The Death of Daniel H. Burnham
Daniel Hudson Burnham (1846-1912) was a prominent American architect and urban planner known for his influential role in shaping the skyline of major American cities.
Burnham served as Director of Works of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, where his vision and coordination resulted in the creation of the famed "White City". He later authored the influential 1909 Plan of Chicago, advocating for grand public spaces, systematic street layouts, and comprehensive urban planning that remains in place to this day.
In his later years, Daniel Hudson Burnham's health began to deteriorate. He developed colitis and was diagnosed with diabetes in 1909, which significantly impacted his circulatory system and led to a persistent infection in his foot. Despite these health challenges, Burnham continued to lead his company D.H. Burnham and Co., which had become the world's largest architectural firm.
Burnham died overseas on June 1, 1912 at the age of 65 from complications related to colitis and diabetes, exacerbated by food poisoning from a meal eaten in Heidelberg, Germany. His passing marked the end of a remarkable career that had significantly influenced American architecture and urban planning.
Burnham was cremated there in Germany, though at which facility is not known at this time. His cremated remains were most likely brought back to Chicago by his family as opposed to being shipped, as Burnham had been traveling with his wife Margaret, his son, Hubert, and several other family members through Europe upon his death. The Burnhams returned to the U.S. from Germany on June 28 on the ship Amerika- 27 days after his passing.
There is no record of why Burnham’s remains were cremated. It would have been his own decision, established prior to death in a will or verbal directive. Alternatively, Burnham’s family may have chosen cremation for him after his passing.
It has always been more costly to ship a casket home to the U.S. or elsewhere from Germany than cremated remains. By the early 20th century, embalming had become a standard practice in the U.S. funeral industry, especially for transporting bodies over long distances, and also adds to the total cost of transportation.
As Burnham’s architectural firm, D.H. Burnham and Co., was the largest in the world at the time of his death, we can safely surmise that cost was not an obstacle in transporting his remains back to the U.S. and may be able to speculate that the physical ease of transporting cremated remains was the primary motivation for Burnham’s family if he had not specified cremation prior to his passing. After the cremation process, Burnham’s family would have been able to receive his ashes and take them back to Chicago personally. According to online resource Chicagology, Burnham’s funeral arrangements are not known.
Daniel H. Burnham’s cremated remains were interred at Graceland Cemetery on Sunday, October 27, 1912- 4 months and 27 days after his passing and 4 months exactly after his remains arrived back in Chicago from Germany.
Why did it take so long to bury Burnham? The answer has everything to do with the location of his gravesite.
Many visitors to Graceland Cemetery have commented that Burnham’s rustic, rough-hewn natural boulder monument with a simple bronze plaque is not suited for a man with such historic impact. For the man who made no little plans, one would think Burnham’s resting place would be adorned within a massive pavilion like the Palmers across the lake, or perhaps an iconic funerary sculpture by a prominent artist like the Fields up the hill.
One could argue, however, that Burnham’s architectural plans did sometimes lack consideration for the needs of the working class, focusing more on the interests of the elite. In this way, Burnham’s island grave is in fact a very fitting memorial, as it was never intended to hold burials in the first place.
The Design of Burnham Island
Father of the Skyscraper and fellow Graceland resident William Le Baron Jenney (1832-1907) was tasked with the excavation and design of three bodies of water within the grounds of Graceland Cemetery in the 1870’s and 1880’s.
These three water features included Lake Willowmere, Lake Hazelmere, and the Lotus Pond. Out of the three, Lake Willowmere was the first and most grand to be developed. The Lake would be situated in the cemetery’s lowland area, and after completing the installation of a sewer system in 1879 Jenney began to carve a lake out of the swampy marsh.
Lake Willowmere to this day is fed by a natural freshwater spring, and before it was filled in and reclaimed as burial space in 1968 Lake Hazelmere was as well. Less is known about the Lotus Pond, located where the prairie is today in Graceland’s southeast corner and the first of the three water features to be filled in back in 1897.
Jenney seems to have always intended to include an island in Lake Willowmere’s overall design, with plans dating back to 1878 outlining the lakeshore, island, and burial sections (Christopher Vernon, Graceland Cemetery: A Design History).
Jenney’s apprentice and later landscape architect and superintendent of Graceland Cemetery O.C. Simonds (1855-1903) cut his teeth in landscape design with the Lake Willowmere project, having moved to Chicago to work for Jenney shortly before the project’s start. Prior to designing the plantings around Willowmere, Hazelmere, and the Lotus Pond, Simonds had proven himself to Graceland’s administration through his work on the drainage system for the cemetery and its water features.
In the earliest known photograph of the wildly wooded island taken in 1880 (not pictured in this article), a small wooden gazebo peeks out from dense foliage on the island’s southern end. There is no record of the original bridge that must have spanned the lake to reach the secluded island gazebo.
Old maps of the cemetery show parts of Graceland that were clearly set aside as ‘parkland’: areas where no burials would take place in order to preserve some of the natural environment for visitors and families to immerse themselves in the restorative powers of nature and contribute to the park aesthetic of the rural cemetery.
It is not known precisely who chose the island as Burnham’s final resting place, however it can be presumed that someone close to Burnham or an individual involved with the cemetery administration suggested the singular location. Henry H. Kuehn, in his book Architects and Their Gravesites, speculates that the cemetery offered the island to Burnham’s family as a potential gravesite. Burnham’s parents, Elizabeth Keith (née Weeks) and Edwin Arnold Burnham, were already buried at Graceland prior to his death in Section G, making the cemetery a natural location for Burnham’s to be laid to rest. Additionally, William Le Baron Jenney, the man behind the original implementation of Lake Willowmere and its island, had once been Burnham’s employer- however by the time Burnham was interred on the island in 1912 Jenney had been dead for several years, having passed away in 1907.
Regardless of whose idea it was to locate Burnham’s final resting place as part of such a unique feature, Graceland Cemetery sold the island lot to Burnham’s widow Margaret (Adam Selzer, Graceland Cemetery: Chicago Stories, Symbols, and Secrets).
As far as the natural glacial boulder marking the precise location of Burnham’s grave on the island, Kuehn also hypothesizes that the design may have been a collaboration between Simonds and the Burnham family. Three similar, slightly smaller boulder monuments as well as several bronze flush plaque markers were later added as family members passed to flank Burnham and Margaret’s central monument.
Building Bridges
As previously mentioned, we have no evidence of what the original bridge connecting the island to rest of the cemetery looked like, but we know there must have been some structure there in order for visitors to make use of the wooden gazebo situated on the island.
Whatever it may have been, the original bridge to the island was replaced by the Log Bridge, designed by either Simonds or his associate Frank Button (1866-1938) in 1912 for Burnham’s island grave. Button, who worked at Simonds’ landscape architecture firm, drafted a drawing of the Log Bridge that was used as the reference for a restoration project in 2007.
For a time after it was built, the Log Bridge had a gate on the mainland side to prevent visitors from crossing to the island where Burnham lay in rest. As an extra deterrent, the gate was marked with a ‘private’ sign. Why such drastic measures to keep visitors off of the island in the early days after Burnham’s burial, nor when and why they were abandoned, we have no record of yet.
At some point, the Log Bridge was removed or deteriorated to the point of removal and replaced with “a low concrete bridge extend[ing] to the island.” (National Registry Nomination Papers, 2000).
According to documentation from the Eifler & Associates Monument Conservation Program (2002), the restoration of the bridge to Burnham island was given “#1 priority” out of a number of other proposed projects. The details for the bridge project were as follows:
"Burnham Bridge - The existing concrete bridge is failing and is considered a safety hazard. A new bridge has been designed, and we were in the midst of completing the construction documents (for [the] bid) when the project was put on hold."
We can see from this excerpt that solid plans to restore or replace the bridge dated back to 2002, but for whatever reason were put on hold. Graceland’s administration picked the project back up in 2007.
Increased visitor-ship and interest in Graceland Cemetery had spurred the cemetery’s board to focus on restoring and preserving the graves and monuments of notable architects within their grounds. From the Library of American Landscape History:
“When Chicago started planning a 2009 centennial celebration of the Plan of Chicago, the Chicago Architecture Foundation chose to focus some of its tours of Graceland Cemetery on ‘Burnham and His Contemporaries’. The cemetery’s trustees hired Chicago landscape architect Ted Wolff to “spiff up” Burnham Island…”
2007 Restoration
With board approval, the restoration of Burnham Island’s landscape design and bridge structure began in 2007.
Again from the Library of American Landscape History: “‘The problem,”’Wolff says, ‘was that we had no historic photographs or other documents to guide a restoration,’ until a librarian at the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries of the Art Institute of Chicago directed him to a 1920 biography of Burnham that contained a photograph of the island.”
Author Christopher Vernon attributes the gradual slope to the shore, designed by landscape architect O.C. Simonds (1855–1931), as a feature that seamlessly blends the land with the lake, with grass mowed down to the water's edge. A canopy of tall trees—ash, honey locust, and willow—still crowned the mound, though most of the understory shrubs had disappeared.
Wolff aimed to address the erosion and faithfully replicate Simonds’s planting design. Additionally, he convinced the trustees to introduce wetland plants along the edges, which would help stabilize the shoreline and attract aquatic wildlife.
Wolff also committed to researching and implementing a historical plant palette in an attempt to recreate some of the original landscaping by O.C. Simonds. A canopy of tall trees - ash, honey locust, and willow - were still present on the island, but most of the understory shrubs were gone, reflecting similar trends in the disappearance of shrubbery and other low and ground cover plants throughout the cemetery that once were common and celebrated by Simonds.
One historical plant, the blue flag iris, can still be found on the north end of the island 15 years after the 2007 restoration concluded. Chokeberry bushes on the mainland side of the bridge also still survive, but other plantings from the restoration such as yellow flag iris, pickerel weed, and American water lilies no longer grow there.
Also notable today is the presence of an unidentified species of invasive algae, which has turned the waters of Lake Willowmere quite murky in recent years. In an effort to combat its spread, past groundskeeper Roger Sewell began to monitor and lower the lake’s water levels in order to choke the algae out.
Today, Burnham Island is one of the most sought after gravesites in Graceland Cemetery for visitors from all over the world. Multiple species of turtle and a large population of fish call Lake Willowmere their home, as well as many species of native and migratory birds. Just last year a black-capped heron, most likely from the group living near the Lincoln Park Zoo, regularly visited the lake to dive for fish in the evening hours.
In total, eight other members of the Burnham family have been interred on the island since Daniel H. Burnham was interred in 1912, with the most recent burial taking place in 1977.
While many visitors comment on the comparably modest and rustic nature of Burnham’s glacial boulder of a monument, what has been somewhat forgotten is the fact that the island is itself a tribute to the influential architect’s legacy. Not many people can say they have an entire island as a funerary monument, much less one that was never intended for such a memorial.