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Greenmount Chapel, Greenmount Cemetery, Baltimore.

Maryland Historical Society

Dedicated on July 13, 1839, Green Mount Cemetery was Baltimore's first rural, or garden, cemetery and one of the earliest in the nation. The impetus for Green Mount came from a Gay Street tobacco merchant named Samuel D. Walker. Around 1834, he visited America's first garden cemetery, Mount Auburn in Massachusetts. Walker returned to Baltimore to persuade others that the city needed a similar cemetery. The state legislature incorporated Green Mount Cemetery on March 15, 1838, providing a board of proprietors to govern it.

Built on the former country estate of merchant Robert Oliver, Green Mount encompasses 68 hilly acres with a long central plateau. The proprietors divided the property into 23 sections, subdividing the sections into family plots of at least 16 feet by 20 feet. Oliver's Walk, a tree-lined path, encircles the plateau, touching on 19 sections, and the proprietors laid out numerous other serpentine walkways. At the time of its establishment, Green Mount was in the country, but today it is in the heart of the city, bounded by Greenmount Avenue, North Avenue, Ensor Avenue, and Hoffman Street.

Green Mount and other garden cemeteries represented a new type of burial ground both physically and intellectually. Baltimoreans until this time had buried their dead in church graveyards, many of which were by the 1830s completely filled and unable to expand due to the development for other purposes of the areas around them. These graveyards starkly presented death as a terrifying passage to an unknown future, and their grim appearance discouraged people from visiting them. By contrast, Green Mount and other garden cemeteries reflected the Romanticism of the mid-nineteenth century. These cemeteries glorified nature by their landscaping and showed death as a benign "falling asleep."

Green Mount's buildings are similarly romantic. Architect Robert Cary Long Jr. used the Tudor style for the gatehouse, built by 1840. He selected the Egyptian style, associated with funerary monuments, for the public mausoleum and for the crypts to be used for level plots. Later, J. Rudolph Niernsee and J. Crawford Neilson designed the hilltop chapel, completed in 1856, in the Gothic Revival style. The public responded to the site's physical attractiveness by treating Green Mount, at least in the nineteenth century, as a park in which to stroll on Sunday afternoons and as a place to take out-of-town visitors.

Among the more than 78,000 graves at Green Mount are those of countless politicians and wealthy people, including at least eight governors of Maryland, five mayors of Baltimore, and philanthropists Johns Hopkins and Enoch Pratt. Others interred there are Robert Garrett, president of the B&O Railroad; his wife Mary Garrett, a pioneer in women's education; Betsy Patterson Bonaparte, Napoleon's Baltimore-born sister-in-law; John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln; and A. Aubrey Bodine, Maryland's outstanding twentieth-century photographer. Although Green Mount's residents include both the upper and middle classes of nineteenth-century Baltimore and their descendents, relatively few people from later immigrant groups, such as Italians or Czechs, are buried there, and there are few African Americans. Spaces are still available.

—Beatriz Betancourt Hardy