Cemetery of the Week #62: Sunset Hills Cemetery

Posted on May 30, 2012 by

Crack the Whip

Sunset Hills Cemetery
G-4413 Flushing Road
Flint, Michigan 48504
Telephone: (810) 732-0260
Founded: 1926
Number of interments: Findagrave lists more than 4500.
Open: 8 a.m. – 6 p.m. in summer, 8 a.m. – 5 p.m. in winter

Sunset Hills Cemetery lies across from the Flint River between the former automotive capital of Flint and the former farming village of Flushing, Michigan. Sunset Hills is a lovely combination of lawn cemetery (with bronze monuments lying flush with the sod) and garden cemetery, full of gorgeous old trees, winding roadways, and peaceful views. In the spring, it comes alive with birdsong. In summer, you’d be amazed at all the shades of green. When autumn comes, the trees seem to catch fire with leaves of gold and orange. It holds a new kind of silence when the snow is on the ground.

Sunset Hills doesn’t have famous people buried in it. The best Findagrave can offer is Arthur Ellsworth Summerfield, who served as Postmaster General from 1953-1961, and Booker Moore, who played fullback for the Buffalo Bills. The Political Graveyard adds only Herbert E. Crouter, who ran as a prohibition candidate for the House of Representatives, the Lieutenant Governorship of Michigan, and the University of Michigan board of regents. It’s unclear to me if he ever succeeded in getting himself elected.

Sunset Hills is worth visiting because it’s home to some of the best sculpture I’ve seen in a graveyard anywhere.

The Provider

The first sculpture to greet the visitor stands just inside the gate. “The Provider” was sculpted by Derek Wernher in the likeness of Albert Koegel. (Koegel was the patriarch of the Koegel’s hotdog empire. Michiganders are fanatic about their hotdogs and Koegels are considered the best.) Koegel’s interest in the cemetery, dating back to its founding in the 1920s, “provided the beautiful backdrop of large trees we enjoy today,” according to Sunset Hills’ website.

“The Provider” is an older gentleman, raising a tin can up to fill a bird feeder. He wears striped rubber boots, slacks with a belt, and a button-down shirt: generic clothing for a very specific figure. The rough surface of his clothing was patterned in the casting process.

Wernher says, “My representational work does not dictate a story but, rather, captures a moment… All these works focus on the portrayal of the ‘self’ of the individual. We are all solitary, yet we are part of the universe.”

Generation Bridge

Farther into the cemetery, you come upon a group of statues called “The Generation Bridge” by J. Seward Johnson. A grandfather in a tweed suit offers a broken Hersey bar to a little girl in a quilted pale blue outfit. He looks at her, but she gazes at the blanket in her hands. Beside him on the wooden bench sits her dolly. The sculpture is tucked back under the trees in such a way that it looks very realistic.

“My art is an imitation of life. [The sculptures] invite people to come into that space, so that they don’t feel quite alone.” – J. Seward Johnson

Detail of Crack the Whip

The centerpiece of the Sunset Hills sculpture collection is “Crack the Whip,” a collection of eight children running in a semi-circle to play the game. “Crack the Whip” was the first of Sunset Hills’ sculptures, dedicated in 1983. The sculpture, which cost $85,000 at the time, was donated by an anonymous Flint-area resident who had family buried in the cemetery.

The Smithsonian’s Save Our Sculpture survey, compiled in 1993, says that the original leader of the game had gone missing. He appears in my photos taken in 1998 and 2008, so he must have been replaced. My photos from 1998 are here on yesterday’s post.

The sculpture is comprised of an Asian girl, two African American kids, a Native American, and four white kid, each distinct and individual. They are dressed in cleats and baseball shorts, a headband and a basketball jersey, a pinafore. The Asian girl has lost her Birkenstock sandal, which lies in the grass nearby.

Multiple copies of the sculpture are scattered throughout the Midwest. According to his website, Johnson makes up to seven duplicates of each sculpture. One belongs to Radisson Hotel Engineering Department in Indianapolis, who purchased it in 1986. Another copy stands at the Lincoln National Life Insurance Company in Fort Wayne Indiana. They dedicated theirs in 1987.

The Gardener

J. Seward Johnson’s final sculpture in the cemetery is called “The Gardener.” The man wears blue denim overalls with a handkerchief dangling from his back pocket. His turquoise plaid flannel shirt has its sleeves rolled back. In one hand, he holds a spade. The other holds a small flowerpot, which is sometimes filled with real flowers. On the ground beside him sits a tray containing more flowerpots. Except for the gloss on his skin – which could be sunscreen – he appears real enough that I expect people sometimes ask him directions.

Candice and the Flower Girls

“Candice and the Flower Girls,” by Gary Price, is a multi-figure piece that includes a pair of little girls and an older girl with a watering can, which trickles out a stream of water. Candice wears a sailor dress and dice-shaped ponytail holders. She holds a straw hat in one hand and her watering can in the other, her expression intent. She doesn’t have any paint, so she looks less realistic than the other sculptures in the cemetery.

The flower girls are roughly sculpted, with big grooves that show the pressure of the sculptor’s thumb. Their faces have less personality and are less established in their ethnicity than the others. Price says his goal is lifting the human spirit through sculpture. He often depicts children in natural settings, gardening and exploring nature.

The Flag Raiser

The final sculpture in Sunset Hills is called “The Flag Raiser,” again by Derek Wernher. The cemetery’s grounds crew calls him Charlie. He’s modeled on Charles Smith, grounds supervisor for over 39 years. He wears a large ring of keys clipped at his hip, a big chunky watch, loafers, and eyeglasses with no glass in them, as he reaches up as if raising the American flag.

Sunset Hills is a lovely place to spend a summer’s day, if you find yourself in mid-Michigan. Stop into the cemetery office, opposite the cemetery gates, and they will give you a map of all the sculptures.

 

Useful links:

Sunset Hills home page

Sunset Hills Flickr gallery

Sunset Hills urban legend

Smithsonian public sculpture listing

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Summer

Posted on May 29, 2012 by

Detail of the Crack the Whip sculpture

To me, summertime means time to explore cemeteries.  One of the first graveyards I fell in love with was Sunset Hills in Flint, Michigan.  It’s a lovely combination of lawn cemetery (with monuments lying flush with the sod) and garden cemetery, full of lush old trees.  The element that first set Sunset Hills apart for me was the Crack the Whip sculpture by J. Seward Johnson.

Here’s a view of the sculpture set in its landscape.  It was kind of shocking the first time I came upon it.  From a distance, it looks for all the world like a gang of kids playing in the graveyard.

We used to play Crack the Whip all the time when I was a kid (although never in the graveyard). Everyone joins hands and the largest kid runs, dragging the line behind her.  The goal is to twist and turn and tangle the line up, snapping the little kids on the end so fast that they lose their feet or their grip and go tumbling away from the rest of the line.  It can be dangerous.  Parents probably don’t encourage their kids to play it these days, even though it was immensely satisfying to hang on, no matter what.

Johnson’s sculpture has such wonderful detail that there’s even a bronze sandal lying in the grass where it’s fallen from one girl’s foot. The children strain with the effort of keeping together. They sway and bend, balancing against each other, almost but not quite toppling over.  It’s a masterwork, an amazing, complicated piece.  Sunset Hills’ website says the eight children are celebrating life.

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Cemetery of the Week #61: Granary Burying Ground

Posted on May 23, 2012 by

The Granary Burying Ground in springtime

Old Granary Burying Ground
101a Tremont Street at Bromfield
Boston, MA 02108
Telephone: (617) 635-4505
Founded: 1660
Size: 2 acres
Number of interments: 5000, or perhaps as many as 8000, under 2345 markers
Open: Daily 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., although some areas may be closed during the restoration work.

This weekend and throughout the summer: The Freedom Trail Organization offers a full schedule of historical tours, led by a costumed guide. The schedule is here. Tickets range from $6-$12.

Established in 1660 in an attempt to alleviate the crowding at King’s Chapel Burying Ground, the Granary Burying Ground takes its name from a grain storehouse that once stood nearby. More than 2300 — and perhaps as many as 8,000 — corpses lay inside this small patch of ground, which barely covers two acres. One source estimates that as many as 20 bodies lie beneath each tombstone.

Unfortunately, few of the grave markers actually mark graves any longer. Around the dawn of the 20th century, groundskeepers re-aligned the gravestones to make it easy to mow between them. In some cases, the footstones — which once marked the foot of a grave like a footboard on a bed frame — now lean against their headstones. At least they hadn’t been lost altogether. Perhaps during the current renovation, some well-meaning soul will set them back up the way they belong.

Paul Revere’s gravestone

The Old Granary Burying Ground is the final home of many of Boston’s Revolutionary War patriots, including James Otis (“Taxation without representation is tyranny.”), Robert Treat Paine (signer of the Declaration of Independence and first Massachusetts Attorney General), and victims of the Boston Massacre, including Crispus Attucks.

In the center of the graveyard stands a granite obelisk labeled Franklin in large, proud capitals. It marks the grave of Benjamin Franklin’s parents, Josiah and Abiah. The original stone he’d chosen was replaced by this one in 1827, erected by local citizens who wanted to lay claim to the glory of their native son, despite the fact that he’d preferred to be buried in Philadelphia. One of my antique postcards incorrectly identifies the monument as Franklin’s own, a misconception that was undoubtedly good for tourism.

John Hancock’s monument

It’s common for visitors to line up to be photographed beside the monuments of Paul Revere and Samuel Adams. Also in the graveyard is the monument to John Hancock, although he may no longer lie beneath it. One story says that grave robbers stole his hand first, whether because they couldn’t remove his rings or because a collector wanted the hand that signed the Declaration of Independence. His body may have vanished during the restoration of his gravesite. I don’t know how much truth there is in these allegations.

Another gravestone that attracts pilgrims is that of Mary Goose. Mary was the first wife of Isaac Goose, whose second wife Elizabeth may or may not have been the famous Mother Goose. Legend has it that Elizabeth’s son-in-law collected her stories into Songs for the Nursery, or Mother Goose’s Melodies, but scholars find it suspicious that no copy of the original book survived. Many of the Mother Goose tales date back to France in the late 1600s. Still, some old guidebooks to Boston identify Mary as Mother Goose.

In the Granary Burying Ground, ornamentation on gravestones runs a gamut from the early awkward death’s-heads common in King’s Chapel Burying Ground to anatomically correct skulls to cherubs with portrait-like faces. I particularly liked the cherubs with hair etched by a delicate tool. These “soul effigies” indicate a huge shift in Christian philosophy, from the Puritan belief that only the Elect will rise to Heaven while their bodies moldered in the grave to a general sense that all souls took flight upon the body’s death and Heaven was available to all.

Some of the stones can be traced to particular carvers, which demonstrates an advance in how people valued graveyards. Once tombstones were acknowledged as works of art — instead of a necessary evil — artists wanted to claim to their designs. Some carvers even autographed their stones. Henry Christian Geyer advertised his talents in the local papers. He was a fisherman who had studied birds well enough to put realistic wings on his cherubs.

Unlike earlier headstones, the Granary stones offer epitaphs that record how the survivors felt about their losses. These seemed to have come into fashion in the late 1700s. One that struck me said:
“To this sad shrine who ’ere thou art draw near
Here lies the Friend most joy’d, the Son most dear
Who ne’er knew joy, but Friendship might divide
Or gave his father Grief, but when he died.”

The Granary Burying Ground is guard by a small Egyptian-style gate. Egyptian grave ornaments didn’t come into fashion until after Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign nearly two centuries after this cemetery was founded. The granite gate was designed by Solomon Willard, architect of the Bunker Hill Monument. It was quarried in nearby Quincy and unveiled in 1840.

In 1879, the last body sank into the dirt of the Granary Burying Ground. Now it invites visitors to touch history.

Useful links:
Interesting tidbits about the Granary Burying Ground and a map of Boston

The Granary Burying Ground is getting a facelift.

My review of a guidebook to Boston’s historic burying grounds

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If you should visit Yosemite…

Posted on May 20, 2012 by

Guide to the Yosemite CemeteryGuide to the Yosemite Cemetery by Hank Johnston

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Everywhere you go, there’s a cemetery. Case in point: tucked into Yosemite Valley is a tiny graveyard where pioneers, Native Americans, and summer visitors rest in peace. The graveyard is a pretty, peaceful place, despite the 3 million visitors to Yosemite National Park each year.

A visit to the Yosemite Pioneer Cemetery is much enhanced by bringing along this little guidebook, which is available from the Visitor Center gift shop. It provides biographies of the Valley’s permanent residents, along with photographs and history lessons. The stories it tells are the best part.

The book also provides a map, so you can stand at the grave as you read about the person beneath your feet.

As far as I’m concerned, this is the perfect souvenir for a trip to Yosemite. My only quibble is that I wish it began with more history of the valley, so that the people who stay there now were put into a wider perspective.

The guidebook is available to view online here. There’s one Amazon listing for a used copy, but it’s overpriced. You could try writing to the Yosemite Visitor Center to see if you can mail order a copy directly.

View all my reviews

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Cemetery of the Week #60: Yosemite Pioneer Cemetery

Posted on May 16, 2012 by

Yosemite Pioneer Cemetery
aka Yosemite Cemetery
Yosemite Village, Yosemite National Park, California 95389
Telephone: (209) 372-0200
Founded: 1870ish
Size: ¼ acre
Number of interments: Approximately 50
Open: every day

Even armed with the Guide to the Yosemite Cemetery, it’s not easy to find the Yosemite Pioneer Cemetery. When I visited, its sign was hidden between parked cars, behind the grocery story and employee housing.

Shadowed by trees and surrounded by a low split-rail fence, most of the graves in the Pioneer Cemetery are marked with plain wooden signboards, painted Park Service brown. Some grave monuments are carved from Yosemite granite.

The earliest grave marker in the cemetery records “A Boy.” Jack Leidig, an old-timer who grew up in the Valley, remembered him as the first person to be buried in the graveyard in 1870. The guidebook theorizes that this area was chosen for a cemetery because the natives had already used it as a burial ground. The Miwoks and Paiutes did not mark their graves, but Native American remains have been uncovered over the years during construction projects in the Valley.

Galen Clark, the first guardian of Yosemite in 1866, selected the granite boulder for his tombstone and planted six trees to shade his grave. Clark lived for 20 years after he’d planned his grave. Four of his trees still survive.

An enormous slab of local granite commemorates the Hutchings family. “Daughter of Yosemite” Gertrude (Cosie) Hutchings Mills was born in the Valley and lived there on and off through her 89 years. She served as postmaster of Yosemite Valley, then as schoolteacher in the village of Wawona, just outside the park’s boundary. When she married, she left Yosemite for 42 years, but after she was widowed in 1941, she returned every summer to work in Yosemite Valley, staying in a tent in Tuolumne Meadows.

Effie’s wooden grave marker

A weathered board marks the grave of Effie Maud Crippen, who died August 31, 1881, “age 14 yrs, 7 mos, 22 days.” “She faltered by the wayside and the angels took her home,” it says. According to the guidebook, Effie moved to Yosemite with her family in 1877. She loved the valley and explored it on horseback, sketching it and describing it in her poetry. A photograph from the year before she died shows her as a serious girl with a thick dark braid, wearing a shin-length skirt and low button-boots. Although hard to imagine, humans had already begun to litter Yosemite by August 1881. Wading in Mirror Lake, Effie stepped on a broken bottle and severed an artery in her foot. The 14-year-old bled to death.

Not far away from Effie’s grave stands a marble marker “In Memory of Albert May, native of Ohio,” who also died in 1881. On his stone, two manly hands clasp, signifying friendship. Marble doesn’t occur inside the boundaries of Yosemite; the Sierra Nevada Mountains are granite. This stone must have been brought in by mule train to mark May’s grave, hinting at the high regard his friend A. G. Black, who erected the stone, must have held for him. May worked for Black as a carpenter and caretaker at Black’s New Sentinel Hotel. Rocks the size of grapefruit ringed the grave itself when I visited.

John Anderson’s monument

John C. Anderson’s marker declares that he “was killed by a horse on the 5th of July 1867.” “Beloved by all,” it says. On his stone, a willow bends under the weight of its own branches like a person burdened by grief. The faded inscription had sunk into the ground.Luckily, the guidebook recorded it:

“Be ye also ready for ye know
not the hour the Son of Man cometh
Dearest Brother, tho had left us,
Here thy loss, we deeply feel.”

When gold fever struck him in 1856, John C. Anderson traveled from Illinois to stake a claim in Yosemite Valley. The gold claim didn’t pan out as richly as the hotel he and three other prospectors built for travelers to Yosemite. He served as the hotel’s coachman on the day he died.

Contradicting the date on the stone, the Mariposa Gazette reported that Anderson had been kicked by a horse and died almost instantly on July 13, 1867. In fact, the authors of the guidebook found many errors in the birth and death dates on the gravestones. Either this was a function of the delay in getting the news to Mariposa to be published or, as in Anderson’s case, the extreme time required to import the marble to mark his grave.

Originally, Anderson had been buried at the foot of the Four-Mile Trail, before being exhumed and moved to the Pioneer Cemetery. Tradition relates that his friends thrust his green locust-wood switch into the ground to mark his first grave. All locust trees in the valley supposedly descend from that green grave marker. I liked the romance of the story, even if the locusts are invasive. Ansel Adams made a beautiful photograph of them shrouded in snow.

In the old days, people had been buried all over the park, where they fell or near places they’d loved. At some point, all the bodies that could be located were gathered together into the graveyard.

Here, in this quiet, tucked-away corner in one of the busiest tourist destinations in the country — averaging three million visitors annually — these permanent residents have become part of the living history forever. Even if their lives had been brief and their deaths agonizing or sad, their spirits had been woven into the beauty of the valley.

Note:
A Guide to the Yosemite Cemetery is available to borrow or purchase at the Valley Visitor Center. I’ll review it tomorrow.

Yosemite has a second graveyard tucked away in Wawona. Ask at the Wawona Visitor Center for its location.

Useful links:

Walking tour of the Pioneer Cemetery, mirroring the text of the guidebook.

Historic places of Yosemite

List of burials in the Yosemite Pioneer Cemetery

Article from 1961

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Cemetery of the Week #59: Vysehrad Cemetery

Posted on May 9, 2012 by

In Vysehrad Cemetery, Prague

Vyšehradsky Hrbitov
11 V Pevnosti, Prague 128 00, Czech Republic
Telephone: +420 2 4141 0348
Founded: 1869, in its present incarnation
Number of interments: Approximately 650
Open: May-September from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., until 5 p.m. from November to February, and until 6 p.m. in March, April, and October

Warning: I’ve found three different addresses for the cemetery, so I’m going with the address I found more than once. When I visited the cemetery, I simply got off at the Vysehrad metro station and climbed the hill past the Exhition Hall. You’ll find the graveyard, trust me.

Vysehrad means high castle. The rocky promontory that carries the name was the site of the original wooden castle in Prague, built around the 10th century. Though no trace of that castle remains, Let’s Go calls the area the Czech Republic’s most revered landmark. It is the site where a vision caused Princess Libuse to point to the forest across the river and direct a castle called Praha to be built. She prophesied Prague would become a rich and powerful center of trade. For centuries, the city set about making the dream come true.

Founded in 1869 on the site of a small parish cemetery that no longer exists, Vysehrad Cemetery was conceived at that time as a shrine to the heroes of the Czech Nationalist Revival. It contains graves of more than 600 important Czechs, including Art Nouveau painter Alfons Mucha, composers Antonin Dvorak and Bedrich Smetana, poet Jan Neruda, and playwright Karel Capek, who coined the term robot.

A neo-Renaissance arcade rings the cemetery. Under its covered passageway, curving gothic arches delineate one burial plot from the next. Baroque ironwork fences enclose some of the graves. Others display elaborate mosaics, depicting a rain of gold-leaf stars on a cobalt glass background, or a caparisoned knight like something out of Rackham’s King Arthur. In my favorite memorial, a ceramic blue-garbed angel in low relief leaned against a starburst mosaic of shades of gold and silver. My photograph doesn’t do justice to the breathtaking shimmer of those tiles.

Beneath the cloister hunched a marble sarcophagus carved with a gruesome skull. A pair of snakes wove in and out of unnatural openings in the bones, then twined together across the brow to form a diadem. The visceral reference to death startled me. On retrospect, it seemed a logical extension of the exquisite real bone artwork of the Kutná Hora ossuary.

Dvorak’s bust

After all these artistic pyrotechnics, Dvorak’s grave seemed less magnificent than I expected. A life-sized bronze bust scowled out from beneath the vaulted arcade. The composer looked as if he concentrated too hard on art to enjoy life. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the bust was made by the sculptor of the Jan Hus monument in Old Town Square.

The Cadogan City Guide to Prague calls Vysehrad Cemetery “an impressive gallery of modern Czech sculpture.” Monuments in Vysehrad span from Art Nouveau to Cubism. I’m not generally a fan of blocky modern art, but I was touched by the Taub monument with its two sturdy, faceless figures supporting each other in their grief. In contrast stood a monument whose family name I didn’t note, so captivated was I by the life-sized sculpture of the robed woman bowing forward as if to drop her tears onto the grave. A bearded man draped in a toga or a blanket clasped her hand. Their sadness was as evocative as the rough Cubist figures.

Toward the middle of the burial ground, a trio of graves encapsulated the breadth of artwork offered in Vysehrad Cemetery. First, a high relief bust of a woman gazed out of a marble archway as naturalistically as if the stone imprisoned her. Beside her, an art deco bronze of a woman with flowing hair rested her chin against her forearm across the top of the pink granite monument. Third in line, a high-gloss black granite stone had a gray granite mask inset. Grief distorted the face of the mask, its eyes squinted shut and mouth gaping around a moan. The same gilt that picked out the letters of the deceased’s name highlighted the mask’s eyebrows.

The Slavin Pantheon

The centerpiece of the cemetery is the towering Slavin Pantheon (after which the cemetery is sometimes mistakenly called) designed by Antonin Wiehl and completed in 1894. Slavin translates loosely to Hall of Fame. The community mausoleum, topped with an angel laying a palm frond on a sarcophagus, is the final resting place of over 50 Czech artists and sculptors, including Alfons Mucha. Even though she stood a long way from any road, black soot stained the poor angel.

Smetana’s monument,
with the Church of Saints Peter & Paul in the background.

The grave of composer Smetana is still remembered and visited. The annual Prague Spring festival starts here on his birthday (May 12), then proceeds to the Municipal House in town. Here’s an article about this year’s festival.

Useful links:
Lovely photos of Vysehrad Cemetery

Lonely Planet listing with alternate address

Other historical sites near Vysehrad Cemetery

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Historic Cemeteries Matter!

Posted on May 3, 2012 by

For the past seven years, American Express and the National Trust for Historic Preservation have awarded millions of dollars in grant funds to historic sites through Partners in Preservation, an online voting competition. Traditionally a cemetery is selected for the competition….but the cemetery never wins.

This year, THE WOODLAWN CEMETERY is among the 40 New York City sites eligible for a grant award. Funds are awarded to the sites with highest number of votes and the most creative and passionate supporters. We’re asking our friends who work tirelessly to preserve and interpret historic burial grounds to show the importance of these historic sites.

To win, we need you to vote daily. You can also post your thoughts on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or on your website to promote the VOTE. Voting starts April 26th and goes through May 21st. Just clickwww.thewoodlawncemetery.org to get started.

If Woodlawn wins, grant funds will be used to restore the exterior of the Belmont Mausoleum. Built in 1910 by Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, the mausoleum is a replica of the Chapel of St. Huber in Amboise, France. Deeded in Trust to Woodlawn, we must raise the funds to restore the memorial through grants and donations.

Please forward this email to those who care – HISTORIC CEMETERIES MATTER!

The Woodlawn Cemetery & Crematory

www.thewoodlawncemetery.org

Serving Metropolitan New York City for over 140 years.

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Cemetery of the Week #58: Swan Point Cemetery

Posted on May 2, 2012 by

Swan Point Cemetery
585 Blackstone Boulevard
Providence, Rhode Island 02906
Telephone: 410-272-1314
Founded: 1846
Size: 210 acres
Number of interments: approximately 40,000
Open: Depending on the weather, Swan Point is open daily from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. Eastern Standard Time and from 8 a.m. until 7 p.m. during Daylight Savings. Children under 16 must be accompanied by an adult.

Founded on just 60 acres in 1846, Rhode Island’s Swan Point Cemetery absorbed people who had been previously buried in the West Burial Ground and other earlier graveyards around Providence. The oldest section of the cemetery, overlooking the Seekonk River, contains graves that date back as early as 1722.

In 1886, landscape Chicago-based architect H.W.S. Cleveland was hired to develop Blackstone Boulevard through the cemetery. He’s responsible for the wall of large boulders that front Blackstone Boulevard for more than a mile, which was completed in 1900. In 1903, the Butler Avenue trolley car was extended to the cemetery, where a fieldstone shelter was constructed for riders. Many people came out just to walk the grounds.

The Aylsworth family monument

Even now, Swan Point’s chief draw is the beauty of its landscaping, which varies from lawn to forest trees to rhododendrons, azaleas, magnolias, and other flowering shrubs. In all it contains more than 200 kinds of trees and shrubs, most of them labeled. In the spring, daffodils gild the old section by the river.

Swan Point is full of lovely Victorian statuary, as well. Twenty-three former governors of Rhode Island are buried in Swan Point, each under a suitably grand monument.

Also among the better known people buried at Swan Point Cemetery is Major Sullivan Balou, wounded in the first battle of Bull Run, whose beautiful farewell letter to his wife featured in Ken Burn’s Civil War documentary.

H. P. Lovecraft’s tombstone

Swan Point’s most famous permanent resident is Howard Pillips Lovecraft. In New England Cemeteries: A Collector’s Guide, published in 1975, Andrew Kull wrote that Lovecraft’s grave was “somewhat difficult to find, since the name is inscribed on the monument of another family.” He recommended “cultists” ask at the office. When I visited in 2002, I thought my husband and I might be regarded as weirdoes, but the secretary treated our request as a common occurrence. She pulled out a drawer full of manila files. Inside Lovecraft’s file waited a stack of maps, already copied. She traced our route and sent us on our way without batting an eye. “Look for an obelisk that says Phillips,” she directed. “He’s right behind that.”

We took the main drive through the cemetery, swung around the 40-foot-tall Barnaby column — topped by a blindingly white muse — zigged and zagged briefly, then saw the Phillips monument directly ahead. The original monument on the plot belonged to Lovecraft’s grandparents. The back of it held Lovecraft’s parents’ name and dates. At the bottom, he was remembered as Howard P. Lovecraft, “Their Son.”

A smaller stone rose nearby. After New England Cemeteries: A Collector’s Guide saw print, Dirk W. Mosig — at that time, the leading authority on Lovecraft — solicited contributions to erect an individual tombstone. He unveiled it during a small ceremony in 1977. The low red granite marker spelled out Howard Phillips Lovecraft, August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1938, and added the epitaph, “I am Providence.”

Those words came from a letter Lovecraft wrote to his Aunt Lillian, eventually published in 2000 in Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters, edited by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz. Lovecraft wrote, “I will be dogmatic only to the extent of saying that it is New England I must have — in some form or other. Providence is part of me — I am Providence…”

One might have suspected that Howard Phillips Lovecraft was destined for oblivion. As a child, frequent psychosomatic illnesses kept him from school. He learned to recite poetry at the age of two and read the Arabian Nights (scarcely a children’s book) by the time he was five, so he acquired his view of the world — and vocabulary — from books, not from people.

Despite his inexperience with the world, “The Beast in the Cave,” his first fiction, appeared in 1905, when he was 15. Twelve years later, he still lived with his mother, which allowed him to write his gloomy tales in peace. Inspired by the fantasies of Lord Dunsany, Lovecraft wrote his first novel, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, in 1926. He was 36. Eleven years later, he’d be dead. Except for a brief sojourn in New York City, he spent his entire life in Providence.

Most of his fiction appeared in pulp magazines like Weird Tales and went uncollected into book form until after his death. Despite that, he is considered the 20th-century Poe, a pioneer in combining elements of horror and science fiction.

When Mason and I visited Swan Point Cemetery on a lovely April day, offerings piled on Lovecraft’s granite block. In addition to pennies lined carefully along the top of the gravestone, someone had left white pebbles. A bouquet of iris and ferns crumbled in the grass.

The air in Swan Point was vibrant with birdsong, fragrant from the exquisite elderly fruit trees laden with blossoms. The cemetery gave the sensation that life continues, despite darkness, despair, and death.

Useful links:
Swan Point Cemetery’s homepage

My review of Famous and Curious Cemeteries

A PDF birding list of more than 100 species seen at Swan Point is available on the cemetery’s website. In fact, a book called The Birds of Swan Point Cemetery is available from Amazon: The Birds of Swan Point Cemetery

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Win a copy of the Cemetery Travels Notebook

Posted on April 30, 2012 by

You could win a copy

What’s the grave of the most famous person in the world?

That was the question that found my Cemetery Travel blog via a Google search. It’s not a question I’ve answered yet, so I turn to the vast hivemind of the internet for the answer.

Leave your vote for the most famous person’s grave in the comments below before May 6, 2012 — and you could win a copy of the Cemetery Travels Notebook.  Illustrated with photos from this blog to inspire your own cemetery explorations, the perfect-bound notebook has plenty of room for your own notes and ruminations.

You can see a sample of the Cemetery Travels Notebook here.

So tell me: what is the most famous person’s grave in the world?

ETA: The contest is closed.  The books came today and I will announce the winner shortly.

Please feel free to continue to suggest the most famous person’s grave, though.  I am loving the responses.

You can order a copy of your own here: Cemetery Travels Notebook by Loren Rhoads

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Kickstart a Documentary about a Cemetery

Posted on April 28, 2012 by

Prospect Cemetery trailer

You can help fund a project to document Prospect Cemetery in Jamaica, Queens, New York:

Director’s Statement: Peter Riegert

I discovered Prospect Cemetery in the pages of Cornelia Read’s novel Invisible Boy, based on an actual 1989 murder case. Cornelia heard the story over twenty years ago when a friend introduced her to Cate Ludlam, president of the Prospect Cemetery Association.

For the last twenty-three years, Cate has worked as a volunteer to rescue this abandoned burial site from the ravages of vandalism, neglect, and nature’s relentless encroachment. A grant was secured last year to have decades’ worth of debris, fallen trees, and invasive weeds and vines hand-cleared from Prospect’s four-and-a-half acres.

Cornelia introduced me to Cate and Prospect board member Andrew Farren several months ago to advise them on creating a video record of the reclamation project. When they took me to see Prospect, however, I found myself deeply moved by the mystery and history of this beguiling ruin and we soon decided that a documentary seemed more appropriate.

I started talking about the project with friends and colleagues who shared their own impassioned stories about long-forgotten people and places, and why posterity and preservation matter.

Our intent is not just to tell the history of the cemetery, but to use this place as a prism to refract the many themes that are part of Prospect. We want to interview historians, artists, writers, poets, archaeologists, and others for insight into this most mysterious part of every life: the end.

Prospect’s History

Located in Jamaica, New York, Prospect Cemetery is the oldest burial ground in the borough of Queens, and among the oldest in New York City.

When you stand at the center of this uneven, wooded ground, you’re in direct contact with the New York of 350 years ago. It’s a small remnant of what was here before the city existed, before skyscrapers and police sirens, subways and concrete.

In 1655, fourteen English families traded two guns, a coat, and a handful of ammunition with the local Lenape Indians for acreage alongside Beaver Pond and founded the village of Jamaica. Peter Stuyvesant officially recognized their settlement the following year, and we know that the villagers were using Prospect’s land as a burial ground by 1668.

Memorialized here are Americans from every walk of life: parents and children, servants, laborers, and bosses… veterans of every American war from the Revolution through World War II, statesmen who shaped the colonies into a nation, and artists, actors, and writers who helped create our culture.

Here’s the Kickstarter link.

Here’s the link to the Prospect Cemetery Association.

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