Written by Stephen Hammock
Cemetery Photography by Ashley Quinn, MGPA Research Associate
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair...." A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens, 1859
Roughly 500 miles separate the rural or garden cemeteries in which two elaborate marble funerary monuments stand. Both are in the American South - in the cities of Macon, Georgia and Louisville, Kentucky. At first glance they may seem identical, but a close study of their artistry proves them to be by different hands, despite being based on the same design. Their actual stories have been forgotten until now, and, as often happens when the truth has been lost over time, speculation and error have made a complete hash of history. Our story begins with the murder of Joseph Bond (1815-1859), one of the wealthiest planters in Georgia.
Bond was shot to death in 1859 while physically chastising his former overseer, Lucien or Lucius Brown, for the savage beating he had given one of Bond's slaves. This beating was given because Bond fired Brown, and despite the fact that he had already found Brown another position working for his brother-in-law on an adjacent Dougherty County plantation. Nevertheless, Brown forbade any of Bond's bondsmen from visiting their friends and relatives there, even though the two plantation owners expressly allowed such familial visits. And so Brown, who no doubt also resented "his tinsel show, an’ a’ that," picked a fight with Bond via a surrogate. And Bond predictably exploded. It seems evident from a reading of the witness statements that the vengeful Brown manipulated the proud and egotistical Bond into attacking him, upon which he drew a hidden rifled pistol of large caliber, and shot Bond to death. There is little doubt this entire episode was premeditated and planned in detail. Brown was arrested and charged with murder, but exonerated at a hearing in the Dougherty County Magistrate's Court in Albany, Georgia. He was essentially considered to have been protecting himself from assault, released, and was last seen fleeing towards northern Georgia. "O how the mighty have fallen."
Bond's primary residence was a massive Greek Revival home on Coleman Hill high above downtown Macon - a house known as the Overlook Mansion, and more accurately as the Cowles-Bond-Coleman House, after the first three families who lived there. This house still looks out over Macon, and is only a short distance from Rose Hill Cemetery (est. 1840), where Bond was soon buried on a hillside overlooking the Ocmulgee River. It was probably the fact that Bond had just sold the largest single-season cotton crop in Georgia history, earning an unprecedented $100,000 (almost $4 million in today's inflated market), that allowed his widow to call in the most famous monumental artist in America.
Robert E. Launitz (1806-1870) was known as the "Father of Monumental Art in America." His sculptures can be found today in historic cemeteries all over the eastern United States, especially in Kentucky, New York, and Georgia. His clients were the crème de la crème of American society. Launitz was a Baltic German from Riga, then an important city in the Russian Empire. Although he was of aristocratic stock and had been educated for a military life, he chose a life in the arts - no doubt inspired by his uncle, the famous sculptor Eduard Schmidt von der Launitz (1797-1869). The elder Launitz convinced his nephew to go to Rome and study under his own master, Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844), who, along with Antonio Canova (1757-1822), was considered the greatest of modern sculptors. The younger Launitz took up his uncle's mantle, and spent two to three years in Rome with Thorvaldsen before emigrating to New York City in 1828. There he went to work for, and in 1831 became the partner of, New Jersey sculptor John Frazee (1790-1852), as well as primary mentor to the precocious Thomas Crawford (1814-1857), who would become one of the most famous American sculptors of his day. He went into business for himself in 1837, specializing in the large marble monuments being erected within the new rural or garden cemeteries springing up all over the eastern half of the country.
Launitz was not only a brilliant sculptor, he was also famous as a monument designer. And his influence was vast because he sold his designs to local gravestone carvers all over the country. Although his most famous monument in the state is still the Pulaski Monument in Savannah's Monterey Square, his earliest known Georgia monument may date as early as 1839. This is the Zachariah Lamar Family Monument in Milledgeville's Memory Hill Cemetery, erected by Zachariah's son, humorist John B. Lamar, Bond's contemporary and another of the wealthy cotton princes of Macon. An 1860 newspaper article described Launitz's design for the Bond Monument:
Mrs. Bond's commission was soon taken up, and, as she apparently wanted Italian marble used, Launitz would then have dispatched an order to his Tuscan stonecarvers, whom he paid to quarry and rough-cut some of his larger, first-rate Carraran marble monuments. Launitz and his workmen would then have completed much of the detailed carving at his New York City studio & marble yard once the pieces arrived from Italy by ship. But something happened from 1861 to 1865 to prevent the timely erection of Bond's monument. It was called by different names, but some of them included: The War of the Rebellion, The War for Southern Independence, the War Between the States, the War of Secession, and later the Civil War. This meant that in 1861, when the monument arrived in the United States to be finished, the cemetery where it was meant to be erected was more than 600 miles behind enemy lines in another country. We now know that it sat in New York, probably in Launitz's urban marble yard, until a year after the war ended - when matters had calmed down considerably from the "grand holocaust of death" described in such vivid and gory detail by participant Sam Watkins.
The Bond Monument was finally erected in Rose Hill in 1866. And there the monument sat high above the river weathering the elements, storms and tornadoes, the violent vibrations of trains passing mere feet away, vandalism, and neglect for the next century. A curiosity from a fallen age. An imposing work of art whose artist and designer no one even remembered anymore. And then parts of it started to disappear, namely the four statues around its base.
But during the early 1980s, Rose Hill Cemetery preservationist and tour guide Calder Payne, who had long been intrigued by this incredible work of art, became aware of a "duplicate" of the Bond Monument at Cave Hill Cemetery (est. 1848) in Louisville, Kentucky. He initiated correspondence requesting information on this other monument on May 10, 1983, and Cave Hill's Grounds Manager, Lee Squires, responded on June 29th with slides of the Lithgow-Smyser-Smith Monument. Then in Payne's second letter on July 3rd, he suddenly stated that Bond's original monument had been "confiscated by the Northern troops in Louisville and later placed in Cave Hill Cemetery. I have absolutely no documentation on this fact and hope you will be able to give me the facts....Forgot to say the Bond family re-ordered after the war." It is not known if Squires replied again. But by 1985, Payne was so certain that the Bond monument "was confiscated in Kentucky and later sold and placed...in Louisville....The [Bond] family then reordered a duplicate..." that he published this story in a book on Rose Hill. Nothing of the sort ever happened, of course.
It is clear from a November 5, 1866 newspaper article, written just after the erection of the Bond Monument, that it had been in New York City all throughout the long war. It had never gone to Kentucky at all. But Payne's fabrication was soon republished in another book by Cave Hill historian Samuel Thomas, and is still believed by many folks in Macon and Louisville to this day! We are now pleased to be able to lay this 1980s nonsense to rest once and for all. The article shown below also provides us with a detailed description of the Bond Monument and its symbolism.
So how do we explain the second monument that appears at first glance to be a duplicate down to the four statues of Devotion, Memory, Hope, and Christian Faith and the Angel of Resurrection? Simple - it is a copy of Launitz's original design by another monument builder. And while we know that Launitz designed, completed, and personally erected the Bond Monument, no signature remains amongst its remnants. It should be mentioned here that substantial portions of it are missing today - primarily the four statues surrounding its central pillar - because of vandalism, neglect, a tornado, and the vibrations of the railroad trains that still thunder past nearby. So Launitz may have signed it, as he usually did his other works across the country.
It was always going to be necessary for anyone writing about this to visit both cemeteries and study both monuments in order to make a proper comparison. Apparently no one did this before our visit on December 31, 2022. The kindness of the good folks at Cave Hill knew no bounds. The tour in the limo-sized golf cart was unexpected but quite a thrill. We looked at many monuments that day, and asked many questions about the management of the cemetery, bonding with our hosts over our mutual taphophilic tendencies. And seeing the monument in question in person for the first time was absolutely thrilling. At this point, you understand, there were only suspicions that it was not by Launitz. We noted every enrichment and took numerous photos in order to compare them with the one in Macon.
A detailed comparison of the artistic merits of these two monuments is now needed to prove they were indeed created by different hands. The images below all show photographs from the Bond Monument on the left, while those from the Lithgow-Smyser-Smith Monument are on the right. Shall we start with the ubiquitous acanthus leaves? These leaves are nearly always found somewhere on neo-classical architecture and monuments. Launitz's acanthus leaves (left) appear much more natural and true-to-life. The New York sculptor depicted the leaves' veins in greater detail, with a central vein and a central leaf peeking out in the middle; the Lithgow monument has twin central veins that are not biologically accurate in this species. Launitz's leaf lobes also have a three-dimensional quality lacking in the other, which are rather flat.
The vertical modillions (brackets or scrolls) at the base of the monuments are even more varied. Launitz's modillions (left) are far more delicate, showing a side-view of a budding acanthus leaf in greater detail than the rather heavy-handed carving on the Lithgow monument, whose scroll work seems stretched-out and blocky (right).
Next, the festoons (wreaths or swag) on the Macon monument (left) also seem more natural than the ones on the Louisville monument (right). While pressure-washing and acid rain may have impacted the latter, the flowers on the former were clearly carved with greater expertise. Those on the right were just not carved as finely.
Moving up, the lettering on the name plates also differs. The Bond Monument exhibits letters inscribed into the marble in a Grotesque Sans and a smaller sans serif typeface (left), while Lithgow's raised lettering only exhibits the former.
Still higher, the surnames both incorporate raised Grotesque Sans typefaces, but there are wavy, decorative lines around the Lithgow-Smyser-Smith Monument's letters (bottom), something we have noted with a handful of other gravestone makers, but never on any of the more than 100 Launitz monuments I have studied up to this point.
Higher still, the honeysuckle enrichments around the top of each monument's central pillar show greater artistic detail and more neo-classical uniformity on Launitz's (left) than on the one by the other hand (right). Indeed, they have nothing in common except for nearly the same Corinthian motif.
And while we cannot compare the four statues around the base since they are all missing from the Bond Monument, the two angels atop the central pillar also show very different hands at work. The Bond Monument's Angel of Resurrection was carved in much greater detail than the Lithgow one. The neo-classical face looks like it could have been carved after a living human's face, while the other looks like a typical Victorian cemetery angel with little individuality. Even the folds in the angels' robes show greater craftsmanship on Launitz's angel. But the angel wings say it all. According to an ornithologist I consulted, those on the Bond Monument are much more natural, seemingly patterned after living bird wings, while the other monument's wings have extraneous sections of unnatural feathers. Not that we know what angel wings look like.
Finally - the clincher. While there is no Launitz signature remaining on the Bond Monument today, the Lithgow-Smyser-Smith Monument at Cave Hill is actually signed "M. Muldoon & Co." No one had apparently ever noticed this before. I rest my case.
Michael M. Muldoon (1836-1911) was an emigrant from County Cavan, Ireland, who found his way to Louisville after working as a stone cutter in several other American cities. His name was associated with several companies: including Muldoon & Co. of Steubenville, Ohio; the Union Marble Works and the Louisville Marble Works, both of Louisville, Kentucky; and M. Muldoon & Co., which was established in 1862. He entered into partnership with his employee, the talented French emigrant sculptor Charles Bullett (1826-1873), as Muldoon, Bullett, & Co. in 1867. Bullett managed their Italian Marble Works operation in Europe. After his partner's death the firm was known for a few years as Muldoon, Walton & Cobb. He later reorganized the company as the Muldoon Monument Company around 1900. It was renamed the New Muldoon Monument Co. in 1913, and remains in operation today as Muldoon Memorials.
Muldoon's monuments may be found in cemeteries all over the United States, and especially in Southern and Midwestern burial grounds. His later monuments were nearly all made of granite, which is not so sensitive to the elements as marble. His technical proficiency as a gravestone carver, however, was just not on the same level as that of Launitz. This was probably the reason he brought in the talented Bullett. As previously mentioned, Launitz studied under two world-famous sculptors and thought of himself primarily as an Artist and Designer (he even published a booklet of his own designs), and was known not for his business acumen, but for his neo-classical artistic brilliance. Muldoon was primarily a very successful businessman, and though he also designed gravestones and monuments, his legacy today consists primarily in being known for a number of baby-in-the-half-shell gravestones, neo-Gothic Victorian rustic gravestones with trees in the shape of crosses, the many Confederate monuments he erected across the South after that holocaust of a war, and the massive blocky granite gravestones that his firm generally left unsigned.
Muldoon married well when he united his fortunes with Alice, the daughter of James S. Lithgow (1812-1902), son of a Pittsburgh plane-maker, owner of the largest iron foundry in the South (the Lithgow Stove Manufacturing Company), and the Mayor of Louisville from 1866-1867. Although we don't know when the Lithgow-Smyser-Smith Monument was erected by Muldoon for his wife's father and her family, according to my sources at Cave Hill, Lithgow purchased two plots in 1863 after the death of his infant son. He also had his parents' remains moved from Pittsburgh to one of these plots in 1870. In my opinion the monument is likely to have been erected around this time, which is, incidentally, the same year Launitz died. But it could have been later. Lithgow and many of his Smyser-Smith heirs were later interred in this plot, and their names carved into the monument on into the 20th century. The Bond Monument only has three names on it.
Joseph Bond's widow later remarried and moved to Louisville, Kentucky herself, where her son Joseph Bond, Jr. worked in the insurance business with his half-brother, Charles L. Nelson. Apparently the house there was large enough for Bond's wife and family and the Nelsons, which made it convenient when Bond, Jr. died in his middle years. He was carried to Macon and interred in the Bond plot at Rose Hill, as was his mother. But Nelson married Bond Jr.'s widow and had another family. They are interred in Cave Hill in Louisville. As for the Bond plot at Rose Hill, no one ever shows the view from the river and train tracks, so here is a photo from that perspective showing the twin William B. Johnston and Joseph Bond Faux Burial Vaults, which are separated by a staircase.
If this view looks familiar, you might be an aficionado of Macon's Allman Brothers Band, whose debut album featured an iconic photograph of the Brothers here. Bassist Berry Oakley stands in a niche above his bandmates giving them his "blessing" from on high.
After you've read this monumental article maybe you feel like its time to "put on a new face, climb down off the hilltop, baby, get back in the race."
Or maybe all this grave information has you thinking: "Good Lord, I feel like I'm dying."
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I must single out MGPA Research Associate Ashley Quinn for taking the wonderful photographs of the two monuments seen here, and preparing them and the other images for publication. We also have had many wide-ranging discussions on the topics covered by this article that have helped to bring into focus my own thinking on this subject. Next, Nonnie Riney, Alexandra Luken, and David Luken of Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky were exceptional hosts and gave us the most wonderful tour of known and potential Launitz monuments in their beautiful cemetery. Surely this is how these magnificent garden cemeteries of our forebears are meant to be administered and conserved. And John G.S. Hanson was instrumental in communicating with the Boston Public Library, which scanned Launitz's 1866 design booklet and kindly provided it to us. Sadly the Bond Monument is not amongst those 70 designs. John's expertise is in New England gravestones, as may be seen here: https://www.johnhansonauthor.com/
HISTORIC PRESERVATION NOTE ON ROSE HILL CEMETERY
The ongoing failures of Rose Hill indicate that much may be learned from a close study of the manner in which Cave Hill operates. Needless to say, Rose Hill is owned and operated extremely poorly and haphazardly by the City of Macon, which also fails simultaneously at managing three other municipal cemeteries. At Rose Hill alone, for starters, the grass is never cut properly anymore, there is an ongoing homeless problem, and the roads and culverts are very dangerous in several places.
Cave Hill is more like Macon's Riverside Cemetery, being a well-managed 501(c)(13) non-profit cemetery assisted in its mission by a 501(c)(3) non-profit foundation. The Cave Hill Heritage Foundation's mission is "to restore the historical monuments and buildings...to preserve the arboretum setting...to provide community access and awareness." For more information on Cave Hill's activities and efforts to bring more people into the cemetery, and to learn about its Arboretum, bird-watching, bee-keeping, lectures, historic tours, and numerous other activities please go to this page: https://www.cavehillheritagefoundation.org/about/overview/
The best means of insuring Rose Hill Cemetery's Restoration, Resurgence, & Revival is to invite in more people to spend time there, not less, and for it to be owned and operated as a private cemetery assisted by its own non-profit foundation like Riverside and Cave Hill. There is already a small group of dedicated volunteers working hard to restore monuments, but without proper training and funding, volunteers can only do so much. Simri Rose's original vision of a garden cemetery should be revived and Rose Hill should be completely restored to its former grandeur. This will take research, detailed planning, a long-term vision, multi-disciplinary expertise, and literally millions of dollars in grants and other funding. It can be done, but it won't be easy. Let's hope we live long enough to see Rose Hill become the jewel it once was.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Allman Brothers Band
"The Allman Brothers Band." Macon: Capricorn Records, 1969.
Andrews, Ian
Antonio Canova 1757-1822, also John Gibson (RA) and Bertel Thorvaldsen. London: Austin Macauley Publishers, Ltd., 2022.
Atkinson, Thomas Dunham
A Glossary of Terms Used in English Architecture. 1906. Almonte, Ontario, Canada: Algrove Publishing, Ltd., 2004.
Bilmanis, Alfred
"Grandeur and Decline of the German Balts." Slavonic and East European Review, American Series 3, no. 4 (December 1944).
Butler, John C.
Historical Record of Macon and Central Georgia. 1879. Macon, Georgia: J. W. Burke Co., 1958.
Burns, Robert
"A Man's A Man For A' That." 1795. In The Complete Works of Robert Burns, edited by James A. McKay. Ayr, Scotland, UK: Alloway Publishing, 1988.
Cave Hill Cemetery
Calder Payne Correspondence (unpublished). Louisville: Cave Hill Cemetery, 1983.
Coles, Stephen
The Anatomy of Type: A Graphic Guide to 100 Typefaces. Third printing, New York: Quarto Publishing, 2021.
Cothran, James R. and Erica Danylchak
Grave Landscapes: The Nineteenth-Century Rural Cemetery Movement. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2018.
Doran & Karwoski, Inc.
Rose Hill Cemetery Master Plan - Summary Report. Atlanta: Doran & Karwoski, Inc., 2004.
Editor (no author specified)
"Pulaski Monument Completed." Daily Chronicle & Sentinel (Augusta), Dec. 23, 1854.
"Col. Bond's Death - Particulars." Columbus Daily Times, March 16, 1859.
"Homocide of the Late Col. Joseph Bond." Georgia Journal & Messenger, March 23, 1859.
Launitz, The Sculptor." The Daily Sun (Columbus), February 11, 1860.
"The Bond Monument & R.E. Launitz, the Sculptor." Columbus Daily Times, March 14, 1860.
"The Monument to Mr. Joseph Bond." Weekly Georgia Telegraph (Macon), Nov. 5, 1866.
Advertisement for Muldoon, Bullett & Co., Louisville Daily Courier, May 24, 1867.
"Sketch of the Life of the Late Joseph Bond." Georgia Weekly Telegraph & Georgia Journal & Messenger, Sept. 24, 1872.
Hammock, Stephen
Archaeological Probing and Monitoring of the Ocmulgee Heritage Trail, Rose Hill Cemetery, Macon, Bibb County, Georgia. Macon: Southern Archaeology & History, 2006.
Hatter, Russell, Nicky Hughes, and Gene Burch
Frankfort Cemetery: The Westminster Abbey of Kentucky. Frankfort Heritage Press, 2007.
Laderman, Gary
The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Towards Death, 1799-1883. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.
Launitz, Robert E.
Collection of Monuments and Headstones Designed by R. E. Launitz. New York: L. Prang & Co. Publishers, 1866.
M. Joblin & Co.
Louisville Past and Present: Its Industrial History as Exhibited in the Life-labors of its Leading Men. Louisville: M. Joblin & Co., 1875.
Mistovich, Timothy and Roy Blair, Jr.
Archaeological Investigations at Overlook Mansion, Macon, Georgia. Marietta, Georgia: Cultural Resource Services, Inc., 1979.
Payne, Calder W. (compiler)
Rose Hill Rambles in Rose Hill Cemetery, Macon, Georgia. Macon, Georgia: Middle Georgia Historical Society, Inc., 1985.
Stott, Annette
"The Baby-in-a-Half-Shell: A Case Study in Child Memorial Art of the Late Nineteenth Century." Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture 7, no. 2 (Autumn 2008), http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/autumn08/91-the-
baby-in-a-half-shell-a-case-study-in-child-memorial-art-of-the-late-nineteenth-century (accessed September 6, 2023).
Thomas, Samuel W.
Cave Hill Cemetery. 1985. Louisville, Kentucky: Cave Hill Cemetery Company, 2001.
Watkins, Sam R.
"Co. Aytch," Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment; or, A Side Show of the Big Show. 1882. Wilmington, North Carolina: Broadfoot Publishing Co., 1990.