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Greene & Greene

The Emeline, Lelia Gravemarkers

On a churchyard plot at the cemetery associated with the Episcopal Church of Our Savior in San Gabriel, California — a cemetery known variously as the Church of Our Savior Cemetery and as San Gabriel Cemetery, with the precise distinctions between these naming conventions reflecting the layered ecclesiastical and civic burial traditions of the San Gabriel Valley — stand the gravemarkers Henry Mather Greene designed in 1940 for his wife Emeline Augusta Dart Greene and his mother Lelia Ariana Mather Greene. The 1940 commission represents one of the most personally significant late-career projects in Henry’s professional record, and it stands in clear architectural and biographical parallel to Charles Sumner Greene’s 1931 commission for the gravestone of their father, Dr. Thomas Sumner Greene, at El Encinal Cemetery in Monterey (House 22 in this directory).

The commission, cataloged in the firm’s archival records under the joint designation “Emeline, Lelia Gravemarkers,” was executed at a moment of deep personal loss for Henry Mather Greene. Emeline Augusta Dart Greene, his wife of forty-seven years, died in 1940 — the death that the Altadena Historical Society documents as the immediate trigger for Henry’s subsequent relocation from his Pasadena residence to live with the family of his eldest son, Henry Dart Greene, at 1405 La Solana Drive in Altadena, where Henry would remain for the final fourteen years of his life. The commission for the gravemarkers was executed in the same year as Emeline’s death and represents Henry’s immediate architectural and personal response to the loss.

The inclusion of Lelia Ariana Mather Greene — Charles and Henry’s mother — within the same 1940 commission indicates that the project was designed as a coordinated funerary architectural treatment for two members of Henry’s family, whose deaths had occurred within the years immediately preceding the commission. Lelia, who had been documented as alive in April 1934 (preserved in a photograph in the USC Greene & Greene Archives at the Huntington Library, with the inscription “Charles, Alice, Ann & Mother Greene / Apr. 1934 / Henry took picture”), would have died sometime between that date and the 1940 commission. The two gravemarkers were designed as a unified architectural treatment of the family burial setting that Henry was establishing at the Church of Our Savior Cemetery in San Gabriel.

The Parallel to Charles’s 1931 Commission

The 1940 Emeline and Lelia gravemarkers commission stands in extraordinarily clear parallel to Charles Sumner Greene’s 1931 commission for the Thomas Sumner Greene gravestone at El Encinal Cemetery in Monterey. Both commissions were designed by one of the architect-brothers for memorial markers for members of his immediate family. Both commissions were executed in the immediate aftermath of the deaths they commemorated. Both commissions established family burial settings that the architect-brother would himself eventually be buried within. Both commissions represent some of the only documented funerary commissions in the entire Greene & Greene catalog — a firm whose principal output was substantial residential architecture rather than funerary or memorial design.

The biographical specifics of the two commissions reveal additional layers of personal and architectural confluence. Charles, in 1931, designed the gravestone for his father, Thomas Sumner Greene — the man whose middle name Charles carried as his own middle name, “Sumner.” Henry, in 1940, designed gravemarkers for his wife and his mother, Lelia Ariana Mather Greene — the woman whose maiden name Henry carried as his own middle name, “Mather.” The brothers, in undertaking these funerary commissions, were each designing memorial markers for family members whose names had been passed forward into the brothers’ own naming conventions. Charles’s middle name traced to his father; Henry’s middle name traced to his mother. The funerary commissions of 1931 and 1940 were, accordingly, commissions in which the architect’s own naming was implicated in the memorial work being executed.

The geographic divergence of the two commissions also reflects a substantial pattern within the firm’s late-career history. Charles’s 1931 commission was executed at El Encinal Cemetery in Monterey, in the central California coastal landscape where Charles had spent his post-1916 life. Henry’s 1940 commission was executed at the Church of Our Savior Cemetery in San Gabriel, in the upper San Gabriel Valley near the Pasadena residential context where Henry had spent his entire professional life. The two brothers’ family burial settings — Charles’s family at El Encinal in Monterey, Henry’s family at the Church of Our Savior Cemetery in San Gabriel — were established at locations approximately six hundred miles apart, with the geographic separation reflecting the broader divergence of the brothers’ late-career residential lives across the post-1922 decades.

The temporal relationship between the two commissions is equally significant. Charles’s 1931 commission was executed nine years before Henry’s 1940 commission. The gap of nearly a decade reflects, in part, the differing timing of family deaths — Thomas Sumner Greene died in January 1931, Emeline Augusta Dart Greene died in 1940. But it also reflects the distinct personal-architectural moments at which each brother was confronted with the question of how to memorialize a member of his immediate family. Charles, in 1931, had recently completed his last full original architectural commission and was working at the smaller scales of his late practice. Henry, in 1940, was approaching the conclusion of his own active architectural career. The 1940 gravemarkers commission would, within Henry’s documented late-career portfolio, prove to be one of the very last commissions he would execute.

Emeline Augusta Dart Greene

Emeline Augusta Dart Greene was born approximately in 1877 in Illinois, the daughter of parents whose family histories included roots in Pennsylvania and New York. Her mother, Charlotte Whitledge — born approximately 1851 in New York — would, in 1900, be living in Henry and Emeline’s Pasadena household, with the multi-generational residential arrangement reflecting the family-centered domestic patterns of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century American life. Emeline’s marriage to Henry Mather Greene was solemnized on August 22, 1893, in Rock Island County, Illinois, when Emeline was approximately sixteen years old and Henry was twenty-three. The marriage occurred at the very beginning of Henry’s professional career — Charles and Henry would establish their architectural practice in Pasadena the following year, in 1894 — and Emeline became Henry’s life partner at the moment when his and Charles’s professional engagement with California was being initiated.

Across the forty-seven years of her marriage to Henry, Emeline raised four children: Henry Dart Greene (born September 20, 1900 in Pasadena), W. Sumner Greene (born approximately 1907), Isabel H. Greene (born approximately 1908), and Elbert M. Greene (born approximately 1911). The children were raised in the family’s Pasadena residences across the firm’s Peak Period and the early years of Henry’s solo Pasadena practice — first at 834 Colorado Street (which the 1900 Census documented as next door to Charles, Alice, and Charles’s parents at 848 Colorado Street), and subsequently at 146 Bellefontaine Street in Pasadena (where Henry was documented as residing during the 1904-1907 period). Emeline’s domestic role across these years — managing the household, raising the four children, supporting Henry’s professional life — represents the kind of substantial but largely unremarked-upon partnership that often shaped the personal and professional lives of architectural firms’ principals’ wives across the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century American context.

Henry Dart Greene, the eldest of the four children, would establish his own substantial professional career in fruit packing and distribution, public relations, and film production. He worked with Argentine Fruit Distributors in Cipolletti, Argentina, from 1928 to 1931, and subsequently conducted public relations campaigns for the American Fruit and Produce Auction Association. His residence at 1405 La Solana Drive in Altadena would become, after Emeline’s 1940 death, the home in which his father Henry Mather Greene would spend the final fourteen years of his life. Henry Dart Greene’s papers — preserved in the Henry Dart Greene Papers at the UC Davis Library Archives — provide additional documentation of the family’s mid-century life.

Emeline’s death in 1940 brought to a close the forty-seven-year marriage that had spanned Henry’s entire professional career. The Altadena Historical Society documents the death and its consequences: “In 1940, after the death of his wife Emmaline, Henry moved to the home of his son Henry Dart Greene. He lived with his son’s family at 1405 La Solana until his death in 1954.” The 1940 gravemarker commission represents Henry’s immediate architectural and personal response to the loss — the design, executed within the months following Emeline’s death, of the memorial marker that would stand at the Church of Our Savior Cemetery in San Gabriel.

(A note on a date discrepancy: the Greene & Greene Virtual Archives findaid suggests that Emeline died in 1935 rather than 1940. The 1935 dating appears, on the broader documentary evidence, to be in error. The 1940 commission for the gravemarkers, the 1940 timing of Henry’s move to his son’s Altadena home, and the broader biographical timeline of Henry’s late life all support the 1940 dating for Emeline’s death. The 1935 reference in the OAC findaid may reflect a misattribution or transcription error within that source. Researchers should treat 1940 as the principal documented dating, with the 1935 alternative noted for completeness.)

Lelia Ariana Mather Greene

Lelia Ariana Mather Greene was born in November 1844 in Virginia, the daughter of parents who had themselves been Virginia-born. Her maiden name, Mather, would become the middle name carried by her younger son Henry, who took “Mather” as his middle name in honor of his mother’s family lineage. Her marriage to Thomas Sumner Greene — solemnized in the late 1860s, on a date that the 1930 Census’s documentation of “married 62 years” would suggest occurred approximately in 1868 — extended across the entirety of her adult life until Thomas’s death in January 1931.

Lelia was, in the family’s own characterization, an artist. The Old California historical-architectural account preserves her admonition to her son Charles in a letter from his MIT student years: “Ideal and Art are very fascinating…” — words she wrote to a son whose own career as a designer would, across the subsequent decades, repeatedly draw him toward exactly the territory of “Ideal and Art” she had warned him about. The artistic sensibility within the Greene family, traced through the brothers’ eventual architectural practice, drew substantially from Lelia’s own creative engagement with art and aesthetic questions, alongside Thomas’s medical convictions about light and air that have been more frequently noted in the architectural-historical literature.

Lelia’s life, like Thomas’s, was substantially shaped by health considerations. She suffered from asthma — a condition that, in addition to Thomas’s malarial concerns, contributed to the 1892 family relocation from St. Louis to Pasadena. The Southern California climate, with its dry warm conditions and substantial sunshine, was understood in late-nineteenth-century medical thinking as therapeutic for both respiratory conditions. Lelia and Thomas’s 1892 Pasadena relocation thus emerged from their joint health concerns, with the architectural careers of their two sons subsequently developing within the Southern California environment that the parental relocation had produced.

After Thomas’s death in January 1931, Lelia continued her own life within the family’s broader California residential context. The 1930 Census had documented her and Thomas as living on Monte Verde Street in Carmel — the residential context near Charles’s Carmel residence and studio that the family had established in their later years. After Thomas’s death, Lelia would have continued in some residential configuration within the family’s California network. The April 1934 photograph at the USC Greene & Greene Archives (with the inscription “Charles, Alice, Ann & Mother Greene / Apr. 1934 / Henry took picture”) documents Lelia’s continued presence within the family circle three years after Thomas’s death, photographed in Charles’s garden in Carmel by her younger son Henry. The specific date and circumstances of her death, between April 1934 and the 1940 gravemarker commission, are not extensively documented in widely accessible sources, but her death must have occurred within those six years.

The placement of Lelia’s gravemarker at the Church of Our Savior Cemetery in San Gabriel — rather than at El Encinal Cemetery in Monterey near Thomas — represents a particular family burial decision. The reasons for this geographic split between Thomas’s and Lelia’s burial settings are not extensively documented; possible explanations include Lelia’s preferences expressed during her later years, the family’s logistical circumstances at the time of her death, or Henry’s role as the surviving son who arranged her funerary commemoration at the cemetery near his own Pasadena home rather than at the cemetery where his father had been buried in 1931. The specific reasoning, like many of the most personal aspects of the family’s late-life decisions, is preserved (if at all) in the family’s correspondence and records rather than in the publicly accessible historical literature.

The Church of Our Savior Cemetery and the San Gabriel Burial Setting

The cemetery at which the 1940 gravemarkers were placed has been identified, in the firm’s archival records, as the “Church of Our Savior Cemetery” — referring to the cemetery associated with the Episcopal Church of Our Savior in San Gabriel, California. Other reference sources, including Find a Grave’s documentation of Henry Mather Greene’s burial location, identify the cemetery as “San Gabriel Cemetery.” The relationship between these two naming conventions reflects the layered ecclesiastical and civic burial traditions of San Gabriel; the Episcopal Church of Our Savior maintains a churchyard cemetery, while the larger municipal San Gabriel Cemetery operates as a separate but geographically adjacent burial institution. The precise distinction between the firm’s “Church of Our Savior Cemetery” designation and the more recent “San Gabriel Cemetery” designation may reflect either two separate cemeteries or two different naming conventions for the same burial ground; researchers consulting the original archival records and the cemetery’s own institutional documentation would be best positioned to resolve the precise identification.

What is documented is that Henry Mather Greene’s burial — when he died in 1954, fourteen years after the 1940 gravemarkers commission — was at the cemetery designated by Find a Grave as “San Gabriel Cemetery, San Gabriel, Los Angeles County, California, USA,” with GPS coordinates 34.1135833, -118.1065444. Whether this is the same physical location as the “Church of Our Savior Cemetery” referenced in the 1940 commission’s archival records, or whether the family’s burials are distributed across the two adjacent cemeteries, would require direct verification with the cemetery’s records. The principal architectural-historical fact — that the 1940 gravemarkers commission established Henry’s family burial setting in San Gabriel, in the cemetery context near the Pasadena residential life Henry had maintained throughout his career — remains stable across the differing naming conventions.

The cemetery’s selection as the family burial setting reflects the broader geographic and biographical pattern of Henry’s life. Where Charles’s 1916 move to Carmel had established a central California coastal residential context for Charles’s branch of the family, Henry had spent his entire professional life in Pasadena and the broader San Gabriel Valley. The 1940 cemetery selection at San Gabriel placed Henry’s family burials in the immediate residential and professional context of his life, rather than at the more distant Carmel-Monterey context where Charles’s branch had established its burial setting. The geographic divergence of the two brothers’ family burial settings — Carmel-Monterey for Charles’s family, Pasadena-San Gabriel for Henry’s family — represents the architectural-historical conclusion of the broader divergence of the two brothers’ residential and professional lives across the post-1922 decades.

The 1940 Commission

The specific architectural design of the 1940 Emeline and Lelia gravemarkers — the dimensions, materials, inscriptional content, decorative elements, and the relationship between the two markers within their plot at the cemetery — is preserved in the project drawings within the firm’s archival collections. The detailed design contents of the commission are accessible primarily through direct archival consultation rather than through the widely available published architectural-historical literature.

What is documented is that the commission was conceived as a unified design treatment for two markers, one for Emeline and one for Lelia, designed by Henry as a coordinated architectural project rather than as two separate ad hoc memorial commissions. The cataloging of the project under the joint designation “Emeline, Lelia Gravemarkers” indicates that Henry approached the commission with the design integration that his architectural training had developed — treating the two markers as elements of a single design composition rather than as independent objects.

The personal-architectural confluence of the commission was substantial. Henry, age seventy in 1940, was simultaneously the husband of one of the women being memorialized (Emeline) and the son of the other (Lelia). The commission required him to design memorial architecture for two of the most central women of his entire life — his wife of forty-seven years and his mother. The design discipline of the commission — the careful proportioning, the considered material choices, the integration of inscriptional content — provided the architectural framework within which Henry was working through, simultaneously, the loss of his wife and the prior loss of his mother. The grief that the commission embodied was thus doubled — two losses memorialized at once, in coordinated architectural design language, by the architect who was both the husband of one and the son of the other.

The commission also represents, within Henry’s documented professional record, one of the very last commissions of his active career. Henry’s office, by 1940, had substantially wound down from its more active 1920s and early 1930s output. The commissions documented after 1940 in Henry’s record are very limited; the 1940 gravemarkers commission stands near the conclusion of Henry’s documented architectural production. After the commission’s completion, Henry would relocate to his son Henry Dart Greene’s home at 1405 La Solana Drive in Altadena, and his subsequent fourteen years of life — until his death in October 1954 — would be substantially withdrawn from active architectural practice.

The Building’s Place in the Greene & Greene Story

The 1940 Emeline and Lelia gravemarkers occupy a particular position within the firm’s catalog as one of only two documented funerary architectural commissions in the firm’s entire record (the other being Charles’s 1931 Thomas Sumner Greene gravestone at El Encinal Cemetery in Monterey, House 22 in this directory). The two funerary commissions, taken together, represent the firm’s only sustained engagement with funerary architectural design — 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 immediate family members.

The commission also represents the conclusion of a particular architectural-historical pattern in Henry’s late career. Across the 1920s and 1930s, Henry’s solo Pasadena practice had increasingly engaged with smaller-scale projects — the relocations and additions of the 1925-1928 period, the 1929 Estelle Strasburg House in Covina, the 1935 L. C. Johnson Garage in Altadena (House 23 in this directory), and now the 1940 gravemarkers in San Gabriel. The trajectory across these years had been from substantial new residential commissions toward smaller and more discrete projects, culminating in the 1940 funerary commission that combined personal grief with professional architectural discipline at the smallest functional scale.

The commission’s parallel to Charles’s earlier 1931 commission also closes a particular architectural-historical loop. The two brothers, who had grown up together in St. Louis, who had attended MIT together, who had practiced together in Pasadena across thirty years of partnership, who had separated geographically with Charles’s 1916 move to Carmel, and who had pursued separate solo careers across the post-1922 decades — these two brothers had each, in their late careers, undertaken funerary commissions for members of their own immediate family. Charles’s 1931 commission for his father at El Encinal in Monterey, and Henry’s 1940 commission for his wife and mother at the Church of Our Savior Cemetery in San Gabriel, together constitute the firm’s documented funerary architectural output. Two commissions, nine years apart, by two separate brothers, for four family members across two cemeteries — these are the only funerary works in the entire Greene & Greene catalog.

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Closing Reflection

A husband designs the gravemarker for his wife of forty-seven years. A son designs the gravemarker for his mother. The husband and the son are the same person — Henry Mather Greene, age seventy in 1940, working at his drawing table in Pasadena, designing both markers as a coordinated architectural composition for placement at the same cemetery. The wife is Emeline Augusta Dart Greene, who has just died in 1940 after sharing his entire professional life. The mother is Lelia Ariana Mather Greene, who died sometime between April 1934 and 1940, who lived to see her sons’ professional careers reach their full development and decline, who carried the family’s artistic sensibility forward across the formative years of Charles’s and Henry’s lives, and whose maiden name “Mather” is the middle name Henry has carried his entire life.

The grief is doubled, and so is the architectural work. Two markers, designed at once, in coordinated language, for placement at the same cemetery, for two of the most central women of the architect’s entire life. The discipline of architectural design — the careful proportioning, the considered material choices, the integration of inscriptional content — provides the framework within which Henry is working through, simultaneously, the loss of his wife and the prior loss of his mother. He is seventy years old. He has been a practicing architect for forty-six years. He will have only fourteen more years of life ahead of him, lived substantially withdrawn from active practice in his son Henry Dart Greene’s home at 1405 La Solana Drive in Altadena. The 1940 gravemarkers commission stands near the very conclusion of his architectural production.

The commission also stands, in its completion, in profound parallel to the 1931 Thomas Sumner Greene Gravestone commission that Charles undertook at El Encinal Cemetery in Monterey nine years earlier. Charles, in 1931, had designed the marker for their father; Henry, in 1940, designs the markers for their mother and his wife. Charles’s middle name was their father’s middle name; Henry’s middle name was their mother’s maiden name. Charles’s commission established the family’s burial setting at El Encinal in Monterey; Henry’s commission establishes the family’s burial setting at the Church of Our Savior Cemetery in San Gabriel. Two brothers, two commissions, two cemeteries, four family members memorialized — these are the only funerary works in the entire Greene & Greene catalog, and they are, in both cases, family architectural commemorations rather than commercial commissions for outside clients.

The drawings from the 1940 commission, like the drawings from the 1931 commission, are preserved in the firm’s archival collections. The gravemarkers themselves stand at the Church of Our Savior Cemetery in San Gabriel, awaiting the eventual visit of family members, scholars, and architectural pilgrims who wish to see them in their permanent cemetery setting. Henry Mather Greene was buried at the same cemetery upon his death in 1954, joining his wife and his mother in the family burial setting his 1940 commission had established. The commemoration that the 1940 commission embodied — for two women, by a man who was both husband and son — was completed, in its broader family-architectural arc, with Henry’s own burial fourteen years later.

A career has chapters, and within those chapters there are commissions that distill the personal and the architectural together at a level of compression that few other professional moments achieve. The 1940 Emeline and Lelia Gravemarkers commission is one of those distilled moments. It is an architectural commission, executed in the documented disciplinary language of Henry Mather Greene’s professional practice. It is a funerary commission, designed for placement in a cemetery setting that would receive the family’s continuing burials across the subsequent decades. It is a personal commission, designed by a man at the moment of acute personal loss for two of the most central women of his entire life. And it is, within the firm’s broader catalog, one of two paired funerary commissions — Charles’s 1931 commission and Henry’s 1940 commission — that together complete the firm’s engagement with the architecture of memorial commemoration.

The husband designs the marker for his wife. The son designs the marker for his mother. The architect designs the architecture for the people he most loved. The drawings survive. The markers survive. The cemetery survives. The family’s continuing burials at the Church of Our Savior Cemetery in San Gabriel — Emeline in 1940, Lelia at some point between 1934 and 1940, Henry in 1954 — continue across the decades.

The architecture of love, in its funerary form, was completed.

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