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Pioneer Cemeteries: Sculpture Gardens of the Old West
As pioneers attempted to settle and civilize the “Wild West,” cemeteries became important cultural centers. Filled with carved wooden headboards, inscribed local stones, and Italian marble statues, cemeteries functioned as symbols of stability and progress toward a European-inspired vision of Manifest Destiny. As repositories of art and history, these pioneer cemeteries tell the story of communities and visual culture emerging together within the developing landscape of the Old West.
Annette Stott traces this story through Rocky Mountain towns on the western frontier, from the unkempt “boot hills” of the early mining camps and cattle settlements to the more refined “fair mounts.” She shows how people from Asia, Europe, and the Americas contributed to the visual character of the mountain cemeteries, and how the sepulchral garden functioned as an open-air gallery of public sculpture, at once a site for relaxation, learning, and social ritual. Here, widespread participation in a variety of ceremonies brought mountain communities together with a frequency almost unimaginable today. Illustrated with eighty-three striking photographs, this book shows how the pioneer cemetery emerged as a site of public sculpture and cultural transmission in which each carved or molded monument played dual (and sometimes conflicting) public and private roles, recording the community’s history and values while memorializing individuals and events.
Annette Stott traces this story through Rocky Mountain towns on the western frontier, from the unkempt “boot hills” of the early mining camps and cattle settlements to the more refined “fair mounts.” She shows how people from Asia, Europe, and the Americas contributed to the visual character of the mountain cemeteries, and how the sepulchral garden functioned as an open-air gallery of public sculpture, at once a site for relaxation, learning, and social ritual. Here, widespread participation in a variety of ceremonies brought mountain communities together with a frequency almost unimaginable today. Illustrated with eighty-three striking photographs, this book shows how the pioneer cemetery emerged as a site of public sculpture and cultural transmission in which each carved or molded monument played dual (and sometimes conflicting) public and private roles, recording the community’s history and values while memorializing individuals and events.
- GenresHistoryNonfictionArt
404 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2008
19 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 27, 2011
This review originally appeared in the Graveyard Rabbits online journal
I’ve been known to complain about the interest in American burial themes being far too centered on New England, or even the East Coast more generally. I {may} have to stop now. Annette Stott’s Pioneer Cemeteries; Sculpture Gardens of the Old West goes a long way to filling that gap. This is a book about cemeteries, but more still, it’s a book about the Rocky Mountains, as a cradle of women’s entrepreneurship, as a remote, as a place where the self-made imposed their rule.
Stott is an art historian by training and brings this toolkit to use in understanding frontier cemeteries as sculpture gardens and often the only public art available in the Western towns. She focuses on community cemeteries in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho and Montana as a distinct region, as the Rocky Mountain west has a unique culture and has been inflected by Spanish Catholic, Native American, Asian, LDS and other American Pioneer groups.
Western frontier towns evolved differently than towns and counties back East. The mixing of the traditions created a distinctive regional culture where a village green was no longer the primary community space but rather where burial ground functioned as ritual, political and artistic space. The burial places reflect the growth of mining camp to mercantile center in their shift from “boot hills” to more polished “fair mounts.”
Impeccably researched, her work in the business and newspaper archives brings to life what was unique about life reflected in commemoration in the region. She uses to good effect newspaper accounts, business archives and legal documents to follow the roles of women as community members and as art objects. The discussion of Mary DeVille Rauh and the M. Rauh Marble Works does both. The business and its artisans produced works which trace the artistic development of memorials from deeply masculine scaled down miner’s cabins to idealized female figures as mourning increasingly became the domain of women. The story of Mary DeVille Rauh, on the other hand, illustrates exactly how difficult it is to parse the role of women in a community. Rauh herself is apparently a self-made woman, arriving in Denver in 1870. By 1877 she had married, had her husband declared violently insane and remarried. The assets she gained in marriage helped build M. Rauh and for twenty years she was signatory of documents of the business that carried her name. What role was played by this woman in growing a business that flourished among the middle and upper classes of Denver? It’s a shame we can never know.
Stott is willing to explore the shifts in manner of commemoration as well as the growth of any given cemetery are reflective of a community’s development. She also skillfully illustrates how memorializations, or the lack of them, can play conflicting roles between the public and the private. In essence she is discovering what audience a memorial is primarily playing to, and how that audience may change over time.
All of the black and white images, plus well over 100 color images used to illustrate key concepts are available online (www.annettestott.com) helping to make this resource a valuable teaching tool for courses on visual or material culture. The images on the website have certainly given me a list of new cemeteries to visit and new communities to explore.
As thorough as Professor Stotts’s book is, it cannot be comprehensive. She acknowledges leaving out cemeteries related to institutional settings and those of communities not intended for permanent settlement. That said, it sets a very high standard to those continuing to work in the West. Opportunities for similar studies of the Pacific Northwest and Canadian Rockies still exist and I can’t wait to read them.
I’ve been known to complain about the interest in American burial themes being far too centered on New England, or even the East Coast more generally. I {may} have to stop now. Annette Stott’s Pioneer Cemeteries; Sculpture Gardens of the Old West goes a long way to filling that gap. This is a book about cemeteries, but more still, it’s a book about the Rocky Mountains, as a cradle of women’s entrepreneurship, as a remote, as a place where the self-made imposed their rule.
Stott is an art historian by training and brings this toolkit to use in understanding frontier cemeteries as sculpture gardens and often the only public art available in the Western towns. She focuses on community cemeteries in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho and Montana as a distinct region, as the Rocky Mountain west has a unique culture and has been inflected by Spanish Catholic, Native American, Asian, LDS and other American Pioneer groups.
Western frontier towns evolved differently than towns and counties back East. The mixing of the traditions created a distinctive regional culture where a village green was no longer the primary community space but rather where burial ground functioned as ritual, political and artistic space. The burial places reflect the growth of mining camp to mercantile center in their shift from “boot hills” to more polished “fair mounts.”
Impeccably researched, her work in the business and newspaper archives brings to life what was unique about life reflected in commemoration in the region. She uses to good effect newspaper accounts, business archives and legal documents to follow the roles of women as community members and as art objects. The discussion of Mary DeVille Rauh and the M. Rauh Marble Works does both. The business and its artisans produced works which trace the artistic development of memorials from deeply masculine scaled down miner’s cabins to idealized female figures as mourning increasingly became the domain of women. The story of Mary DeVille Rauh, on the other hand, illustrates exactly how difficult it is to parse the role of women in a community. Rauh herself is apparently a self-made woman, arriving in Denver in 1870. By 1877 she had married, had her husband declared violently insane and remarried. The assets she gained in marriage helped build M. Rauh and for twenty years she was signatory of documents of the business that carried her name. What role was played by this woman in growing a business that flourished among the middle and upper classes of Denver? It’s a shame we can never know.
Stott is willing to explore the shifts in manner of commemoration as well as the growth of any given cemetery are reflective of a community’s development. She also skillfully illustrates how memorializations, or the lack of them, can play conflicting roles between the public and the private. In essence she is discovering what audience a memorial is primarily playing to, and how that audience may change over time.
All of the black and white images, plus well over 100 color images used to illustrate key concepts are available online (www.annettestott.com) helping to make this resource a valuable teaching tool for courses on visual or material culture. The images on the website have certainly given me a list of new cemeteries to visit and new communities to explore.
As thorough as Professor Stotts’s book is, it cannot be comprehensive. She acknowledges leaving out cemeteries related to institutional settings and those of communities not intended for permanent settlement. That said, it sets a very high standard to those continuing to work in the West. Opportunities for similar studies of the Pacific Northwest and Canadian Rockies still exist and I can’t wait to read them.
April 11, 2010
OK, I didn't read the whole book word for word. A relative wrote it, and since I'm interested in cemeteries I had our library order it. I read the introduction, conclusion, and I hopped skipped and jumped through the middle. It was interesting enough, about the way cemeteries developed in the West, the various ways plots were marked by different groups, and what hopes people had for cemeteries. I just didn't have the time or patience to really study this very complete analysis.
July 25, 2019
I’ve seen a lot of the ones mentioned in this book
April 18, 2012
It's rare for me to give a cemetery book such a low rating, but it's rare for a cemetery book to contain so much dry information that even my interest wanes.
I assumed, from the subtitle, that this would be a book about the West. In this case, the west is limited to the Rocky Mountain states. Since I live west of that, I struggled with my disappointment. Also from the subtitle, I assumed this would be a book about cemeteries as "sculpture gardens." While I hoped for an accent on the garden aspect, Stott accents the sculptors rather than their works. The horticultural details gets scant attention.
The text focuses on the business aspects of the cemetery trade. I find that I am more interested in the stories recorded in stone than in the stone carvers. I wanted to spend more time in the graveyards and less time in workshops.
I read this book in advance of a trip to the Salt Lake City Cemetery, hoping to glean some background that would add richness and depth to my exploration. Instead, the beautiful historic cemetery, which easily rates a chapter of its own, gets short shrift. Then again, no one seems to have done justice to the graveyard with a book of its own, so perhaps that information is impossibly difficult to come by?
In the end, I was bored and disappointed by this book.
I assumed, from the subtitle, that this would be a book about the West. In this case, the west is limited to the Rocky Mountain states. Since I live west of that, I struggled with my disappointment. Also from the subtitle, I assumed this would be a book about cemeteries as "sculpture gardens." While I hoped for an accent on the garden aspect, Stott accents the sculptors rather than their works. The horticultural details gets scant attention.
The text focuses on the business aspects of the cemetery trade. I find that I am more interested in the stories recorded in stone than in the stone carvers. I wanted to spend more time in the graveyards and less time in workshops.
I read this book in advance of a trip to the Salt Lake City Cemetery, hoping to glean some background that would add richness and depth to my exploration. Instead, the beautiful historic cemetery, which easily rates a chapter of its own, gets short shrift. Then again, no one seems to have done justice to the graveyard with a book of its own, so perhaps that information is impossibly difficult to come by?
In the end, I was bored and disappointed by this book.
June 6, 2011
Overall an interesting look at cemetery monuments, in the west, as in who made them, what kinds there were, how motifs and imagery got selected, and how the cemetery of this region is different than the resting places back east.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews