COOL STUFF A winter walk among the dead By Maria Scrivani; photos by kc kratt Stark sentinels of black-limbed trees sport snow adornments, bare branches thrust out like a haughty lady’s diamond-draped arms. Listen to the soft crunch of boots on white-dusted pathways, the whistle of wind, the squawk of geese. Perhaps you’ll hear a car go by, but deep in this frosty enclave, by the icy creek burbling under a hoary bridge, it’s as likely not on a cold day. The silence of the graveyard is thick, a restful blanket blocking the intrusive outer world on a winter walk through Forest Lawn. Here in the heart of Buffalo is a 269-acre nature preserve, what was, a century and a half ago, a rural cemetery, located outside the city limits as was customary. But a metropolis grew up around it, and prescient philanthropists planted trees (nearly 200 different species and varieties), commissioned elaborate memorials in stone, added lakes, and created a bird sanctuary, where over 240 kinds of bird have been spotted to this date. Early on, Forest Lawn was praised by the great nineteenth-century landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. In Buffalo to plan a parks system, the designer was so impressed with the natural beauty of Forest Lawn that he sited what would be Delaware Park on contiguous land to the north and west. Walk through the great gates of the cemetery on Delavan at Main Street—the massive triumphal arch, flanked by symmetrical gatehouses, was erected in time for the 1901 Pan-American Exposition. Today the main entrance to the cemetery is at Delaware and Delavan, where visitors can stop in the administration building to collect maps or consult computers for locations of specific gravesites. Here, too, are bags of cracked corn for sale. Toss them out to the geese, who will render cacophonic thanks. Cemetery caretakers also appreciate it when appropriate snacks are offered to precious waterfowl. On a walk through Forest Lawn you can see the final resting places of the famous—from Millard Fillmore, the thirteenth U.S. president, locally renowned as first chancellor of the University of Buffalo as well as president of the Buffalo Club and a founder of the Buffalo Historical Society, to funk musician Rick James, whose grave sports the image of his guitar. Storied names from Buffalo’s past—Larkin, Green, Albright, Knox, Kleinhans, Martin, Park, Schoellkopf, Baird, and many more—are marked on tombstones here, from the elaborate to the surprisingly plain. The walker’s true pleasure is discovering the unusual, the epitaphs (“I told you I was sick,” reads one), the odd grave, the name that is not immediately recognizable—and uncovering the lesser-known tales of lives no less remarkable for their quieter impact on the wider world. Seek out the small grave marker that looks like a large rock from afar. Up close note the chiseled train tracing a granite track through what appears to be a mountain pass. A skilled sculptor has memorialized one Glenn Albert Wagner, who lived from 1910 until 1987. For fifty years he served as hobby editor of Boys’ Life magazine, and his marker is a replica of a cover from the magazine, including the corner notation, “25 cents.” As you walk, look for some other memorials to posthumous prominence. Perhaps not a laudatory legacy in today’s thinking, but the inventor of the electric chair is buried in Forest Lawn. If you’re phobic about dental work, you will find no comfort in learning that Dr. Alfred P. Southwick was a Buffalo dentist who experimented with electric shock. Seeing a potential for more humane (quicker?) execution of criminals sentenced to death, he retrofitted a dental chair with electric current. The fatal furniture was first used in the New York State penitentiary at Auburn in August 1890. A novel approach to crime-writing was the claim to fame for one Anna Katherine Green, who was one of the first American women to write detective novels. In her lifetime she won praise from the master of the genre, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were known as fans of the Green novels, which were popular in America and England. The writer is buried beside her husband Charles Rohlfs, a luminary in the world of Arts and Crafts furniture design. Rohlfs, a moderately successful actor, went on to international fame for his furniture. One particularly notable memorial dating from the middle of the nineteenth century is a lifelike statue of a little girl, Tacie Hannah Fargo. The daughter of Hannah and J. F. Fargo, a principal in the Wells, Fargo & Company founded by his brother William, died December 3, 1866 at the age of “1 year, 9 months, and 20 days.” Tacie, forever enclosed in glass, sits on a blanket, a bouquet of flowers clutched in her tiny fist. It would take a long, slow walk to view the graves of the more than 160,000 people buried in Forest Lawn. A more rewarding approach is to focus on a single aspect of this remarkable place—a walk, for example, that pays tribute to some of the earliest denizens of this area, buried in the “cemetery within a cemetery” that is marked by the Franklin Square memorial. Graves dating from the 1700s, once interred at what was the Franklin Square Cemetery (now the site of the downtown county courthouse, in which one can find a plaque noting the old graveyard), were moved en masse to Forest Lawn. “The remains of 1,158 persons are buried in this lot, all of which were removed from the old burial ground on the west side of Delaware Street, between Church and Eagle Streets, in the City of Buffalo,” reads the inscription on the obelisk that marks the spot, dated October 1852. This mass exodus of the dead attracted the attention of Mark Twain. The fervid author used it as the subject of a short story, “A Curious Dream,” which recounts the saga from the point of view of the corpses. (The story itself is in the collection of the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library.) When you’re tired of walking, rest on some of the Lawn’s furniture, ranging from benches at scenic spots to marble “sofas,” complete with tassel-trimmed granite upholstery, mimicking what those now gone once enjoyed in their own homes. Writer Maria Scrivani is a native of Buffalo with an interest in local history and people who make a difference. SUBSCRIBE NOW Back to the Table of Contents Back to Top