LouLife

Photos by John Nation
Text by Jack Welch

It might seem ironic to some that so many Louisvillians consider 157-year-old Cave Hill Cemetery an uplifting place — a place to unwind after a stressful workweek, to bring the kids for a little duck-feeding, to admire vegetation and edification — almost as if it were an Olmsted park. But it’s not ironic at all.

  “Olmsted got his ideas from the cemetery designers,” says Cave Hill superintendent Lee Squires, explaining that an early-19th-century eastern U.S. undertaking called the “rural” or “garden” cemetery movement predated public parks by about 25 years. “They wanted to make cemeteries beautiful places for the living, not depressing places to visit,” Squires says. “Olmsted said, hey, let’s do this without the monuments.”

  Sprinkled with hundreds of varieties of deciduous and nondeciduous trees and shrubs, acquired and cultivated by a five-man succession of landscape-gardener superintendents, Cave Hill is a horti-culturist’s wonderland — and not just because of the number of plantings. They grow atop karst bedrock — water-eroded limestone — pocked with numerous basins and hillocks that heighten the trees’ majestic appeal. Especially in the western two-thirds of the cemetery’s 296 acres, surrounding a system of terraced lakes that used to be one long and deep ravine, the compacted hill-and-dale topography takes your breath away.

  In spring, when the dogwoods, crab-apples, horse chestnuts and buckeyes are blooming, all around you see walls of white, pink and red. In summer, as stagnant, polluted air settles over the city, Cave Hill’s vegetation swallows carbon dioxide and pumps out enough oxygen to keep your eyes from itching. These cooler fall days, as the leaves’ supply of chlorophyll dwindles and their carotin, xanthophyll and anthocyanin come to the fore, the color walls turn to yellow, red and purple.

  Fallen leaves from the 150-yard-long lines of sugar maples that flank the flat front entrance avenue pave the street with gold. The ginkgoes, including the oldest one in Louisville in section N (thought to have been planted when the Cave Hill property was part of William Johnston’s farm), provide a textbook shade of deep lemon-yellow. The dogwoods, sweet gums and tupelos express themselves in orange to crimson.

  But Cave Hill’s visual portfolio also includes two elements no park can touch: its wealth of artistic monuments — dozens of which were designed by famous national and local architects and sculpted abroad by European craftsmen — and the incredible lesson in historical Louisville figures the cemetery’s tombstones provide. “I call Cave Hill the Rosetta Stone of Louisville,” says architect/historian Steve Wiser, who conducts walking tours of the cemetery’s oldest sections five times a year. “You understand Cave Hill, you understand Louisville.”

  As you drive around the grounds on serpentine  roads, the famous family names pop out at you: Clark, Guthrie, Belknap, Speed, Ballard, Morton, Norton, Caldwell, Grawemeyer, Seelbach, Bullitt, Brown, Heyburn, Bingham, Jacob, Vogt, Galt, Brennan, and on and on.

  In sections B, C and P, near the Baxter Avenue entrance, you’ll find headstones or mausoleums designed by New Yorker Robert Launitz, known as the “father of American monumental art” (whose Wilder family monument is shown on the opposite page); Philadelphian Horace Trumbauer; and noted Louisvillians Henry Whitestone and Michael Muldoon. Whitestone (section C) and Muldoon (section 1) are buried here, too, as are monument contributors Arthur Loomis (section Q) and Barney Bright (section 29) and the architect of the old Jefferson County Courthouse, Gideon Shryock (section H).

  Their artistic work insures that Cave Hill will always be looked upon as a wondrous sculpture garden as well as a horticultural paradise.

  Wiser will lead a historical walking tour on Sunday, Oct. 2, at 1 p.m. Squires will conduct a horticultural tour on Sunday, Oct. 23, also at 1 p.m. For more information call 451-5630. Cave Hill’s grounds are open 8 a.m.-4:45 p.m. 365 days a year.    n