Albany Rural Cemetery, Menands New York

Date added: October 30, 2023 Categories:

The rural cemetery movement in America began in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1831 with the design of the Mount Auburn Cemetery. It gained its impetus from the happy convergence of three forces: The Romantic movement in literature and art, an increased interest in horticulture and landscaping, and the poor, overcrowded conditions of many graveyards within city limits where land was limited. Thus was born the need for both a pastoral setting and a decent burial site: the rural cemetery. Albany Rural Cemetery founded in 1844 is an early example in the movement following Greenwood Cemetery in New York City by only four years, and Mount Auburn in Cambridge, the earliest rural cemetery in America by thirteen years. It is a fine example of this type of cemetery which rapidly became popular throughout the East and Midwest. The Victorian approach to death was a sentimental one. Many of the monuments employ symbols that spoke eloquently to the Victorians: crosses, anchors, draped urns, mourning figures, tree stumps, small Grecian temples; all were regarded as suitable memorials to the dead. The irregular landscaping, the winding roads, lakes, and picturesque vistas all bespoke a sense of sylvan placidity to our Victorian ancestors, marking a fit place for the dead to repose and for the living to wander. The rural cemetery provided people in the nineteenth century with an easily viewable collection of American sculpture: a kind of outdoor sculpture museum.

The Albany Rural Cemetery contains records in stone of the feelings and attitudes about death as expressed by relatives of the deceased and by the craftsmen who created the memorials. These feelings are expressed in the design of the memorials, the materials, size, lettering, and Choice of words that are used to remember the dead, as well as by the pastoral setting. The cemetery reflects changing tastes and attitudes about death from 1844, when it was founded, until the present day. It contains a fine collection of nineteenth and twentieth-century mortuary art which reflects the changes in decorative art taste during that period.

Cemetery Description

The Albany Rural Cemetery, founded in 1844 and laid out by Major D.B. Douglass, occupies 467 acres. Located north of the city of Albany in the city of Menands on high ground overlooking the Hudson River, the cemetery has thirty-five miles of roadways and contains the graves of nearly one hundred thousand people. The cemetery is divided by three ridge areas known as the South Ridge, the Middle Ridge, and the North Ridge.

The cemetery is bounded on the southeast by St. Agnes Roman Catholic Cemetery and is penetrated by the Jewish Beth Emmeth Cemetery on the northwest. Both these cemeteries are on land formerly owned by Albany Rural. They are of later date and have less significant design features and sculpture than Albany Rural.

The plan of the Albany Rural Cemetery is irregular and incorporates a labyrinth of romantically named winding roads. The main road is called The Tour. Other roadways are entitled Bower Hill Way, Ravine Cross Way, Crescent Way, Summer Side Avenue, Pine Bough Avenue, Rose Leaf Way, Wild Flower Avenue, and as well, more prosaic examples as Elmwood Avenue, and Spruce Avenue. The cemetery with its public buildings (chapel, office, tc.), mansions (mausoleums), middle-class homes (monuments and tombstones), and apartment houses (vaults) is a vast city of the dead. Divided into irregular sections, the various sections were also named. Some examples of the nineteenth century's romantic approach to names are: Daisy Lawn, Lily Dale, Cypress Hill, Meadow Hill, Summit Ridge, and Sylvan Dell. Fortunately, for sanity's sake, each section is also numbered.

Cemetery Map (1977)

Two creeks flow through the cemetery in the deep ravines that flank Middle Ridge. Originally these creeks were damned at various points creating four lakes. The largest was Lake Bethesda; Tawasentha Lake, Indian Lake, and Consecration Lake were much smaller. These bodies of water must have created irregular vistas of great picturesque quality. The dams were blown up because of problems with the graves along the lake banks; so this striking original visual feature is now gone. Remaining is Cypress Water, a pear-shaped, spring-fed, artificial lake on the South Ridge. Seven roads converge on this placid little pond making it one of the main visual points of the cemetery today.

There are five major structures on the cemetery grounds: an office, a superintendent's residence, a chapel, a gatehouse, and a barn complex. The office building, designed by Robert W. Gibson in 1882, is a handsome, polychromatic, picturesque eclectic structure of red Potsdam sandstone and Croton brick. It is covered with a red tile roof. Its massing and window treatment, especially when viewed from the south, is suggestive of the Queen Anne style of architecture.

On the right of The Tour just beyond the office and set well back from the road is the superintendent's residence. This is a large three-bay frame structure of two and one-half stories, handsomely detailed in the Neoclassical Revival style. Built in 1899, it has a wide entrance porch supported by paired Ionic fluted columns which carry a full entablature whose frieze is decorated with rosettes. The cornice is enhanced with dentiling. Fluted Doric pilasters support the portico at the wall. The whole displays a careful adherence to the Classical vocabulary of ornamentation. The doorway is flanked by wide diamond-paned lights and narrow-paneled pilasters that support smallish brackets. Above and below the side-lights are recessed panels. Above the doorway in a recessed panel appears the date 1899 in Roman numerals. A most visually striking feature of this rural house is the fenestration. Above a recessed panel is a very classical window with enframements that echo those of the doorway and which are crowned by a robust, deep pediment. Above this pediment, narrow pilasters support the base of the second-story window which has a shouldered architrave both at lintel and sill. A recessed panel decorated with a swag in the finest Neoclassical mode occupies the space between the top of the window and the heavy, flat cornice. In the attic above this elaborate window treatment is a rectangular attic window framed in the Italianate style. Wide brackets support the hip roof. The architect is unknown.

On the same side of The Tour only a short distance away but near the road is the chapel designed by English architect Robert Gibson in 1884 and built of the same materials as the office. This stylish building in Romanesque Revival style has a drive-through portico for carriages. The steeply pitched roof is covered with red tile. The T-shaped structures have a stained glass rose window in each gable. They are very fine quality and typical of the work of the Tiffany Studios. Their maker is unknown. The interior walls are of glazed brick: brown, grey, and a brilliant blue creating a banding up to about five feet. Glazed brick of this type was common in England at the period but is rare in this country. A round band above this glazed brick is decorated with beasts and plant forms entwined in Celtic fashion. This building was altered in 1978 to become a crematorium. The gable ends have had doorways cut through and two wings have been erected which are separated from the chapel by glass hyphens. One houses a waiting room and the other holds retorts. These wings are finished in sandstone which blends with the main structure. Visually, they do detract, however, for Gibson's little chapel was best viewed from an angle. Now the gable ends are obscured by the new wings.

The fourth structure is the gatehouse at the South Gate designed by Marcus Reynolds, Albany architect. Of cut stone and shingle this narrow building with its high-pitched roof and gable end to the street has a distinct medieval appearance.

A group of barns and service structures are located on the right side of The Tour further north beyond the chapel.

The earliest graves in the cemetery were moved there from what is now Washington Park in Albany. Indeed, the impetus for the building of the cemetery came in large part from the scarcity of land for this purpose within the city. These early graves are laid out in sections according to the various churches of the deceased. The stones are laid on slightly angled banks close together and contain many markers dating from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The various parts of the cemetery were developed at about the same time and some of the graves brought from the city were placed with family plots rather than in the grounds set aside for the churches. Thus, markers of all periods appear throughout the cemetery. The Schuyler family graves (brought from Albany) are in a section by themselves.

The rambling plan of the cemetery created striking vistas: some with rolling terrain, others a jumble of monuments and statuary. The dead are remembered in a variety of ways. Elaborate mausoleums are the palaces of the rich. They frequently occupy positions of visual prominence. The G.C. Hawley Gothic mausoleum of 1917 is located on the drive from the south gate in the apex of a triangle formed by the roadways. It has four small towers decorated with crockets and a large crocket on the peak of the gable-ended facade. Slightly behind it but visually prominent as well, is a little Greek treasury that is the Manning family mausoleum with fluted Doric columns and a classic entablature with triglyphs on the frieze. The exceedingly plain and handsome sandstone mausoleum of Artemas Fish is dated 1870. Near it in section 5 is the Van Benthuysen mausoleum, a handsome brick Greek Revival structure with pilasters at its corners and stone trim. An entire row of these mausoleums can be found along Mount Auburn Avenue in section 29. They represent a variety of revival styles but the most common are Greek and Romanesque.

Mount Auburn Avenue - mausoleums, section 29 (1977)

Another type of tomb is the vault that is built partially into the hillside. Numerous examples can be found throughout the cemetery, the largest of which are the cemetery's receiving vaults located on The Tour slightly north of the chapel. These vaults are monolithic in their impact. Of cut stone, they have sloping slides marked by heavy quoins and massive cornices. They were used for the placement of bodies during bad weather.

Receiving vaults (1977)

The Burden family vault of 1850 is an elaborate Neoclassical tomb with fluted Doric columns which support a complete entablature and wide cornice. Two large-jowled dogs sit atop the tomb guarding the entrance to the world of the dead. In front of this vault is another monument: a great marble book lies open on a marble pillow with tasseled corners, upon a marble pulpit. On the pages of the book are inscribed a memorial to Henry Burden and his wife, Helen. Mr. Burden founded the Troy Iron Works which can be seen across the river from this site while standing before the marble book. Even in death, Mr. Burden keeps a cautious eye on his business interests. Another striking tomb is the Romanesque Revival vault of the McCoy family, which is also built into the hillside but which is much less elaborate than the Burden vault.

Burden vault: section 62 (1977)

The sarcophagus monument is another type of memorial found in the cemetery. The Archibald McIntyre tomb is a coffin-like structure raised on a high base and decorated with floral motifs.

The marker for Erastus Dow Palmer is a massive Neoclassical sarcophagus reminiscent of Roman examples. Designed by Marcus Reynolds, the Albany architect, the monument contains two marble bas reliefs designed by Palmer.

The sarcophagus motif is also used at the grave of Chester A. Arthur. The polished granite marker is in the shape of a coffin. A bronze angel, larger than lifesize, stands beside it resting her arm along the lid and holding a palm branch.

President Chester A. Arthur's grave: Section 24 (1977)

Celtic crosses are not uncommon markers. Some of them are tall and elaborately carved. Draped urns or slabs, denoting a melancholy air, are also frequent.

The various revival styles of architecture are found among the memorials: Gothic, Greek, and Egyptian.

The rich and the poor, the proud and the modest, the well-known and the long-forgotten, the loved, the cherished, and, presumably the hated are all committed here. The Victorian way of death was an elaborate and sentimental one. The strong sentimentality and architectural symbolism profoundly influenced the manner in which the dead were remembered. Death was to the Victorians a publicly displayed reality. The newer graves in the cemetery are generally marked with simple stones and the twentieth-century lots are generally smaller as families have gotten smaller and more mobile. Perhaps our feelings are the same as those of our ancestors in the nineteenth century, but they are not relieved in the same fashion since we do not share them publicly to any great degree.

Among the most poignant graves in the cemetery are those of the babies and children of which there are many. A low slab with a deeply carved lily marks the grave of Mary S. Hastings who died in 1875. The stone is inscribed "Aged 9 Months and 8 Days" and "Of Such is the Kingdom of Heaven." Two children of the Alexander family are commemorated by a small stone carved with high-relief Gothic arches and topped by twin lambs, their heads nestled together. Within the arches are the inscriptions "Libbie" and "Ira." A rose-topped slab remembers "Sarah and Her Little Clarence". One of the most beautiful of the graves is that of James and John Strong. A delicate sleeping lamb carved by Erastus Dow Palmer marks this grave. Tiny Henry V. Heck has a monument consisting of a high pedestal on which stands the statue of a waking child-angel gazing down. His sad dates are given: "1911-1911."

Palmer lamb: in Strong family lot, section 5 (1977)

Among the most richly sentimental of the markers are those for the Clark family. Two elaborate stones using the motif of a cut tree trunk and a cross mark the graves of "Mother" and "Father." The three children are commemorated by a tiny sleeping cherub on a pedestal, a cross with flowers, and a small urn topped by flowers and a dove. The design of an urn with flowers and a dove was a common one and is an example of mass-produced grave markers.

Clark family graves: section 62 (1977)

The earliest sculpture by Erastus Dow Palmer in the cemetery is that on an Olcott grave. This marble bas-relief depicts a mother rising to meet her dead babies in heaven.

R.E. Launitz, the New York sculptor, was commissioned to do the stone marking the grave of Margaret Gregory. It is an elaborate slab curved with flowers and vines.

Gregory marker carved by Launitz: section 9 (1977)

Obelisks were, of course, Egyptian Revival in style and are common throughout the cemetery. The most unusual one is the marker of O. Hall which has four umbrella-like projections at the tips of which originally hung small bells. It was thought by the author of The Albany Rural Cemetery (written in 1893) to be exceedingly tasteless. A small statue of a lamb nestles beneath the name of the deceased.

O. Hall: section 62 (1977)

The symbolism of the marker for Hettie Ten Eyck, a young woman, is typical of the spirit of the Victorian Age. Atop a marble slab carved in the shape of a rock is an anchor, a cross, and entwining flowers.

The Veterans' graves are marked by small, plain, slightly round-topped markers and they share a large monument on which stands a Civil War soldier leaning on his rifle.

Victorian symbolism can be seen also in the large Wilson monument with inverted torches flanking a relief of a Grecian lady. The Neoclassical cornice is topped by a cross on a garlanded pedestal.

Wilson: section 31 (1977)

Many tombs are marked with statues of angels or mourning figures frequently dressed in Grecian garb. Examples are the small walking angel on Bessie van Schaick's monument, the seated woman with downcast eyes holding a wreath on the Kibbe monument near Cypress Water, the Boulware/Richardson monument of a seated woman who rests her chin in her hand in a contemplative fashion. (The inscription reads, "I remember the days of old, I meditate on all thy works.") Other examples are the Hasey angel with trumpet, the Wooster man who points his hand towards heaven, the kneeling Monteath mourner with a wreath, the tall column of the Pitkin family with standing mourner, and the massive Lathrop monument with a much larger than lifesize Grecian statue atop it. Most famous of all the statues in the cemetery is the Angel of the Sepulcher carved by Erastus Dow Palmer in memory of the wife of Robert Lenox Banks. "Why seek ye the living among the dead?" is the unusual inscription along the base.

Boulware/Richardson monument: section 30 (1977)

Robert Lenox Banks' memorial to his Wife section 31; Angel of the Sepulcher; Palmer, sculptor (1977)

Later monuments from the turn of the century are frequently elaborate. The Glazier monument to a soldier is a rough-hewn rock sensitively carved with a furled flag and soldier's accouterments. The bronze relief on the Hilton mausoleum has its roots in Grecian prototypes: an angel presents herself before the seated deceased. The Tebbutt family plot with its simpler individual markers is typical of more recent styles.

Hilton monument: section 29 (1977)

While the grounds of this cemetery are carefully cared for, many of the monuments have not aged well and are in need of work. Exposure to the elements has taken its toll and much restoration work is needed.