The Landscape Gardeners

Horace William Shaler Cleveland (1814-1900)

Horace William Shaler Cleveland was born in Lancaster, Massachusetts, and as a youth attended an innovative school there managed by his mother, Dorcas Hiller Cleveland. The school’s unique curriculum emphasized landscape study and observation. Horatio Greenough, another student at the school, developed a set of aesthetic ideas in concert with Ralph Waldo Emerson, which argued for an organic approach to art. These ideas later influenced Cleveland, as a landscape designer, leading him to believe that he should be as true as possible to the landscape in which he worked. As a consequence, throughout his career, he advocated a starkly simple and natural style of design and maintained great disdain for superfluous decoration.

In the late 1820’s, Cleveland moved with his family to Cuba, where he learned about mulching techniques on the coffee plantations and healthful effects of tropical scenery. During the 1830’s, he surveyed in the wild landscape of Illinois and other western states for railroad entrepreneurs and real estate speculators. After returning to Massachusetts in the late 1830’s to stay with brother Henry in Jamaica Plain, Cleveland became involved with a literary organization call the Five of Clubs, where he met Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose ideas about social responsibility influenced Cleveland’s entire career. In the early 1840’s, Cleveland purchased “Oatlands”, a farm in Burlington, New Jersey, where he established himself as a scientific farmer. In that role, he considered both practical and aesthetic issues of landscape design and published articles about pomological techniques in journals such as Andrew Jackson Downing’s “The Horticulturist”.

In 1854, Cleveland again moved back to Massachusetts to begin a practice in landscape and ornamental gardening with Robert Morris Copeland. On of their first important commissions was the design of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts, for which Copeland and Cleveland were employed by Emerson and the other members of the Concord Cemetery Committee. Cleveland and Copeland designed the site to be sensitive to the existing landscape, and also as a park connected to various public open spaces in the Concord community. Their ideas about the connection of public spaces informed their suggestions for a Boston park system a year later. In 1856, as Back Bay was being filled, Cleveland and Copeland recommended that Commonwealth Avenue connect the center of Boston (the Common and Public Garden) to public spaces on the city’s periphery. In the following years, Cleveland contributed to a public campaign in support of a connected park system for Boston. His 1869 publication “The Public Grounds of Chicago: How to Give Them Character and Expression”, was as much about the public open space needs of Boston as it was about Chicago. Cleveland and Copeland dissolved their partnership sometime before the Civil War.

When Cleveland moved to Chicago in 1869, he used his connections with powerful railroad magnates to secure work. These men were convinced of their responsibility to help guide the advance of civilization by planning communities and planting trees in the prairie landscape. Cleveland also formed a loose partnership with William Merchant Richardson French, a civil engineer and later founding director of the Chicago Art Institute collaboration with him on cemetery and subdivision projects. During the 1870’s, Cleveland worked on Chicago’s Drexell Boulevard, the South Parks, and Graceland Cemetery. His office and prized library were destroyed in the great Fire of 1871. In 1873, he published “Landscape Architecture as Applied to the Wants of the West with an Essay on Forest Planting on the Great Plains”, one of the first books to define and develop the scope of the new profession of landscape architecture. Cleveland also corresponded extensively with colleagues such as Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr.

In 1883, Cleveland began work on the Minneapolis Park System, the crowning achievement of his long career. He laid out a system of connected lakes, parks and parkways that were integral to the city’s development over the next several decades. After moving to Minneapolis in the mid-1880’s, he helped secure the area around Minnehaha Falls, known for its poetic associations with Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha. The Minneapolis park system is today considered on the most significant open space systems in the United States, and it stands as a testament to Cleveland’s vision.

ROBERT MORRIS COPELAND (1830 – 1874)

Robert Morris Copeland was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts. After trying his luck in California during the gold rush, he attended Harvard College, where he studied liberal arts and formed a lifelong association with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. After graduating in the early 1850’s, Copeland became a scientific farmer at Beaver Brook Falls near Lexington, Massachusetts. He met Horace Cleveland through scientific farming connections, and they established a partnership in “landscape and ornamental gardening” in 1854.

Copeland’s first commission, likely prepared with Cleveland, was the State Farm at Westborough, Massachusetts. In early 1855, Copeland delivered an address in the Concord Lyceum Series titled “The Useful and the Beautiful”. That address, coupled with personal connections, let to the selection of Copeland and Cleveland as designers of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts. Other notable projects they completed during the 1850’s included the Samuel Colt estate in Hartford, Connecticut (today part of Colt Park), the Oak Grove Cemetery, Gloucester and the Wyoming Cemetery, Melrose, both in Massachusetts. In 1856, failed attempts to obtain the commission for the design of Central Park, and toward that end, he and Cleveland laid out their thoughts in a pamphlet titled “A Few Words on the Central Park”. In 1857, Copeland submitted a formal entry in the Central Park design competition but won nothing (it is unclear whether he submitted the design alone or with Cleveland). Copeland also wrote a book, “Country Life: A Handbook of Agriculture, Horticulture and Landscape Gardening (1859), in which he offered practical and aesthetic advice to rural citizens and suggested that a managed rural landscape offered everything that might “expand the mind and ennoble the soul”. Copeland and Cleveland amicably dissolved their partnership at some point before the Civil War.

During the Civil War, Copeland attained the rank of major in the Union Army and likely helped establish the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the black brigade later depicted in the famous Augustus Saint-Gaudens sculpture. He was dishonorably discharged in 1862, apparently for leaking disparaging information about superior officers to the press, and spent the next several years clearing his name. In the process, he solicited character witnesses including Ralph Waldo Emerson and even met with President Abraham Lincoln. By the late1860’s, he had established a flourishing practice in Boston with projects in New York, Pennsylvania and several for the Frederick Billings estate in Woodstock, Vermont, where Billings engaged in forestry study and scientific farming experiments consistent with many of the ideas presented in Copeland’s Country Life.

Also, beginning in the 1860’s, Copeland began to promote his developing ideas for a Boston park system in articles and editorials published in the Boston Daly Advertiser (the newspaper was edited by his brother-in-law, Charles F. Dunbar). By 1872, Copeland had developed a grand plan for a system of public open spaces which he highlighted in his 1872 publication, “The Most Beautiful City in America: Essay and Plan for the Improvement of the City of Boston”. Many of his ideas foreshadowed Charles Eliot’s. Copeland designed hundreds of landscapes at all scales, including several fine community designs such as Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard. He continued to refine his design philosophy and worked to position himself to design a system of parks for Boston until he died unexpectedly in 1874. After his death, his apprentice, Ernest Bowditch, continued to promote Copeland’s concept for a connected park system in Boston. According to an obituary, likely written by Dunbar, “Copeland had done much in the way of laying out and ornamenting private grounds, but his ambition was for work on a grander scale”.

ERNEST W. BOWDITCH (1850 – 1918)

William Ernestus Bowditch was born in Brookline, Massachusetts and educated in the Brookline public schools. In 1865, Bowditch, (who by this time had inverted his first and middle names and was known as Ernest W.), enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied chemistry and mining. He ended his studies in June 1869, leaving without a degree, and went to Nebraska, where for several months he had a construction job with the Chicago Burlington & Quincy Railroad.

After returning to Boston, Bowditch, through family connections, was appointed assistant mineralogist with the Darien Expedition, a canal survey expedition to the Isthmus of Darien (now the Isthmus of Panama). The route Bowditch’s team surveyed during the first half of 1870 proved not to be the best one for what was to become the Panama Canal. When he returned to Boston afterward, his career began to blossom. He worked in conjunction with architectural and engineering firms, as well as using his family connections to obtain independent commissions. His career is marked by associations with prominent Boston and New York architects, landscape architects and architectural firms: Robert Morris Copeland; McKim, Mead & Bigelow; Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr.; Bruce Price; Peabody & Stearns; H. H. Richardson and Shedd & Sawyer.

In the fall of 1870, Bowditch was employed at the Boston office of Shedd & Sawyer, Civil Engineers. One of his first jobs for the firm was general maintenance of the grounds of Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, where he laid out driveways, paths, stone bounds for corners, curbing and gardens. This early exposure to America’s first romantic cemetery plan was a strong influence on Bowditch’s future design ideas.

In mid-1871, Bowditch set up his own office opposite Copeland’s and did survey work for him. A year later, he began to consult for Peabody && Stearns. He continued to work with the architectural firm through the mid-1880’s and also collaborated with architect H. H. Richardson on several projects, notably as structural engineer for Boston’s Trinity Church. From the mid-1880’s through late 1890’s, Bowditch shared office space with his landscape gardener brother, James H. Bowditch.

Bowditch also frequently worked with Olmsted Sr. and John Charles Olmsted, often as a surveyor or draftsman. But despite a long professional relationship with the Olmstead, he generally felt animosity for them because of their wide renown.

Bowditch was a talented designer, both creatively and technically, as well as an adept manager of project construction. He was involved in municipal surveys for sewer and water supply design and in many eastern communities, as well as structural engineering, land surveying, cemetery design, subdivision layout, and landscape design at summer resorts of the wealthy, especially Newport, Rhode Island. His projects there included Pierre Lorillard and Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Breakers, as well as the estates of Ogden Goelet, Catherine Lorillard Wolfe, and Charles Lanier, to name only a few. While much of Bowditch’s residential design was carried out in a picturesque style, his designs for the estates of the wealthy often utilized a formal layout. The estate of T. W. Pierce of Topsfield, Massachusetts, showed Bowditch’s mastery of a Beaux Arts approach.

Bowditch also designed many parks. Two notable surviving examples from the 1890’s are Rockefeller Park and the connecting Shaker Lakes Park on Cleveland’s Erie-oriented horseshoe park system, much like Boston’s “Emerald Necklace”. In the late 1880’s and 1890’s, Bowditch executed landscape designs for several subdivisions: Tuxedo Park in New York; Newton Terraces in Waban and Allston Park in Allston, Massachusetts; and Shoreby Hill in Jamestown, Rhode Island; as well as the suburban Cleveland communities of Clifton Park and Euclid Heights.

The Evolving Landscape

For several hundred years, the cemetery with its curvilinear roads and pathways has been shaded by mature maples, beeches, red oaks and lindens. Stately pines and hemlocks line avenues and borders and old fashioned shrubs such as lilacs, viburnum, mulberry, forsythia and bridal wreath spirea provide accents on street corners. During the 19th century , the plan of Milton Cemetery evolved by design of several well known proponents of the rural garden cemetery movement, the firm of Whitman and Breck, Ernest Bowditch, Robert Morris Copeland and William S. Cleveland. Although the grid like “old burial grounds” had been in use as a burial place for Milton families since 1672, there was a need to expand for the town’s growing population. Many wealthy people summered in the mansions and estates of Milton and with their support , the cemetery trustees hoped to create a place of tranquil beauty that would compete with other developing cemeteries such as Forest Hills and Mount Auburn. The landscape gardeners who designed the expanded cemetery were contemporaries of the “Father of landscape architecture”, Frederick Law Olmstead, and like him, designed large scale public spaces which took advantage of the natural topography and water features.

Over the past twenty years, in order to enhance its intended purpose as a garden cemetery, many more varieties of trees have been added to the landscape including Sweet Gum, Sourwood, Stewartia, Liriodendron, Weeping Cherries, Japanese maples and Magnolias. Spring showcases the bulbs of giant purple allium, tulips, daffodils and the flowering of dogwood, crabapple and cherry trees. Blue scilla planted years ago colors the hillsides of the southern part of Centennial Avenue. Perennial beds have been added which feature the fall plumes of ornamental grasses, and the flowers of sedum, coreopsis, black eyed susans, lavender, roses and catmint.

Shrubs and perennials popular in the 19th century were chosen for the entrance way to the old grounds and include oak leaf hydrangea, pulmonaria, inkberry, periwinkle and blueberry bush. A cart path constructed of cobbles leads the visitor from the front entrance to the old grounds. Over the past few years due to the generosity of the Copeland Family Foundation, both new trees and replacement species have been planted throughout the cemetery and period signage, designed by the Boston Sign Company has been installed.

Historical Gravestones

The Milton Cemetery is very unusual in that it has been used continuously since the town’s inception. The result is a collection of memorial art representing most phases of its fashion in America. Complemented by beautiful landscaping, this is one of Milton’s most important sites.

Of prime importance is the Old Burying Ground, long since incorporated into the larger cemetery, especially the sections identified as “Purchase No. 1" and “Purchase No. 2" which contain the oldest gravestones. Not only are the monuments contained herein historically and iconographically significant, but they are considerably endangered.

Here are found pale greenish-grey slates quarried in Dorchester, grey-black slates peppered with tiny garnets quarried in Harvard, purple slates from the South Shore, and a variety of other slates, shales, and occasional fieldstones from other unknown locations. These gravestones are long, thin slabs, smoothed and carved on one face, with a rough tapered portion descending into the ground to anchor them upright.

Carved primarily in the eighteenth century, the markers in this area are decorated with many of the mortality and resurrection images typical of that period. These include skulls, winged skulls (or “death’s heads”), bones and crossed bones, a snuffed candle, hourglasses, a scythe, the Latin phrases “memento mori” and “fugit hora”, columns of fruit and vegetation, and winged effigies (or “cherubs”), heavenly representations of the deceased. Amidst the glowering depictions of Death and risen spirits are a few actual attempted portraits. By the 1790's and well into the next century, fashion dictated neoclassic designs; slate gravestones toward the back of Purchase No. 2 and in Purchase No. 3 have urns or urns and willows in their tympanums.

Milton apparently had no local stonecutter during this period, so grave markers were purchased elsewhere and brought in. The few seventeenth century examples came from William Mumford’s shop in Boston’s north end. Many of the eighteenth century stones, from its earliest years, came from the busy Foster family workshop in Dorchester. Other gravestones were furnished by Henry Christian Geyer in Boston, Caleb Lamson in Charlestown, the Pratt family shop in Abington, the Dwight shop in Shirley, William Park in Groton, Barney Leonard in Bridgewater, David Linkon in Norton, the Soule workshop, James New in Attleboro, and several other unidentified, or tentatively identified, carvers in and around Boston, including Mumford’s apprentices.

Because stones were procured from so many sources, the variety of individual styles evident here is relatively great. This “collection” probably wouldn’t have occurred, at least to such an extent, if the work of a local artisan had been dominant. Family connections probably account for the preponderance of Foster carvings. The product of Daniel Hastings in Newton, however, though popular throughout eastern Massachusetts, is curiously absent. With fewer vernacular traits and showing less originality, the urn-and-willow type remain largely unresearched, although one here is signed, “B. Adams Sculptor”.

The overall artistic quality of these gravestones is high. Shops generally produced higher and lower quality at commensurate cost; it must be surmised that price was not the first consideration of these early Milton families when ordering monuments. Add the cost of sledging the massive slates from as far away as western Middlesex county, and the scale of investment becomes impressive.

The case for initiating any possible conservation is clearly made in acknowledging the historical, genealogical and artistic importance of these early bas relief sculptures. Before presenting my assessment of their conservation needs, it may be useful to describe a few unique or exceptional examples found in Milton, standing out from the many thousands I have studied around New England.

MARY MILTON, 1704/5: This is one of a very small group of early stones, simply peaked in shape and plainly lettered without decoration, found around Boston. Similar stones stand in Roxbury’s Eustis Street Burying Ground. They are crudely but competently done, and may represent someone’s first efforts at carving or a short-term occupation.

MARY BATES, 1799: The face in this tympanum has been awkwardly changed from that of a skull to one that is cherubic, altering the stern, admonishing quality of its original design. 1799 is very late to find death’s heads, except in the most rural places, so it is very likely that an earlier “bland” (stonecutters were known to warehouse these) was made over to suit current fashion.

ISAIAH CREHORE, 1776: This is a seventeenth century gravestone by William Mumford. Its inscription field has been scraped down and recarved by another man. Is there an old grave in Milton now unmarked, or from where did an evidently finished early gravestone become available?

PATIENCE HOLMAN, 1713: This is a slate-type design executed on brownstone, or Connecticut sandstone. Excepting the product of one Essex County craftsman, there are only a handful of early gravestones using this material in the area; two, in Newport, are by William Mumford. This is probably by one of the carvers thought to be his apprentice, now tentatively identified from initials engraved on their work.


SETH SUMNER, 1771: The design on this stone is iconographically rare and important, with its released spirits reigning in an anthropomorphized cosmos. It is attributed on the basis of probate evidence to Henry Christian Geyer.






ANN CREHORE, 1797: There are several sun/horizon carvings here, symbolizing the end of life on Earth and the commencement of that which is eternal (it is setting or rising). Though the suns are often anthropomorphized, this is the only know example of a hairy sun face, which is both strange and comical.

JOSEPH FENNO, 1767: This is an especially elaborate design by Geyer, certainly one of his masterpieces.

ELIZABETH CLAP, 1701: This amateurishly lettered “headstone” was actually created from that portion of another gravestone intended to be below ground. Upside-down foliate bottom and side borders can be seen at and below ground level on the inverted monument; whether it still exists in entirety can’t be known without excavation. Judging by these borders, the re-used original is least fifty years newer than the date on this make-do production. Was Elizabeth’s old marker somehow destroyed, and why was it replaced thusly? Unfortunately, in the process, some subteranean carving (this is where initials, prices, or chisel tests are sometimes found) was scratched out to clear an inscription field.

LIEUT.. ROBERT VOSE, 1760: This is an iconographically important artifact, possibly from the hand of Henry Christian Geyer. (Although the skull appears awkward compared with Geyer’s best-known work, some of his minor productions and foot stones used similarly craggy skulls.) The unusually asymmetric tympanum is filled with symbols of mortality: a scythe (rare), the “naturalistic” skull (rarely unstylized), the flame of life - represented by a candle in a fancy holder - being snuffed (rare), and an hourglass.

REV. JOHN WADSWORTH, 1766: The design of this stone, possibly from the workshop of James New, includes a delightfully detailed torso portrait of the deceased under the banner, “A Sudden Death.”

THEODORA THACHER, 1697: Made of Connecticut brownstone, probably from the quarry at Middletown, this is one of a relatively small group of seventeenth and early eighteenth century “table stones”, usually raised up on legs or brick bases to mark tombs.* It does not appear to be recut as some inscriptions on these are, being as they are especially vulnerable to erosion from rain. While typically having a recess to hold an inlaid plaque of slate (often a coat-of-arms, and now usually missing), this table stone is one of the few with decorative corner devices resembling fleur-de-lis.

SAMUEL BENT, 1797: This is an austere but delicate neoclassic design featuring a handsome urn and draped shroud, signed at the bottom by B. Adams. Signatures in the eighteenth century are quite rare.

SARAH THACHER, 1764: This is the northernmost example of David Linkon’s work. He and a small group of other Bristol County stone cutters employed strange central designs on their gravestones consisting of complicated arrangements of tendrils, organic and geometric shapes and drill holes.

ANN SWIFT, 1762: Another tour de force carving by Geyer, who placed an unusual number of his best works in the Milton burying ground, this includes a rarely-attempted three-quarter view spirit effigy, scallop device, flaming heart and Bible verse.

By highlighting these few gravestones, I do not mean to suggest that they comprise the principal interest of the Old Burying Ground section. There are ambitious, if less skillful, imitations of Geyer’s angels; a charming profile portrait; exceptional productions, some documented by probate evidence, from at least two generations of Fosters; home-made markers; and many other remarkable decorative carvings, as well as innumerable poetic and elucidating epitaphs.

The first four purchase areas contain Milton Cemetery’s oldest monuments, marked on the east by a long row of mound tombs and bounded on the west by grassy, indistinct Walnut Avenue. Gravestones here are predominantly slate, set directly into the ground, with a scattering of marble slabs, and a few later granite monuments and obelisks. The majority are arranged in rows facing Centre Street, or roughly northwest, though many are also laid out in a roughly perpendicular pattern facing the southwest. Neither direction is typical for gravestone orientation in New England. There are almost no foot stones; they were undoubtedly discarded at some time in the past to make maintenance easier.

The ground is slightly undulant, but fairly level. Gravestones are generally plumb and level; sinking and tilting do not contribute significantly to a need for extensive resetting. There is much evidence of past attempts to repair and consolidate the old slates. Approximately 32 gravestones have been encapsulated in cement holders; these have all failed or are failing. Many stones were “fixed” using an unknown adhesive; these repairs have all failed or are failing. In addition, several markers were held together with bolted iron hardware which is corroding, expanding, and causing further fractures.

But the greatest and most immediate threat to these early gravestones is extensive delamination, proportionally the worst I have seen. Delamination occurs between layers of a bedding type stone like slate when water seeps into fissures at the edge and forces them apart by freezing. Repeated cycles of freezing and thawing can actually force outer layers right off the monument; splits through the middle can undermine its entire structure. So advanced is this process among the old stones in Milton that a vandal with a baseball bat could easily - and quickly - deface many of them. A few are so compromised that they wouldn’t even survive the slap of an open hand.