americans were reviving ancient practice. Egyptian, Greek and Roman burial grounds were located outside city walls, close enough to convey a body from town but far enough away to avoid the contamination of decay. The Greeks believed that dead bodies gave off a miasma of toxic fumes, a fear shared by many people in the 19th century.
Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Mass., which opened in 1831, is generally credited with inaugurating this country’s rural cemetery movement, which is actually suburban in location and design. Nashville’s first full-blown garden cemetery is Mount Olivet, established in 1856. Calvary Cemetery, another garden graveyard, moved in next door on Lebanon Pike in 1868. Both are private and reflect 19th century Romantic developments in American planning, in which nature is an integral part of the space.
The landscaping in both cemeteries is organic, with irregular groupings of trees and curving paths geared to the topography. The intention was to celebrate the irregular shapes and textures of nature at a time when industrialization was replacing nature with the right angles of factories and roads. In these cemeteries, nature seems to prevail over death, and symbols of death are freed from anguish. No skulls and grim reapers. The inscription on the classical temple of the Reed family makes this new way of looking at death explicit. “As imprisoned birds find in freedom / Winging wildly o’er the heights / Over forest and orchards green / On and on out of sight.”
Since its founding, Mount Olivet has been the final resting place of Nashville’s leading families. A walk along its lanes yields a roll call of the city’s power structure. It’s not surprising, therefore, that its collection of funerary sculpture and architecture, if sometimes grandiose, is the finest in the city. Mount Olivet is an exclusive and tony place. The grounds once featured a conservatory that sold plants and flowers for grave decoration. And admission was by ticket only, issued to lot-holders for the exclusive use of family and relatives.
Many of the bodies buried here, including that of Phillip Lindsley, who founded the University of Nashville when the city was little more than a wilderness, were relocated from City Cemetery when that graveyard lost its caché. The remains of the Hardings and Jacksons were moved from Belle Meade Plantation.
Adelicia Acklen, the builder of Belmont Mansion, lies here in a High Victorian chapel. A pyramid guarded by a pair of busty sphinxes is the crypt of Eugene C. Lewis, a mover and shaker behind the building of Union Station. The grave of grocery king Horace Greely Hill features a frieze of classical columns. Vernon K. Stevenson, once the president of the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad, lies in a large sarcophagus modeled on Napoleon’s. The largest tomb in Mount Olivet belongs to Francis Furman, a merchant for whom the hall at Vanderbilt University is named. The roof of this massive monument is born aloft by caryatids, female figures in Greek dress like those on the porch of the maidens standing on the Athenian Acropolis. The glory that was once ancient Greece is now ours—or at least Furman’s.
Calvary Cemetery is the Catholic equivalent of Mount Olivet. A circle at the top of the hill—adorned by a crucifixion scene and altar—is set aside for the burial of bishops. Priests and several orders of nuns also have groupings. The nuns’ graves are marked with a modest cross inscribed “requiescat in pace,” recalling the days when the Mass was in Latin and everyone knew this meant “rest in peace.”
Irish and German names predominate at Calvary, with a smattering of Italians. Many of the Irish came here to work on the railroads. The Germans, early in their history here, frequently toiled in the slaughterhouses along the Cumberland River, east of what is now aptly named Germantown.
While many monuments are of the type you’d find in other cemeteries, some of the iconography is especially Catholic: Christ and his cross, the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus and the finest collection of angel sculpture in the city. A 1998 “Memorial to the Unborn,” erected by the Knights of Columbus, makes a doctrinal statement as well.
The establishment of Calvary Cemetery led to a relocation of Catholics previously buried in the southwest corner of City Cemetery. With the incursion of the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad through City Cemetery in the 1850s, the Catholic dead literally found themselves on the wrong side of the tracks. By 1901, the last had made a final pilgrimage to the suburbs, to the idyllic spots that were so enticing to their living brethren.
The Color Line: Mount Ararat and Greenwood
About 4,000 African Americans—slaves and free persons—were buried in City Cemetery after its founding in 1822, according to historian Bobby Lovett. Other slaves were placed in churchyards or in white family burial grounds. But after emancipation, whites no longer wanted black bodies in their private cemeteries. So African Americans made a burial place of their own.
In 1869, black businessman Nelson Walker purchased land near Elm Hill and Murfreesboro pikes to establish the first African American cemetery. It was called Mount Ararat, after the peak in Turkey where Noah was thought to have landed the ark after the flood. Blacks had been through their own travails on the way to freedom. Here they would come to rest.
Mount Ararat organizers staged a mass meeting to involve the churches and their preachers in the sale of lots. Lovett reports that one black leader stated, “We must have education, valuable property, and plenty of money.” Valuable property included burial plots. Just as white families relocated their ancestors from City Cemetery to Mount Olivet and Calvary, so blacks brought their dead to Mount Ararat. The body of the Rev. Nelson Merry, founder of Spruce Street Baptist Church, was moved and now lies under a tall obelisk draped with the cloth of mourning. Sculptor William Edmondson is buried here, along with Dr. Robert Fulton Boyd, a black physician and a leader of the black community.
Mount Ararat was laid out as a garden cemetery, but after periods of deterioration and revival throughout the 20th century, much of the original cemetery now looks like wilderness. The stone of many grave markers is broken, while tall grasses surround the tombs. The headstone of Elizabeth Richardson Payne (1847-1930), under attack by a giant yucca, is inscribed “At Rest,” but only the dead could sleep amid the roar of traffic on Interstate 40 and the hum of trucks in the parking lot of Purity Dairy, paved right to the cemetery’s boundary.
Just down Elm Hill Pike lies Greenwood Cemetery, the African American Mount Olivet.
Preston Taylor, a former slave who fought for the Union in the Civil War, established Greenwood in 1888. He was a prominent minister and undertaker, one of three pioneers who founded Citizens’ Bank. He was also the developer of Greenwood Park, an amusement park for blacks that operated when African Americans were not permitted in public parks.
Taylor’s grave lies just inside the entrance to Greenwood, marked by a classically inspired tomb decorated with soaring angels. Nearby rests Charles S. Johnson, the progressive sixth president of Fisk University who had been a key player in the Harlem Renaissance. Among the massive magnolias and cedars are buried DeFord Bailey, the first black member of the Grand Ole Opry, along with Tennessee State University coach John Merritt and civil rights leaders Kelly Miller Smith Jr. and Z. Alexander Looby. Less well known is “Uncle Billy” Reed, whose headstone is the wheel of a railroad car. Reed worked for the Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Railway at a time when this was a prestige job, as evidenced by the “Creed of Life” inscribed on his grave marker: “I love my Lord; I love my home; I love my job.”
In 1982, Greenwood Cemetery’s board took over Mount Ararat and four years later named it Greenwood West. Together the two graveyards tell the story of Nashville’s African American community in the years after the Civil War.
War Dead
The casualties of all the nation’s wars are represented in Nashville’s cemeteries. But the Civil War dead posed special challenges because so many of them piled up so quickly. And that wasn’t just due to major 1864 battles in Franklin and Nashville.
The city supplied many fighters to the Confederate cause, and their bodies were often returned here for burial. Union forces occupied Nashville relatively early in the war (February 1862), and by the end of that year had turned it into the most heavily fortified city in America outside Washington, D.C. The Union army’s decision to make Nashville the western depot for food, supplies and ordnance, with the railroads the means of distribution, guaranteed that the city also would be a major destination for Confederate prisoners of war. It also became a Union hospital center for the western theater. After the battle of Shiloh, more than 14,000 men poured into Nashville’s 25 hospitals. Given that so many of the injured didn’t make it out of those hospitals alive, Nashville ended up with a lot of bodies on its hands.
The majority of Union and Confederate fatalities, about 15,000, were not shipped home but were buried in City Cemetery, in an open field divided into separate sections for blue and gray. Each grave was marked with a wooden headboard. In 1867, Union bodies were replanted in the new National Cemetery established on Gallatin Pike. Confederate bodies unclaimed by family members remained in City Cemetery until 1869. That’s when the Ladies Memorial Society of Nashville, concerned about the deteriorating wooden headboards, purchased a circular burial ground at the highest point in Mount Olivet and reburied nearly 1,500 Confederate soldiers. In 1887, the Confederate Monument Association erected a 45-foot-tall granite obelisk topped by a soldier in the center of the circle of graves.
The site for National Cemetery was chosen by Gen. George Thomas, the Union commander at the Battle of Nashville and the person in charge of military forces for a time after the war. Thomas selected land along the tracks of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, he said, so that “no one could come to Nashville from the north and not be reminded of the sacrifices that had been made for the preservation of the Union.” The cemetery once had its own rail station for the families who came to mourn at the graves. Beyond National’s rusticated stone arch flanked by Tuscan columns, curving rows of bright white markers count off the troops who served in the Civil War and subsequent conflicts before the cemetery was filled and closed to further interment in 1993.
National Cemetery is a formal roll call of the war dead. The McGavock Confederate Cemetery outside Franklin speaks in more intimate tones. In 1866, John and Carrie McGavock donated two acres adjacent to their family cemetery at Carnton Plantation for Confederates who died at the Battle of Franklin. During the battle, their home, and the yard surrounding it after the house filled up, served as a temporary hospital.
Almost 1,500 are buried in the graveyard, which lies next to the fields still surrounding Carnton, down a quiet street through a modern subdivision. The dead are interred by state—states’ rights was their rallying cry, after all—with Mississippians (424) the most numerous and Tennesseans next (230). Simple granite blocks form a grid punctuated by the occasional larger monument, shaded by oaks and cedars. Despite the nearby golf course and clubhouse, the scene is not much altered from that described by Allen Tate in his 1930 “Ode to the Confederate Dead.”
“Row after row with strict impunityThe headstones yield their names to the element,The wind whirrs without recollection;In the riven troughs the splayed leavesPile up, of nature the casual sacramentTo the seasonal eternity of death; . . .”
Potters’ Fields
The least known of Nashville’s cemeteries, not surprisingly, are for the poorest people. Those who die unknown or indigent, who lack friends or family to provide for their remains, are the responsibility of Metro government. They are buried on city land or in space Metro has purchased for the purpose.
In City Cemetery and the public graveyards that preceded it, so-called paupers were buried along with people of means. But that democratic spirit lapsed with the establishment of private burial grounds and restrictions to interment imposed in City Cemetery. The result was a series of “potters’ fields”—sometimes bastardized as “paupers’ fields”—supervised by city health officials.
The term potters’ field is commonly traced to the Bible. A passage in Matthew tells that when Judas returned the 30 pieces of silver he’d been paid to betray Christ, officials used the blood money to buy a potters’ field for the burial of foreigners.
But the association of burying grounds with pottery makers is much older than the New Testament. In ancient Athens as well as other Greek cities, the Kerameikos (potters’ quarter) featured graves as well as kilns. “The primary reason kilns and tombs are so often found in such close proximity is that both are usually sited outside the main area of habitation of any settlement,” writes archaeologist John Papadopoulos. That’s because both were considered safety risks. The kilns were a fire hazard, especially to wooden housing. Dead bodies were thought to give off toxic vapors. So ceramic makers shared space with the dead outside the city walls.
The old potters’ field, renamed Davidson County Cemetery in 1960, is a chain-link fenced field lying in a 1950s and ’60s residential neighborhood on 18th Avenue North. There are few trees. Rows of simple stone cubes placed by graveyard surveyors are inscribed with numbers. The bodies are packed in tightly to conserve space. Records of the people buried there go back only to 1958. But there are stories of thousands of Mexican laborers interred in a mass grave in 1918, victims of a flu epidemic at the powder plant in Old Hickory. In 1950, a group called the Christian Friends donated a central monument “In Memory of All Who Sleep Here. Inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”
When space in Davidson County Cemetery was exhausted, Metro found land for a new one near Bordeaux Hospital in 1984. The one-acre site, also surrounded by chain link, overlooks a bleak stretch of County Hospital Road and wastewater treatment plant. The most significant landscaping is a giant power line cutting across the property. But the graves are marked with granite stones and inscribed with names, when they are known.
There are signs of personal remembrance. A careful arrangement of silk flowers spells out “Dad.” A pair of sculpted puppies frolics on the grave of a child. A small concrete bench inscribed with flowers politely requests: “Bless this Garden.” And on the grave of the infant Quiseyana White, 2005-2005, dances a ceramic rococo angel.
Today, Bordeaux Cemetery is filling up, and the city has purchased a section of plots in the private Hills of Calvary Cemetery on Ashland City Highway. It’s not as grim as Bordeaux. But of course it’s the living that care about such things. As Euripedes wrote in The Trojan Women:
“It makes small difference to the dead, if theyare buried in the tokens of luxury. All thisis an empty glorification left for those who live.”
