Cave Hill National Cemetery, Lodge, 701 Baxter Avenue, Louisville

Source document Quoted word for word from HALS KY-8-A. Not written, edited or summarised by this site.

701 Baxter Avenue, Louisville-Jefferson County, Jefferson County, Kentucky. The coordinates for the Cave Hill National Cemetery are W and N, and they were obtained in August with, it is assumed, NAD There is no restriction on the release of the locational data to the public.

Source document Quoted word for word from HALS KY-8-A. Not written, edited or summarised by this site.

National Cemetery Administration, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Prior to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs was known as the Veterans Administration. The Veterans Administration took over management of Cave Hill National Cemetery from the U.S. Army in (Public Law Date: sold at auction, Builder/Contractor: William T. Foster. Description: The one and one-half story, Second Empire style lodge is brick over a stone foundation. The brick walls are painted grey. The mansard roof is covered in slate, while the shallow hip roof above is covered in tin. The principal elevation faces southwest to Baxter Avenue and the entrance porch is in the south corner of the building. The double-hung, wood sash is glazed with six-over-six lights and the first-floor windows have shutters.

Sometime before a kitchen, porch, and radiators were added. Contemporary aerials reveal the addition of an exterior, wood staircase at the north end of the northwest elevation. Site Context: The lodge faces Baxter Avenue (State Route and overlooks a parking lot. It is flanked by commercial development. To the east are the burial grounds, and south along Baxter Avenue the burial grounds begin to be visible from the street through the iron fencing. At this juncture, a secondary entrance gate leads into the Cave Hill Cemetery from Baxter Avenue. Further south from the lodge on Baxter Avenue is the main entrance to Cave Hill Cemetery; this entrance is marked by a clock tower. The national cemetery lies within the Cave Hill Cemetery boundaries.

History: Please see the contextual report for an analysis of the architectural development of the lodge as a building type for the national cemeteries and its place within this prescribed landscape (HALS No. In Congress authorized the appropriation of land for use as national cemeteries so that the CAVE HILL NATIONAL CEMETERY,

Lodge Hals

No. KY-8-A (page 2) Union soldiers who perished in service to their country could be buried with honor. These became the first cemeteries in the national cemetery system; by the end of the decade almost men were buried in seventy-three national cemeteries. By that time the Office of the Quartermaster General, and the Quartermaster Montgomery C. Meigs in particular, had developed an architectural program for the cemetery. The program created for the national cemeteries included an enclosing wall demarcating the grounds and ornamental iron gates cast to instill reverence to those who entered and calm the wrought emotions of a nation in mourning for its lost sons.

Specific plantings, such as the Osage-orange hedge and various trees, were selected to give a pleasing appearance and, likely, to screen outbuildings - the business of cemetery maintenance - from public view. Less a commemorative architectural statement, the superintendent s lodge combined practicality with a respectful presence. Lodge plans first evolved from expedient wood-frame cottages to masonry buildings one-story in height and with a three-room floor plan.

Construction of the temporary wood-frame lodges took place in the years to and overlapped with the construction of the first permanent masonry lodges built to a standard, single-story design from to Officers in charge of the cemeteries soon found the floor plans of the temporary wood lodges and the first permanent masonry lodges inconvenient and, increasingly, unattractive. Moreover, representatives from the Quartermaster General s Office noted these three-room models were often too small for a superintendent and his family, and so in plans for a six- room, one and one-half story type were acquired from Edward Clark, Architect of the Capitol Extension. The design was refined over the next two years and in drawn for the Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs s approval.

This standard plan featured a mansard roof and so became associated with the French or Second Empire style. Contemporary buildings, domestic and civic, exhibited this aesthetic and so the choice of the Quartermaster for a Second Empire style lodge is in keeping with national architectural trends as well as the personal taste of Meigs whose house also was erected in the Second Empire style. On the national stage, Alfred Mullet designed the Old Executive Office building in Washington, DC, a building whose construction in the coincided with the building of lodges in the Second Empire style in many of the national cemeteries.

The National Cemetery Administration identifies the Second Empire style lodge, referred to in the as the usual type, or even the full Meigs plan likely in reference to the Quartermaster s endorsement of the design, as the first generation of permanent lodges. It reflects a concerted effort to standardize what a national cemetery, including the lodge, should look like. The last cemeteries for which the Quartermaster contracted for this style of lodge were for Mobile, Alabama, and Beaufort, South Carolina, in The L-plan was revised in for the lodge in San Francisco, and then employed for the lodges in Mound City and Loudon Park. The revised plan was further improved for the construction of the lodge at Cypress Hills.

The revision to the standard L-plan primarily included a change in roof form from the mansard to a cross-gable and the use of banded brick in the exterior walls. Cypress Hills was a simpler expression of the type, with segmental arches over the windows instead of stone lintels and having no banded exterior brick in the walls. In the the plans CAVE HILL NATIONAL CEMETERY, LODGE HALS No. KY-8-A (page 3) called for an elongated office wing. This change to the L-plan accommodated an entrance hall in the middle of the building; the elongated L-plan was built in Santa Fe, Fort Smith, and Fort Leavenworth. By the century s end, standards of living called for conveniences the L-plan lodges lacked.

Advances in plumbing and heating technologies, in particular, made the L-plan outdated as expectations about the appropriate level of domestic sanitation that the government should provide to its employees changed. Even so, the Quartermaster omitted indoor toilets from the lodge floor plans until Maintenance of the existing lodges, as well as ell additions, addressed some of the inconveniences of the older buildings, and made the lodges more comfortable as living spaces. Between the and improvements to the existing lodges included the installation of indoor plumbing and bathrooms, central heating, closets and cupboards; adding a kitchen ell and converting the original kitchen into a dining room; and maintenance of windows, shutters, and porches.

By the Quartermaster determined some lodges warranted a complete overall, rather than renovation, and the department began to replace some of the buildings in the national cemeteries. For the new lodges, it created a succession of twenty-two different plans between and Nine of these plans were used to build multiple lodges, but thirteen were unique designs, used only once. Compared to the extended popularity of the L-plan, which lasted from to in its mansard-roof form and to in its later variations, the rapid succession of designs in the twentieth century suggests a new awareness among those directing the cemeteries of the need to construct lodges that were aesthetically and technologically up-to-date.

Over five decades, the Quartermaster endorsed a progression of plans from four-squares to bungalows to Colonial Revival designs and then to suburban ramblers. This progression paralleled the changes in form, style, building materials, and construction practices that occurred in the private housing market. Most of the lodges built in the twentieth century are indistinguishable from typical American middle-class and upper-middle-class suburban dwellings, with the exception of a second entrance for the superintendent s office. In some instances, such as in Hampton, Virginia, and in Annapolis, Maryland, the army made a particular effort to match new lodges to their local surroundings, usually by building period-revival designs in places where those designs would have particular resonance.

In a nod to the colonial heritage of the Chesapeake, the Quartermaster built one-and-one-half-story brick lodges in a Colonial Revival style at these cemeteries in In another example, the desire to match designs to localities prompted the alteration of the L-plan lodge at San Francisco into a Spanish Mission Revival building in and the similarly extensive reconstruction of the Santa Fe lodge into the Pueblo Revival style in The Quartermaster s department oversaw the construction of three lodges in and the one for Cave Hill National Cemetery was the only one of the three built in brick. The other two lodges built that year were in Grafton, West Virginia, and Finn s Point, New Jersey.

The Cave Hill lodge is significant as an example of the L-plan design rendered in brick over a stone foundation, and is significant as part of the Quartermaster s architectural repertoire that saw a standardization of building form and plan in the late nineteenth century. The survival of the CAVE HILL NATIONAL CEMETERY, LODGE HALS No. KY-8-A (page 4) lodge for Cave Hill National Cemetery is, perhaps, tied to this definitive design, one that continued to identify the building with the cemetery and the national cemetery program despite its location outside the premises and subsequent sale.

The auction of the Cave Hill lodge also speaks to the Quartermaster s modernization campaign that saw many of the Second Empire style lodges renovated or razed, as recognition of changing living conditions also ushered in views of obsolescence. Cave Hill National Cemetery is located in Louisville, along the streetcar line and was highly visible to residents of the city in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The first burials in the cemetery occurred in and the grounds were established as a national cemetery in After the war, the remains of those who had died on the battlefields and in the Union hospitals from their wounds and hastily buried were reinterred in Cave Hill.

Records of the Office of the Quartermaster General reveal that there were two lodges built for Cave Hill National Cemetery, a temporary wood-frame structure erected about and a Second Empire style, brick building constructed in Both were located outside the cemetery grounds and adjacent to it. The lodge lot was 180 long and 55 wide and enclosed with a picket fence. The temporary frame lodge was one story, and had a footprint about 36 x 16 . The floor plan accommodated just three rooms. It was rented in because there was no superintendent assigned to the cemetery at that time. When time came to replace the temporary wood-frame structure with a permanent lodge, cemetery officials planned to reuse the wood building as a tool house and so moved it to clear the site for construction.

They noted the building was of the old style was in fair condition given its age. The Quartermaster contracted with William T. Foster of Jeffersonville, Indiana, to move the frame building and retrofit it for a tool house as well as to construct the one and one-half story brick lodge in the Second Empire style in His cost estimate for the project was In June a request to insert shutters on the inside of the dormers was made and approved. Although the records are largely silent, maintenance on the building continued into the twentieth century and it remains on Baxter Avenue today albeit with a commercial rather than commemorative context.

Source document Quoted word for word from HALS KY-8-A. Not written, edited or summarised by this site.

Annual Report of the Secretary of War. [to Congress]. Washington, DC: GPO, Deetz, James. In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American Life. New York: Doubleday, Dickinson, William C., Dean A. Herrin, and Donald R. Kennon, eds. Montgomery C. Meigs and the Building of the Nation s Capital. Athens: University of Ohio Press for the U.S. Capitol Historical Society, General Correspondence and Reports Relating to National and Post Cemeteries, 1865-ca. CAVE HILL NATIONAL CEMETERY,

Lodge Hals

No. KY-8-A (page 5) Record Group 92, Records of the Office of the Quartermaster General, National Archives Building, Washington, DC. Holt, Dean W. American Military Cemeteries: A Comprehensive Illustrated Guide to the Hallowed Grounds of the United States, Including Cemeteries Overseas. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, Message of the President of the United States [to Congress]. Washington, DC: GPO, Meyer, Richard E., ed. Cemeteries and Gravemarkers: Voices of American Culture. Logan: Utah State University Press, National Cemetery Historical File, Department of Memorial Affairs, Record Group 15, Records of the Veterans Administration, National Archives Building, Washington, DC. Sloane, David Charles. The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, Zipf, Catherine W. Marking Union Victory in the South: The Construction of the National Cemetery System. In Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory, edited by Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,

Source document Quoted word for word from HALS KY-8-A. Not written, edited or summarised by this site.

The documentation of the lodges and rostrums in the national cemeteries was undertaken by the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), one of the Heritage Documentation Programs of the National Park Service, Richard O'Connor, Chief. The project was sponsored by the National Cemetery Administration (NCA) of the U. S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Sara Amy Leach, Senior Historian. Project planning was coordinated by Catherine C. Lavoie, Chief of HABS. Historical research was undertaken by HABS Historians Virginia B. Price and Michael R. Harrison. NCA Historians Jennifer Perunko, Alec Bennett, and Hillori Schenker provided research material, edited and reviewed written reports.

Field work for selected sites was carried out and measured drawings produced by HABS Architects Paul Davidson, Ryan Pierce, and Mark Schara.