Talk:Elmwood Cemetery (Detroit, Michigan)

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	Elmwood Cemetery (Detroit, Michigan) is part of WikiProject Michigan, a WikiProject related to the U.S. state of Michigan.
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[edit] Elmwood Cemetery (Detroit) as "Rural"

I copied the following here from my talk page, since it seems this information should get integrated into the article at some point (and I'm not sure when or if I'll ever get around to it). older ≠ wiser 19:15, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

I have no problem with your deletion of the non-category "rural cemetery" from the Elmwood article.

However, I take very strong issue with your edit comment:

even if the category existed, this is hardly a rural cemetery

Actually, Elmwood (though located in a large city) is precisely one of the earliest Midwestern products of the Rural Cemetery Movement. In the early 19th century, the "urban" approach to burial was seen as the crowded and unsanitary churchyard; the so-called "rural" approach was to create a nonsectarian cemetery with spacious parklike setting with trees and winding drives.

See, e.g., [1], [2], [3], [4], [5].

The first "rural cemetery" was Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris; the first one in the U.S. was Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, MA. By the 1870s, pretty much every sizeable community in the nation had created a cemetery inspired directly or indirectly by Mt. Auburn. (So even if "rural cemetery" were a real category, it would be meaningless, only slightly smaller than the category "cemetery".) Kestenbaum 18:46, 14 September 2006 (UTC)