Photos of Figaro by the author.
Figaro died March 21, 2021. Asthma became COPD, choking the breath from his body.
Major died July 1900. “Congestion of the lungs” listed as cause of death.1
My cat and a collie, separated by nearly a century and a quarter, connected by broken lungs and the immeasurable grief of the people they left behind.
Since Fig died, I’ve struggled with his absence. I’m still prone to welling eyes at an unexpected memory (or at writing that line), and I’m someone who has never been a crier.
Fig was an academic, a weird descriptor for a cat, one to which you might object, but it’s true. Adopted in my first weeks of grad school, from the crowded cat room — a repurposed garage — at the shelter where I volunteered in a bid to keep my sanity (with mixed success). He was smart, distinguished, cool. Reaching up, paws on my chest, he made himself mine. Already eight years old, a tiny professor in a prim tuxedo.
Then passed nearly ten years. A decade of vet visits, countless thousands spent on pills and tests and special food to preserve his fragile health: the hyperthyroidism I first worried was cancer; the arthritis in his front legs, bending him like a bulldog but rarely slowing him down; the asthma that taught me you can give a cat an inhaler, and which, despite all possible medical intervention from the vet he loved and for whom he always purred on the exam table, took him away from me in March 2021.
As a historian, I think a lot about death. Moreover, I’m an animal historian — I know the dog always dies in the end. Maybe that’s why I turned to the past, unintentionally, subconsciously, to process my grief.
Dellwood (or Dell Wood, or The National Cemetery for Animals at Coxsackie, New York) was not far from where I grew up. But for me, it was just a passing reference in my research, tucked aside until it called to me last year.
The plan, as announced in 1899, was to turn acres of real estate overlooking the Hudson River into a sprawling, landscaped resting place rivaling any for humans. A special undertaker, embalmer, and coffin-maker. Silver trimmings, delicate pillows, silk. Death masks of beaks, snouts, and little whiskered faces.2
I read the reports of the funerals, including the one for the collie who succumbed to “congestion of the lungs,” and was struck by an overwhelming sense of familiarity. Major’s coffin — rosewood, lined in white satin — was lowered beneath a carved marble headstone, the ground carpeted in flowers. Humans cried; Major’s mate howled.3
More than a century later, Figaro’s coffin — cedar, made by my dad, lined with Fig’s beloved memory foam — was lowered into the field at home, with the pets who went before. A grave known, but unmarked still because I can’t yet find the words to immortalize him.
When Dellwood opened, it was controversial for such attention to be paid to mere animals; “little short of wicked,” perhaps. As the Buffalo Evening News explained, “extreme affection” for a pet was often associated with “lunacy or at least eccentricity.” But attitudes were shifting, cruelty less tolerated, pets more family than not: “What will seem unnatural to some, will appear quite right to others.”
The hierarchies were still there: an “old maid” grieving her parrot was “subject for jest,” whereas a prominent family’s champion thoroughbred or pedigreed canine deserved memorialization.4 As a thirty-something woman with no strong maternal desire and a dead cat, I am the archetypal target of the detractors’ scorn.
There was an unsentimental argument to be made for these elaborate burials. They kept corpses from “the refuse heap, the sewer, and the gutter,” a sanitary coup for 19th-century cities. “No longer must the deceased feline be given the garbage man.”5 They didn’t have the same options I had, standing in the exam room with the shell of my boy, the vet asking if I wanted cremation or to take him home. He came home.
It is unlikely, however, that the denizens of Dellwood were ever destined for the dump. The first burial was the St. Bernard of a prominent doctor in Troy, New York. Other reported Dellwood burials included J.P. Morgan’s dog and Buffalo Bill’s horse.6 Animals with such owners always received a better end than a street mutt, or even a beloved pet of the poor.
Dellwood president William D. Lane was a cemetery man. He pitched the idea after a conversation with “a wealthy New York woman who had just lost a beautiful dog, to which she was greatly attached.” He formed the new company with a reported “$200,000 as a capital stock, and of this $80,000 has already been subscribed, mostly by New Yorkers, and 110 acres have been purchased on a beautiful slope.”7 While Dellwood was his first for pets, it was by no means the first cemetery he founded or managed, and he was prepared to defend his new venture. He wrote, “Whether or not they share with man that indefinable, unknown quality or essence which we term ‘Mind,’ is a question for philosophers to decide, we, however, are willing to admit that many of them have feelings, emotions and sense perceptions similar to our own.” Major’s owner, with the belief her dog could sing in three languages — and I, with my insistence that Figaro could tell a joke, though not in words, for his was a physical comedy — were easy marks.
Lane continued to dance around the concept of the animal soul, professing “no predilection for such a theory,” but recognizing it as a trend he could capitalize on by creating “a nice quiet spot where the ghosts of the departed quadrupeds can sport at will, enjoying the cool country air and an uninterrupted view of the Catskills and Hudson River.”8
The venture lacked financial stability from the start. A company circular claimed plots went for $1 to $3 per square foot, but were up for an introductory bargain of 50 cents a foot, “with the assurance that the price will certainly advance once the scheme becomes better known.” An office was established at 4 Wall Street, New York City, to appeal to the city’s monied animal fanciers.9
In pursuit of famous future residents, the Dellwood cemetery solicitor called upon the Central Park Menagerie, seeking a contract for the zoo’s dead. Those creatures, however, were destined for stuffing and the American Museum of Natural History. Dellwood found itself a subject of ridicule, as the press had a field day with this desperate-seeming pitch.10
At the end of 1899, at a New York City dog show, Dellwood exhibited “a plan in wood and grass,” their model cemetery for the model dogs. After about half a year, they claimed 18 plots sold — most to women.11
In January 1901, Dellwood faced lawsuits alleging that only six dogs and one cat were ever interred and, therefore, “the enterprise was not a financial success.”12 And that was it for the Dellwood National Cemetery.
There was something so sad, so dark, so weird, about a failed pet cemetery that it provided a welcome distraction from Fig’s death. I thought of the words of Major’s owner, Myra Stephens, a society woman and mother who lost her only child two years before her beloved dog: “I am heartbroken. I loved him as much as a human being, and he had more intelligence than a good many human beings and was far more faithful.”13
I could sympathize. I knew too intimately what Major’s “inflammation of the lungs” would have sounded like, looked like, felt like to a helpless human observer. The thought of breathless Major interred only to have a cemetery fail around him, to be unceremoniously dug up again, felt cruel at a personal level.
Chicago Inter Ocean, June 25, 1905, p. 30.
Except, the report I first read was wrong. Major was never buried at Dellwood. He was laid to rest a bit more than 100 miles south at Hartsdale Pet Cemetery, Dellwood’s predecessor by a couple of years, which still exists today.14 Is it weird to feel relief for a dog long dead? For his person?
Occasionally still, an insipid debate breaks out on Twitter or in op-eds about the correct way to feel about our pets. They’re like children; they’re totally different from children; people spend too much on animals; nothing’s too good for my pet; she’s a crazy cat lady. We’ve had these conversations ad nauseam for well past a century.
Perhaps I’m too close to this subject to do “good” history. I’m certainly not an “objective” observer, though I don’t think that concept is worth much anyway. Still, my history brain can’t help but make the connections. I do think there is power in recognizing that nothing we feel is new, even if the thorns of grief cannot be dulled by context, only time.
- “Dog Buried in Satin,” Ottawa Journal, July 13, 1900, p. 5.
- “A Pet-Animal Cemetery,” Buffalo Evening News, May 20, 1899, p. 6.
- “Dog Buried in Satin,” Ottawa Journal, July 13, 1900, p. 5.
- “A Pet-Animal Cemetery,” Buffalo Evening News, May 20, 1899, p. 6. For more discussion of changing attitudes toward pet animals in the late 19th century, see Katherine C. Grier, Pets in America: A History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Grier discusses the range of feelings about animal death, with the rise of pet cemeteries and port-mortem photography becoming more common for well-off pet owners.
- “Buried Like a Dog,” Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, Jan. 10, 1901, p. 3 (first quotation); “Cemetery Lots For Pet Animals,” New York Sunday Telegraph, June 18, 1899, p. 7 (second quotation).
- “First Grave in Cemetery,” Buffalo Enquirer, July 15, 1899, p. 7; “Cemetery for Pets,” Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago), July 6, 1900, p. 4.
- “A New Departure,” Journal of Zoophily 8 (June 1899): 68.
- “Cemetery Lots For Pet Animals,” New York Sunday Telegraph, June 18, 1899, p. 7.
- Ibid.
- “Was From Coxsackie,” Poughkeepsie Daily Eagle, July 26, 1899, p. 2. “He Wanted to Perpetuate Memories of Dead Animals,” Brooklyn Standard Union, July 26, 1899, p. 6.
- “Pet Dog Show’s Last Day,” New York Times, Dec. 2, 1899, p. 11.
- Columbia Republican (Hudson, NY), Jan. 17, 1901, p. 2.
- Sarah Knowles Bolton, Our Devoted Friend, The Dog (Boston: L.C. Page & Company, 1902), 361.
- “1900: Major Van Buren Stephens, the Hero Dog of New York’s Chelsea,” The Hatching Cat, October 20, 2016.
