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Greene & Greene

The Thomas Sumner Greene Gravestone

On a sloping hillside in El Encinal Cemetery, on a rise above the El Estero estuary in downtown Monterey, with views across the cemetery’s park-like grounds toward Monterey Bay, stands the gravestone Charles Sumner Greene designed in 1931 for his father, Dr. Thomas Sumner Greene. The cemetery, also identified by its Spanish name Cementerio El Encinal and its older designation as the Monterey City Cemetery, has been operated by the City of Monterey since 1851 and is one of the oldest burial locations in Monterey County. The cemetery’s grounds rise gently above the estuary at 798 Fremont Street in downtown Monterey, with sentinel oaks scattered across the lawns and views opening toward the bay through the gaps between the trees.

The gravestone commission, cataloged in the Greene & Greene Architectural Records and Papers at the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University as “Thomas Sumner Greene Gravestone, (Monterey, California, 1931)” and in the Charles Sumner Greene Collection at the Environmental Design Archives at the University of California, Berkeley as “Greene, Thomas Sumner. Head stone Monterey CA,” was executed in the same year as Charles’s other documented 1931 work — the conclusion of the Mary J. Moore furniture commission (House 21 in this directory). The 1931 dating places the gravestone commission at the moment of Thomas Sumner Greene’s death on January 10, 1931, in Carmel, Monterey County, California, at the age of eighty-eight, after sixty-two years of marriage to Lelia Ariana Mather Greene.

The commission is, in its position within the firm’s catalog, a singular project. Charles Sumner Greene had spent thirty-seven years designing residential architecture for clients across California. With the 1931 gravestone commission, he turned the discipline of architectural design — the careful proportioning, the considered material choices, the integration of design elements into a coherent whole — to the design of a funerary monument for his own father. The architect designing the building was the son of the man for whom the building was being designed, and the son’s middle name “Sumner” was the father’s middle name passed forward into the next generation. Few professional commissions in any architect’s career involve this degree of personal connection between the designer and the project’s purpose.

Dr. Thomas Sumner Greene

Thomas Sumner Greene was born on September 19, 1842, in Brighton, Ohio, a working-class neighborhood on the southern periphery of Cincinnati. His own father came from Rhode Island and his mother from Massachusetts. He grew up in Cincinnati and on his maternal grandparents’ farm in Wyandotte, West Virginia. He served as a soldier in the Civil War — his memoirs of that service, preserved in the Greene & Greene Archives at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, document his experience of one of the central upheavals of nineteenth-century American history. After the war, he returned to civilian life, married Lelia Ariana Mather (born November 1844 in Virginia) on a date the historical record places in the late 1860s, and began his working life.

Thomas Greene’s early professional career was not in medicine. Through the 1870s, he worked as a bookkeeper and cashier — first for an unnamed employer in Cincinnati, then, after a 1874 relocation to St. Louis, for Edward Martin and Company, a clothing manufacturer. The years in St. Louis, with Charles born in 1868 (in Cincinnati) and Henry born in 1870 (also in Cincinnati), produced the formative environment in which the future architects would receive their education. Charles and Henry attended the Manual Training School connected with Washington University in St. Louis, where founder Calvin Milton Woodward — a follower of John Ruskin and William Morris — taught students the dignity of hard work and fine craftsmanship alongside their academic curriculum. The school’s motto, “The Cultured Mind, The Skillful Hand,” would prove formative in shaping the brothers’ subsequent architectural sensibility.

In 1879, Thomas Greene made the decision that would substantially redirect the family’s life. He returned to Cincinnati to attend medical school, leaving Lelia and the boys at her parents’ farm in West Virginia for the duration of his studies. He completed his medical degree in 1880 and the family was reunited in St. Louis, where he established a practice as a respiratory physician — sometimes described in family records as a homeopathic physician, reflecting the medical orthodoxies and alternatives of the late nineteenth-century American medical landscape. The medical practice in St. Louis through the 1880s and into the early 1890s supported the boys’ continuing education — at the Manual Training School, then briefly at Washington University, and eventually, in 1888, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Charles and Henry both earned Certificates of Partial Course at the architecture program in 1891.

In 1892 — a date corrected in the historical record by Edward R. Bosley, Director of The Gamble House, on the basis of letters preserved in the Greene & Greene Archives at the Huntington Library — Thomas and Lelia Greene relocated from St. Louis to Pasadena, California. The relocation was driven substantially by health considerations; Thomas, as a respiratory physician, held strong views about the importance of sunlight and circulating fresh air, and the Southern California climate offered a residential environment substantially more conducive to respiratory health than the Midwest. The 1892 Pasadena move would prove formative for the broader Greene family. Two years later, in 1894, Charles and Henry — having completed their MIT studies and brief apprenticeships in Boston architectural firms — followed their parents to California and opened their architectural practice in Pasadena, beginning the thirty-five-year career that would produce the firm’s catalog of celebrated residential commissions.

Thomas Sumner Greene’s Influence on the Brothers’ Architecture

The architectural-historical literature on Greene & Greene has consistently identified Thomas Sumner Greene’s medical convictions about sunlight and fresh air as one of the formative influences on the brothers’ architectural design philosophy. The firm’s celebrated bungalows — the Gamble House, the Blacker House, the Cordelia Culbertson House, and the broader catalog of California residences — were designed with substantial attention to natural light, cross-ventilation, sleeping porches that drew the residential program out into the open air, and the organization of interior spaces around the maximum infiltration of California sunshine. These design preoccupations were not the brothers’ invention; they were, on the documentary evidence preserved in the firm’s records, substantially shaped by their father’s medical convictions about the importance of light and air to human health.

Sleeping porches, in particular, became a defining element of the firm’s Pasadena Peak Period residential designs. The sleeping porch — a covered outdoor or semi-outdoor sleeping area integrated with the upper floor of the residence — gave the residents the ability to sleep in the open air during the temperate California climate, with the maximum exposure to fresh air that the contemporary medical orthodoxy considered conducive to respiratory health. The firm’s Pasadena residences typically included multiple sleeping porches, often integrated as substantial architectural elements rather than as marginal additions. The Gamble House includes sleeping porches that are among the most architecturally celebrated elements of the building. The architectural language of the sleeping porch, in the firm’s residential vocabulary, traces directly to Thomas Greene’s medical preoccupations and to the Pasadena climatic context that supported their integration.

The relationship between Thomas Greene’s medical philosophy and the firm’s architectural design was, accordingly, more than incidental. The father’s medical training, his convictions about the determinants of respiratory health, and his decision to relocate the family to Southern California for climatic reasons together produced the architectural environment in which Charles and Henry would develop their professional vocabulary. The firm’s residential designs were, in this sense, the architectural expression of medical convictions held by the architect’s father — convictions that had brought the family to California in the first place, and that continued to shape the residential design choices the brothers made through their professional careers.

El Encinal Cemetery

El Encinal Cemetery — known also as Cementerio El Encinal in Spanish, and historically as the Monterey City Cemetery — is one of the oldest continuously operating cemeteries in Monterey County, California. The cemetery has been administered by the City of Monterey since 1851. Its grounds, located at 798 Fremont Street between Fremont Street and Third Street in downtown Monterey, occupy a hillside above El Estero (the estuary) with views across the cemetery’s lawns toward Monterey Bay. The cemetery’s site is characterized by mature oaks scattered across the gently sloping grounds — sentinel oaks that give the cemetery its distinctive park-like character — and by the careful integration of historic monuments with the contemporary landscape design that the City of Monterey has maintained.

The cemetery adjoins, on its western boundary, the Catholic San Carlos Cemetery, with the two cemetery grounds separated only by a tree-lined boundary rather than a physical fence. The geographical and visual continuity between the two cemeteries reflects the layered religious and civic history of Monterey, where Catholic, Protestant, and civic burial traditions have developed alongside one another since the city’s nineteenth-century origins as the Spanish, Mexican, and American capital of California.

El Encinal’s contemporary historical-tour materials, maintained by the City of Monterey, identify several notable burials within the cemetery — figures who shaped Monterey’s cultural and civic life across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among the historically identified burials is Charles Sumner Greene himself, whose grave is identified as Site Number 10 on the City’s official historic cemetery tour, with attribution as “Charles Sumner Greene (1867-1957), architect.” The identification of Charles’s grave as a stop on the historic tour reflects the architectural-historical recognition of his career within the broader cultural memory of Monterey, twenty-six years after his death.

The presence of both Thomas Sumner Greene and Charles Sumner Greene in the same cemetery — father and son, the patriarch of the Greene family in California and the son who designed his father’s gravestone in 1931 — represents a particular kind of family architectural-historical continuity within El Encinal’s grounds. Charles, who designed his father’s gravestone in 1931, would eventually be buried near his father at the same cemetery in 1957. His wife Alice Gordon White Greene (1870-1965) would survive him by eight years, dying at age ninety-five.

The 1931 Commission

The specific architectural design of the Thomas Sumner Greene gravestone — its dimensions, materials, inscriptional content, decorative detailing, and placement within the cemetery — is documented in the project drawings preserved at the Charles Sumner Greene Collection at the Environmental Design Archives at the University of California, Berkeley, and in the Greene & Greene Architectural Records and Papers at the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University. The detailed design content of the commission is accessible primarily through direct consultation with these archival repositories rather than through widely accessible online catalogs.

What is documented in the publicly accessible record is that Charles approached the commission with the architectural seriousness that his thirty-seven-year career in residential design had developed. The cataloging of the project in two separate archival repositories — both Berkeley and Columbia — indicates that the design process produced sufficient drawings to constitute a documented architectural commission, not merely a sketch or informal design exercise. The commission was treated, within the firm’s archival record, as a project of the same kind as the residential commissions Charles had executed throughout his career.

The commission’s 1931 dating coincides with the year of Thomas Sumner Greene’s death, on January 10, 1931, at the age of eighty-eight. The compressed timeline between death and gravestone commission — Charles would have begun the design process in the months immediately following his father’s death — represents the kind of grief-driven creative work that often accompanies the loss of a parent. Charles, age sixty-three at the time, had recently completed his last fully original architectural commission with the John Langley Howard House (1929, House 19 in this directory) and was concurrently engaged in the twelve-year Spindrift project (House 18) and the Mary J. Moore furniture commission (House 21). The gravestone commission was undertaken in the immediate aftermath of his father’s death, alongside this continuing professional work.

The commission was executed for placement in El Encinal Cemetery, which would also become the cemetery where Charles himself would eventually be buried. Charles, in 1931, was designing not only his father’s gravestone but, in some implicit sense, the architectural setting in which his own future grave would eventually be placed. The cemetery, with its sentinel oaks, its sloping hillside, its views across the estuary toward Monterey Bay, was the place Charles selected for his father’s burial — and, through that selection, the place that would become the family’s architectural-historical setting at the close of life.

The Personal-Architectural Confluence

Few professional architectural commissions in any career involve the degree of personal connection between the designer and the project’s purpose that the Thomas Sumner Greene gravestone commission embodied for Charles Sumner Greene. The architect was the deceased’s son. The architect’s middle name — “Sumner” — was the father’s middle name, passed forward into the next generation. The commission was the design of the funerary marker for the man who had brought the architect’s family to California in 1892, whose medical convictions about light and air had substantially shaped the architect’s residential design vocabulary, who had lived to see his sons’ professional careers reach their full development and decline, and who had passed away at the age of eighty-eight in the Carmel community where the architect had himself been living since 1916.

Charles, in undertaking the commission, was performing several distinct kinds of work simultaneously. He was, in the most direct sense, a son designing the memorial for his father. He was also, as a professional architect, executing a commission within his standard professional practice — a small-scale architectural project requiring the same attention to proportion, material, inscription, and composition that any monument design would require. He was, additionally, designing a memorial that would mark his own family’s presence within the Monterey burial landscape, with the implicit understanding that his own future burial would likely occur near his father’s grave at the same cemetery. The convergence of personal grief, professional architectural practice, family history, and anticipatory family-burial planning produced a commission unlike any other in Charles’s professional record.

The compressed timeline of the commission — undertaken in the months immediately following his father’s January 1931 death — meant that the design work occurred during the period of acute grief that follows the loss of a parent. The discipline of architectural design, with its requirement for considered decisions about scale, material, and inscription, would have provided a kind of focused attention that grief work often requires. The commission was, in this sense, both an architectural project and a process by which Charles worked through his father’s death within the disciplinary framework that his professional life had developed.

The result of this personal-professional confluence was a gravestone that exists today in El Encinal Cemetery, marking Thomas Sumner Greene’s burial within the cemetery’s grounds. The specific architectural character of the design — what Charles produced when he sat down to design his father’s memorial — is preserved in the project drawings at Berkeley and Columbia, available for consultation by scholars and family historians who wish to study the specific design choices Charles made. The publicly accessible record preserves the existence of the commission, its dates, its location, and its broader biographical context; the architectural details remain within the archival material, awaiting consultation by those with reason to study them directly.

The Cemetery as Continuing Family Setting

The Greene family connection to El Encinal Cemetery, established with Thomas Sumner Greene’s burial in 1931 and the gravestone Charles designed for him, would extend across the subsequent decades of the family’s life in central California. Lelia Ariana Mather Greene, the matriarch — who had been married to Thomas for sixty-two years at the time of his death — would, on the available evidence, also be buried within the family burial setting at El Encinal in the years following Thomas’s death. Charles Sumner Greene himself would be buried at El Encinal in 1957, twenty-six years after he had designed his father’s gravestone, with his own grave eventually identified as Site Number 10 on the City of Monterey’s official historic cemetery tour. Alice Gordon White Greene, Charles’s wife, would survive him by eight years before her own death in 1965 in King City, Monterey County, at age ninety-five.

The cumulative effect, across the decades from 1931 onward, was the establishment of El Encinal Cemetery as the family burial setting for Charles Sumner Greene’s branch of the Greene family. The selection of this specific cemetery, in this specific Monterey location, with this specific architectural character of sloping grounds, sentinel oaks, and views toward the bay, produced the family’s permanent presence within the architectural and natural landscape of the central California coast where Charles had spent the second half of his professional career.

Henry Mather Greene, by contrast, would establish the burial setting for his own branch of the family at a different cemetery — the cemetery of the Church of Our Savior in San Gabriel, California, near the Pasadena residential context where Henry had spent his entire professional life. Henry’s late-career memorial commissions would include the 1940 Emeline and Lelia Gravemarkers at the Church of Our Savior Cemetery (House 24 in this directory), executed for his deceased wife Emeline Augusta Dart Greene and his deceased mother Lelia. Henry himself would be buried at the same San Gabriel cemetery upon his death in 1954.

The two brothers’ family burial settings — Charles’s family at El Encinal in Monterey, Henry’s family at the Church of Our Savior in San Gabriel — represent the geographic divergence of the Greene family’s two principal branches in their later decades. The brothers, who had grown up together in St. Louis and worked together in Pasadena across the firm’s three decades of partnership, had spent their later professional lives in separate cities six hundred miles apart, and their family burial settings reflect that geographic separation. The Thomas Sumner Greene gravestone at El Encinal in 1931 marks the establishment of the Carmel-Monterey branch of the family’s permanent presence within the central California coastal landscape; Henry’s San Gabriel commissions, nine years later, would mark the parallel establishment of the Pasadena branch of the family’s presence within Southern California.

The Building’s Place in the Greene & Greene Story

The Thomas Sumner Greene gravestone occupies a particular position within the firm’s catalog as one of the most personally meaningful late-career commissions in either brother’s professional record. The commission embodies a level of personal connection between the designer and the project’s purpose that few other commissions in the firm’s catalog can match: the designer’s own father as the deceased, the designer’s middle name carrying his father’s middle name, the cemetery selected becoming the family’s permanent burial setting, the project executed in the immediate aftermath of the father’s death.

The commission also represents a particular building type that the firm’s broader catalog rarely engaged with. Greene & Greene was, principally, a residential firm. The firm’s commercial commissions, civic commissions, and institutional commissions form a relatively small portion of its overall output. Funerary architecture — gravestones, memorials, mausoleums — is even less commonly represented in the firm’s catalog. The 1931 Thomas Sumner Greene gravestone and Henry’s 1940 Emeline and Lelia gravemarkers (House 24) together constitute the firm’s documented engagement with funerary architecture, and they were, in both cases, commissions executed for family members rather than for outside clients. The firm’s funerary architecture is, in this sense, family architecture — the architectural commemoration of the architects’ own family members.

Within Charles’s late career specifically, the gravestone commission also represents a particular kind of professional continuity. Across the years from 1929 onward, Charles’s architectural production had increasingly consisted of smaller-scale projects — the John Howard House completing his original residential career, the continuing Spindrift engagement, the Mary J. Moore furniture commission, the Mortimer Fleishhacker Sr. additions, and now the gravestone commission. The 1931 gravestone fits within this pattern of smaller-scale, more discrete late-career work, while distinguishing itself through the personal connection that the residential commissions did not embody. It is, in some sense, the most personal commission Charles ever undertook.

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Closing Reflection

Architects spend their professional lives designing buildings for other people. They design houses for clients who will live in them, commercial buildings for tenants who will conduct business within them, civic structures that will serve communities the architects themselves are not always part of. The buildings the architects design, while shaped by the architects’ professional vision, are ultimately for others to occupy. The Pasadena Peak Period of Greene & Greene was substantially this kind of architectural production — the brothers designed the Gamble House for the Gambles, the Blacker House for the Blackers, the Cordelia Culbertson House for Cordelia Culbertson and her sisters. The houses were the brothers’ work, but they were the clients’ homes.

A gravestone designed by a son for his father is, at its specific level, a different kind of project. The marker stands in the cemetery for the person buried beneath it — but it is also an architectural object that the designer’s family will encounter when they visit the grave. The son who designed it will, eventually, be buried near it. The grandchildren who never met the deceased will see the stone. The architectural decisions the designer made — the proportions, the materials, the inscription, the placement — will be encountered by family members across generations, in the contemplative environment of cemetery visits that mark the family’s ongoing relationship with its dead.

Charles Sumner Greene, in the spring or summer of 1931, sat at his drawing table in his Carmel studio, four miles north of El Encinal Cemetery in Monterey, and designed the gravestone for his father, Dr. Thomas Sumner Greene, who had brought the family from St. Louis to Pasadena in 1892, whose medical convictions about light and air had shaped the architectural vocabulary the firm had developed across its partnership years, who had lived to see his sons’ professional careers reach their full arc, who had died on January 10, 1931, in Carmel at the age of eighty-eight, after sixty-two years of marriage. The drawings from that design process are preserved in two universities’ archives. The gravestone itself is at El Encinal Cemetery, in the family burial setting that the 1931 commission established.

Twenty-six years later, in 1957, Charles himself was buried at El Encinal, near his father’s grave. His wife Alice was buried there in 1965. The City of Monterey’s historic cemetery tour identifies Charles’s grave as Site Number 10 on its official walking tour, recognizing him as one of the architects whose careers shaped the region’s cultural and architectural identity. The gravestone Charles designed for his father in 1931 stands as the original architectural marker for the Greene family’s permanent presence in the Monterey burial landscape — the first stone of a family burial setting that would, across the subsequent decades, accumulate the markers of additional family members.

A son designed his father’s gravestone. The son was an architect. The father had brought the family to California. The cemetery would become the family’s permanent setting. The drawings survive at Berkeley and Columbia. The gravestone survives at El Encinal. The family survives — across the additional generations that have followed since 1931 — in the broader Greene family genealogy that continues to trace the descendants of Thomas Sumner Greene and Lelia Ariana Mather Greene into the twenty-first century.

The architectural work and the personal work, in 1931, were the same work. Charles Sumner Greene, professional architect and son of the deceased, executed both at once.

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