The Evergreens Cemetery

ong before Downing, Davis, and other notable designers applied their art to it, even longer before people were laid to rest there, the site of the Evergreens Cemetery was significant in Brooklyn and New York history. To understand the appeals of these knolls and swales to the Schencks, Cornells, Furmans, Remsens, and other colonial settlers who farmed it for two hundred years – as well as to the British invaders in the American Revolutionary War and to the founders of the Evergreens – it helps to appreciate this unique terrain.  

Walt Whitman described the site as well as anyone. In 1847, he was the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and one day he came out to eastern Kings County and observed a startling contrast in the local geography. Whitman looked up and saw what was called the Green Hills. “To the north rises a spur of the range of hills which runs nearly through the island [Long Island]”, Whitman wrote, going on to say that this ridge “gives the settlement a relief from the character of monotony which most flat places possess”. Whitman concluded that the area “did really offer a pretty natural situation”. 

In 1776 the Green Hills of Long Island took a role in international history. In the Battle of Brooklyn, the British Army’s commander, William Howe, rode up into the Hills at the head of ten thousand troops on a flanking maneuver aimed at pinning George Washington’s disorganized forces against the East River. The maneuver was decisive but survived the Battle of Brooklyn to fight another day. 

Besides history and beauty, one of the advantages of Green Hills was its accessibility. By the early 1800s, stagecoaches and omnibuses were running out through the Jamaica Pass on a plank road. In the 1830s, the eager development of East New York induced the young Long Island Railroad to open a station there in the 1830s.  

There is a vivid excitement surrounding the cemetery’s founders in an article by a journalist who accompanied them on an early tour of the land in the fall of 1849. This sweeping landscape and seascape ranging through one-hundred-eighty-degrees inspired a reporter to write “Nature seems to have adapted this place to the purposes to which it is now to be devoted”. He continued, “An air of repose rests on it.” 

The Evergreens addressed serious problems presented by a rapidly urbanized and diversified America. Brooklyn was quickly expanding and becoming more densely settled in the mid-centry, as was Manhattan to its west. The population of Kings County sprang from just under forty-eight thousand in 1840 to almost two-hundred-five-thousand fifteen years later. As the cities became crowded with throngs of New Englanders and immigrants from Ireland and central Europe fleeing famine and civil wars, Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn could no longer automatically provide two services that Americans considered essentially. The first was the right to a decent burial in a local churchyard or burial ground, and the second was the right to experience fresh air and open country. 

The Picturesque design of the Evergreens and other cemeteries like it was an effective solution to American challenges of urbanization. Constructed during the period of the country’s fastest rate of urban growth, rural cemeteries emerged as the young nation struggled to define the relationship between its rural and urban environments. Andrew Jackson Downing (1815-1852) may have played a role in laying out the basic principles of the Evergreens Cemetery. Downing was one of the most important pre-Civil War designers and writers in the United States. In his writings and his designs for parks, Downing developed the profession of “rural architecture” and helped transform the way America looked at nature. Downing agreed with many other popular writers of the period such as Washington Irving and Emily Dickinson that nature was a place to bask in beauty and learn scientific and horticultural principles, while attitudes towards death made early cemeteries like the Evergreens outdoor museums of art, sculpture, past ancestors, heroes, and role models.  

The founders of the Evergreens – all prominent Brooklynites or New Yorkers – understood the many needs and ideals of the residents and death-progressive thinkers of Brooklyn and acted on them. The cemetery’s first president, Luther Bradish, was the President of the New York Historical Society, a former lieutenant governor of the state, and an abolitionist who once declared that skin color was no cause for distinction – very strong words indeed.  

Evergreens Cemetery, National Register of Historic Places. Accessed January 14th 2021. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/75318379.

Our Story, Evergreens Cemetery Website. Accessed January 14th 2021. https://www.theevergreenscemetery.org/our-story.

The Eevergreens Cemetery, Brooklyn, NY, Final resting place for the Triangle Shirtwaist fire’s unidentified victims, Atlas Obscura. Accessed January 14th 2021. https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/evergreens-cemetery.