Bette Burgess - Elmhurst and Millennium Park
Dan Knapp - Riverside
Gene Ramsay - Graceland Cemetery
Hugh Keenan - Chicago Theatre

Our Visit to GracelandCemetery October 17, 2004
Gene Ramsay, Guide for tours of the Fox Theatre, Ansley Park, Grant Park and more ….

We spent part of Sunday afternoon exploring Graceland Cemetery, which was established in 1860. It originally had 80 acres but was extended to its current size (about 119 acres) in the 1870s. It has a beautifully realized landscape design, including a lake in the northernmost part of the cemetery, and since no stone curbing was allowed after the 1870s, Graceland today gives the visitor a sweeping view of grass, trees, monuments and mausoleums.

Graceland is a peaceful, calm resting place for many of Chicago’s finest citizens, and it is gratifying to know that the delegation from Atlanta was reserved in its awe of the place.

Chicago is famous for its architecture, and Graceland is the final resting place for the most famous of those architects, including:

William Le Baron Jenney (1832-1907), served as an engineer in the Civil War, where he designed fortifications at Corinth, Shiloh, and Vicksburg. He came to Chicago in 1867, forming the firm of Jenney, Schermerhorn and Bogart. Together with landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, Jenney's firm helped develop Riverside, Illinois, the nation's first planned "railroad suburb." He also designed the first steel frame skyscraper in 1885, the Home Insurance Building, at LaSalle and Adams Streets in Chicago (demolished in 1931.) His earliest surviving building in Chicago dates from 1891. http://www.ci.chi.il.us/Landmarks/L/Ludington.html He died in California; his body was cremated, and his ashes were sprinkled at the plot of wife’s family in Graceland.

Louis Henry Sullivan (1856- 1924) was born in Boston and initially worked for renowned Philadelphia architect Frank Furness. He came to Chicago in 1873, where he worked briefly for William Le Baron Jenney. After a year of study in Paris, Sullivan returned to Chicago and became a draftsman for John Edelman, whose luxuriant organic ornamental designs had a significant influence on Sullivan. In 1879, Sullivan joined the firm of Dankmar Adler (1844 - 1900), one of the city's most outstanding structural engineers. He designed the Auditorium in Chicago and the beautiful Getty monument found in Graceland. He died in poverty, and his monument was funded some years after his death by a committee of local architects. “Form follows function.”

Georgia native John Welborn Root (1850-1891), who came to Chicago in 1871 with a degree in civil engineering, joined Daniel Burnham top establish Burnham and Root in 1873. He died in 1891 at the age of 41 of pneumonia, following a wintertime trip to Atlanta, just as their firm was starting its work on the design of the 1893 Columbian Exposition. His monument in Graceland, topped by a Celtic cross, was designed by members of his firm.

Daniel Burnham (1846-1912) supervised the laying out and construction of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and, in 1909, prepared, along with his assistant Edward H. Bennett, The Plan for Chicago, which is considered the nation's first example of a comprehensive planning document. This plan is in large part responsible for the many miles of unbroken green space along Lake Michigan in the Chicago area, and Burnham Park, which is located along Lake Michigan south of the Loop, is named in honor of the famed architect-planner. The Rookery building in Chicago is one of the few surviving steel frame skyscrapers designed by Burnham and Root. It was recently remodeled into a hotel. Burnham is buried on an island in the lake at Graceland. “Make no little plans.”

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) was born in Germany and served as director of the famed Bauhaus school of design there from 1930 to 1933. He migrated to Chicago in 1938 to take over , the architectural program of the Armour Institute of Technology, a modest technical training school on Chicago's near South Side. He also established an architecture practice, designing buildings such as the Seagram Building in New York, the Farnsworth House in Plano, IL, and the Federal Center in Chicago. “Less is more.”

Other notables buried at Graceland include:

George Pullman developed the first successful comfortable railroad sleeping car, the Pullman sleeper. The first one was finished in 1864. Although the sleeper cost more than five times the price of a regular railway car, by arranging to have the body of President Abraham Lincoln carried from Washington, D.C. to Springfield on a sleeper, he received national attention and the orders began to pour in. When business fell off in 1894, Pullman cut jobs, wages and working hours. His failure to lower rents, utility charges and products in the company-owned housing for his workers caused the Pullman Strike, which was eventually broken up by federal troops sent in by President Grover Cleveland. Loathing for Pullman remained, and when he died in 1897, he was buried in Graceland Cemetery inside a Pullman Sleeper, with steel rails criss-crossed on top of it. Several tons of cement were poured over the sleeper to ensure that his body would not be exhumed and desecrated. Celebrated journalist and author Ambrose Bierce observed sardonically, "It is clear the family in their bereavement was making sure the sonofabitch wasn't going to get up and come back."

Allan Pinkerton (1819-1884) was the world's first private detective. Immigrating to Chicago from Glasgow, Scotland, he discovered a gang of counterfeiters and assisted in their capture. He became deputy sheriff of Kane County, then Cook County, resigning from the police to form the Pinkerton Detective Agency in 1852. The Pinkerton logo, the All-Seeing Eye, inspired the phrase "Private Eye". In 1861 Pinkerton uncovered a plot to assassinate President Lincoln. At Lincoln's request, Pinkerton began the U.S. Secret Service and served as its head. Pinkerton is surrounded at Graceland by his family and several Pinkerton employees. Timothy Webster, a bodyguard for Lincoln, was hanged as a Union spy during the Civil War. Also buried here are the first woman detective, Kate Warn, and Joseph Whicher, killed in pursuit of Jesse James.

William Kimball (1828-1904) was a manufacturer of pianos. Kimball's monument is one of the largest in Graceland. Across the rear are four Corinthian columns, with two more on the sides. The structure is without a roof. Below, an angel kneels, watching over the two graves beneath the floor. The entire monument is of white marble, and was erected in 1907 from a design by the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White.

Marshall Field (1835-1906) was the wealthiest man in Chicago of his time, worth an estimated $100 million when he died. Originally working as a clerk for Potter Palmer, he saved half of his $400/year salary, and in 1865 with his partner Levi Leiter bought Palmer's dry-goods store. Field and Leiter eventually became "Marshall Field and Company", which is now one of the most successful and widespread department-store chains in the world. Field donated $8 million to establish the Field Museum of Natural History. His Prairie Avenue mansion was the first home in Chicago to be wired for electric lighting.

Potter Palmer was a merchant and real-estate promoter who was responsible for the development of much of the downtown district and the Lake Shore Drive area of Chicago after Chicago 's great fire of 1871. He was the force behind the Palmer House Hotel in the Loop.

Melville Fuller, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court for 22 years in the late 1800s.

Cyrus McCormick (1809-1884) invented the reaper when he was only 22 years old. His father had tried for 15 years to invent a harvester, but had not been able to build one successfully. He had made a lot of mistakes, but young Cyrus learned from his father's mistakes, and in just 2 months he was able to make a harvester that harvested an acre an hour, compared to a half acre per day by hand. Some said his reaper looked like a combination of a flying machine, a wheelbarrow, and a carriage, so sales got off to a slow start. In 1843 he sold 29 reapers, but by 1850, he was selling 5,000 reapers a year. His company became the International Harvester Company in 1902. At the time of his death in 1884, enough grain was shipped from Chicago to bake 10 billion loaves of bread a year, thanks to McCormick's invention.

Philip Armour 1832–1901, American meatpacker, b. Stockbridge, N.Y. Armour’s Chicago meatpacking plants introduced new principles of large-scale organization, as well as refrigeration, to the industry. He is said to have been one of the first to notice the tremendous waste in the slaughtering of hogs and to take advantage of the resale value of waste products. His prestige was dimmed by the scandals of 1898–99 in which his packing-house was charged with selling tainted beef.

Peter Schoenhofen (1827-1893) was born in Prussia and established a successful brewery in Chicago. The door to his pyramid-shaped mausoleum is flanked by a female angel, holding a bronze key, on one side and a male sphinx on the other.

Robert Fitzsimmonds and Jack Johnson, championship boxers

William Hulbert - founder of the National League in baseball in the 1870s. His monument is the shape of a baseball, and has the names of the teams in the league at the time of its founding.

Among the famous buried elsewhere in Chicago:

Al Capone
Oscar Meyer
Montgomery Ward
Richard Sears
Jesse Owens
Stephen Douglas
Enrico Fermi


For more info:

http://www.graveyards.com/index2.html

http://www.ci.chi.il.us/Landmarks/Architects/Jenney.html

 

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