02-10-14 Council Agenda & Packet

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United States Department of the Interior National Park Service / National Register of Historic Places Registration Form NPS Form 10 -900 OMB No. 1024 -0018 South Bend City Cemetery St. Joseph, Indiana Name of Property County and State historically, though advances in public works infrastructure has now mitigated that threat, The soil is somewhat sandy and the growing season is fairly typical and the temperatures moderate. Due to South Bend's proximity to Lake Michigan and "subsequent" lake effect, though, winters can bring frequent storms, blizzards and significant precipitation. The land for the original portion of the cemetery was gifted to the City of South Bend by Alexis Coquillard and Lathrop Taylor, founders of the town, platting the town and the cemetery in 1831. The site for the burial grounds was chosen due to its practical proximity and simultaneous respectful distance from the center of the city. Even in the very earliest days of South Bend's history, City Cemetery lain near enough to city thoroughfares to provide a fairly navigable route for mourners and funeral processions. The style of City Cemetery originated as a municipal cemetery and developed to feature characteristics of both a rural cemetery and a lawn park cemetery. Municipal cemeteries, as the name implies, were right on the edge of town, bore no specific religious affiliation or exclusion, and were administered by city governments. These were also very regular, as to maximize space. In great contrast, rural cemeteries, most popular circa 1831 -1870, were designed as picturesque, lovely garden -like settings, replete with romantic images of life and death; utilized architectural elements such as fencing and coping, and began the trend of monuments and structures designed to convey status and socio- economic stature. Use of the word rural, in this context, should not be misunderstood to mean remote or of the countryside, as even the earliest visual documentation shows houses along Colfax and LaPorte. In 1831, Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts was developed by the Massachusetts Horticultural Society as a reaction against overcrowded graveyards. It was a non- denominational, non - profit business that maintained its own records on a beautiful stretch of land outside the city limits. Mount Auburn, the first of its kind, was the beginning of American rural cemeteries. American Rural cemeteries were common in the era of 1831 -1870 as attitudes regarding death shifted from a depressing reality to thoughts of beauty and celebration of one's life. The settings were designed rather than left to fill in a haphazard form. Also called Garden Cemeteries, the picturesque landscape reflected the newer romantic ideas of life and death, which is also evident in the imagery and iconography of the markers and monuments. During this era, planners advocated park like cemeteries away from the city center in lieu of small urban or family graveyards or churchyards. Use of the word "cemetery" took precedence over "graveyard" or "burial ground" after the Mount Auburn development. The romantic garden settings were replete with manicured plantings, asymmetric lots, and winding roads and trails. Invisible to the eye is the regimented grid of roughly equal sized plots, mapped but not marked on the land. Instead, trees, plants, vertical monuments, and winding trails detract from a grid - like appearance. Built features though that contradicts the open garden plan are that of coping and decorative fencing. This practice recalls the symmetry of a churchyard and allowed the visual impact of enclosing a significant sized plot, highlighting impressive monuments, and further embellishing the family lot, thus emphasizing wealth and status. Lawn park cemeteries, developed by Adolphe Strauch, a Prussian landscape artist, merged landscape design with a set of rules and regulations restraining the effects from wild landscapes Section 8 page 20