J’aime Rubio was born and raised in California. Besides being a mother of two, she is also an accomplished author and published journalist who has contributed her historical knowledge and investigative research to various newspapers and magazines in both California and Arizona. She is also the host of the new podcast, “Stories of the Forgotten.” Although J’aime spends most of her free time roaming cemeteries and researching the past, she also maintains her website, which links to all of her historical blogs. Her blogs focus on people and places in history, with the hope to give a voice to the voiceless, so that the forgotten will be forgotten no more.
What’s your favorite thing to do in a cemetery?
Finding the graves of the people I research so they are remembered once more. I also love just taking walks in cemeteries as well, because I feel serenity there. Cemeteries are my home away from home.
Tell me about your favorite cemetery.
I have too many cemeteries that I love dearly. I don’t think I can name one particular cemetery I love more than another, but I would have to say it is a close tie between Stockton Rural Cemetery in Stockton and Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland. Both are in California.
Is there a cemetery or gravesite you’ve always wanted to visit?
If I could, I would visit my favorite author Richard Matheson’s grave, but unfortunately he was cremated and his ashes are kept private, so it is impossible.
What might your epitaph be?
The poem would be changed to a “SHE” instead of a “he” by James Whitcomb Riley ~She Is Not Dead ~ “I cannot say, and I will not say That she is dead. She is just away. With a cheery smile, and a wave of the hand, She has wandered into an unknown land And left us dreaming how very fair It needs must be, since she lingers there. And you—oh you, who the wildest yearn For an old-time step, and the glad return, Think of her faring on, as dear In the love of There as the love of Here. Think of her still as the same. I say, She is not dead—she is just away.”
Do you have a favorite song about cemeteries or graveyards?
Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” and the theme from Somewhere In Time by John Barry: I would want that played at my funeral.
Death’s Garden Revisited: Personal Relationships with Cemeteries was a finalist in the Travel/Travel Guide category of this year’s Next Generation Indie Book Awards!
The book Death’s Garden Revisited collects 40 powerful personal essays — accompanied by full-color photographs — to illustrate why people visit cemeteries. Spanning the globe from Iceland to Argentina and from Portland to Prague, Death’s Garden Revisited explores the complex web of relationships between the living and those who have passed before.
Last September, Death’s Garden Revisited came out from Blurb.com in a glorious hardcover edition full of huge, lovely cemetery photos. The colors are exquisite. The edition was everything I’d dreamed of. There’s a preview of it available on Blurb.
I’ve been wanting to create an ebook edition for people who couldn’t afford an expensive art book. I shouldn’t have been surprised that a book crammed with full-color photos would make an enormous ebook. Finally, after many hours of effort and several family crises, Death’s Garden Revisited is now available for preorder on Amazon for the kindle. Check it out here: https://amzn.to/3EzIqws.
One of the things that I am absolutely fascinated by is the way cities are built up over their dead. In long-lived cities like Rome or Paris or London, it’s inevitable that cemeteries from the past have been built over and forgotten. In San Francisco, which isn’t even 250 years old, the shortness of memory is more surprising.
Journalist Beth Winegarner shares my obsession with cemeteries. Her newest book is “San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries: A Buried History,” which comes out today. In the book, she looks into the cemeteries that used to lie beneath the Presidio Parade Ground, the Asian Art Museum, what’s now a Target, and much more.
I asked her to tell us about it.
“San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries: A Buried History”
by Beth Winegarner
San Francisco is famous for many things: tech companies like Twitter and Uber, the cacophony of sea lions at Pier 39, the Painted Ladies houses, major earthquakes. It’s also known, especially among locals, for not having any cemeteries.
But what if I told you that settlers established nearly 30 cemeteries in San Francisco between the arrival of Spanish missionaries in the 1770s and 1901, when city leaders banned any new burials within city limits — and that, in the process of moving 150,000 graves to Colma in the early 20th century, tens of thousands of graves were left behind?
My new book, “San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries: A Buried History” traces the history of these burial grounds, from one at Mission Dolores where headstones still mark the grounds, to a pet cemetery hidden beneath a freeway overpass in San Francisco’s Presidio. It includes many graveyards where bodies still rest beneath the ground while residents, workers, and tourists unknowingly pass over them every day.
Writing is one of my favorite ways to connect with the history of a place, and with the place itself. In my first book, “Sacred Sonoma,” I wrote about unusual places in Sonoma County, in Northern California: Locations where people reported ineffable (or chilling) experiences, or hauntings. I dug into local history, including indigenous and settler history, and created a kind of travel guide to these sites, which remains popular to this day.
After almost 20 years living in San Francisco, I felt like I wanted to get to know this place better, and a friend connected me with an amazing digital archive of local newspapers. Out of curiosity I looked for articles about San Francisco’s cemeteries, and began to discover just how many there were, how badly mismanaged they were in the early years of the city, and how many were forgotten.
As San Francisco and its population expanded, graveyards were pushed farther and farther out from the city center. And with so many people coming and going, especially after the Gold Rush, the city had very little institutional memory. A cemetery would be decommissioned, its grave markers (usually wood) removed and sometimes its burials relocated, only to be rediscovered when a new generation wanted to dig sewer lines or build something. Many crews fled job sites because of what they found beneath the soil.
After San Francisco banned burials, residents voted to move the graveyards south to a small town just outside city limits. The majority of burials, probably about 75%, were relocated, but about 25% remain in place. They’re beneath the Lincoln Park Golf Course, the Legion of Honor Museum, the Asian Art Museum, the University of San Francisco, and residential neighborhoods of the Golden Gate Park panhandle, among others.
I became fascinated by these discoveries, and moved by the existence of so many abandoned dead. Once I started learning, I couldn’t help but write, in the hope of sharing this history with others and remembering what so many people had forgotten. It’s helped me understand San Francisco better, and I hope readers find meaning in it, too.
“San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries: A Buried History” by Beth Winegarner (trade paperback, 172 pages, 60 photographs), with a foreword by Roberto Lovato, author of “Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs and the Revolution in the Americas,” is being published by The History Press on August 28, 2023. You can order a copy from Amazon or directly from The History Press.
To find out more and to see dates for local and online events in connection with the book, click here.
You can also follow Beth on Instagram, where she’s posting images of the old cemeteries.
I am excited to announce that Beth will chat about all things cemeteries with me on October 27 at the San Francisco Columbarium: RSVP here.
Friend to Cemetery Travel and contributor to Death’s Garden Revisited, Sharon Pajka, PhD, is a professor of English at Gallaudet University and the author of Women Writers Buried in Virginia. On the weekends, you can find her in the cemetery, giving history tours or volunteering and running the website River City Cemetarians.
Sharon has a brand-new book out from The History Press about the graves of people who knew Edgar Allan Poe during his life. I asked her to tell us about it.
Toasting The Souls Close to Edgar Allan Poe
by Sharon Pajka
I have fond memories of visiting cemeteries with my maternal grandfather, a genealogist. I remember him handing me slips of paper with distant family members’ names. I would search to find their graves. Not much has changed since my childhood, except instead of searching for my family members, I now create thematic tours of cemeteries for others and myself.
As a literature professor, I tend to focus on writers. Most recently, I have been searching for graves connected with the author Edgar Allan Poe. For the past few years, I have given an annual tour in Shockoe Hill Cemetery in which I highlight connections between Poe and those interred in the cemetery. The cemetery is 12.7 acres with approximately 30,000 interments. It was much smaller during Poe’s lifetime. He lived with his foster parents in several places in and around Shockoe Hill’s neighborhoods. He visited the cemetery both alone and with his wife to grieve the loss of his foster mother as well as a significant muse. Today, the cemetery includes his foster family, his first and last fiancée, and more friends and acquaintances than any other cemetery. Poe most likely would have been buried in this cemetery if he had not taken that last fateful trip in 1849.
Last year, I expanded my research from Poe’s connections who are buried in Shockoe Hill Cemetery to create a grand tour of cemeteries to visit many of the people Poe knew well during his life. Some of the cemeteries I visited were places Poe also visited. Some cemeteries were places where Poe would recognize only the names on the graves; others were places where Poe would both recognize the names and be familiar with the land—although prior to it being established as a burial ground.
There is nothing inherently unique about visiting the graves of individuals whose work was admired during their lifetimes; many bibliophiles make excursions to the graves of their favorite writers. There is something unique about visiting the graves of those who were one degree of separation away from an author. I wanted to meet the people Poe knew when he was alive to have a fuller story of the author based on the people with whom he associated.
I went to cemeteries and visited graves of his mother, wife, foster family, first and last fiancée, bosses, friends, cousins, school peers and instructors. The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore lists over 200 correspondents along with “420 surviving letters.” It was not possible for me to visit the graves of everyone Poe knew, at least not in one summer. I conducted research and made several road trips to southern cemeteries, mostly in Virginia and Maryland, along with Washington, D.C., Kentucky, South Carolina, and West Virginia.
I traveled to 19 cemeteries and visited 37 memorials. The names I had read in biographies and museum exhibits were now the names engraved on the tombstones—his birth mother Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe, who is buried in Saint John’s Episcopal Churchyard in Richmond, VA; one of the judges for the Baltimore Saturday Visiter literary contest that Poe won and who would later help support Poe financially: John Pendleton Kennedy, who is buried in Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore, Maryland; southern author and friend, Philip Pendleton Cooke, who is buried in Burwell Cemetery in Millwood, Virginia; the reverend who married Poe to his cousin, Amasa Converse who is buried in Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky; William Gilmore Simms, who in Poe’s words was the “best novelist which this country has, upon the whole, produced,” is buried in Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, South Carolina; and the man who received an urgent message about Poe’s health, Joseph Evans Snodgrass, who is buried in Hedgesville Cemetery in Hedgesville, West Virginia. These were individuals who supported, inspired, and challenged him. There are even a few who attempted to foil his dreams.
Since I was a teen, my father has clipped newspaper articles that he thinks will interest me. Many of the articles that I have kept since the late 1980s are focused on the Poe Toaster, the individual who visited Poe’s grave annually and left tokens at the grave. I have long been enchanted by this shadowy figure’s ritual of visiting Poe’s grave on the author’s birthday for over seven decades. Recently, I have even taken the time to offer my own toasts— although unlike the Toaster, I did not leave roses or cognac.
While standing in each cemetery, I read letters to and from Poe at the graves of those who knew him. It is often too easy to walk through a cemetery admiring the memorials and epitaphs while completely forgetting that these were people with their own interests and stories. I did not want these visits to be solely focused on learning about Poe. I wanted to understand each individual’s life before standing at their stone. They had their own stories, which organically led me to becoming somewhat of The Toaster for each of them. I took a whiff of orris root at the grave of Frances Allan, a perfume Poe’s foster mother was remembered for wearing. I sat by the water near where Susan Ingram gathered with family and friends 173 years ago when Poe read poetry to them. Although we do not have recordings of Poe reading his work, the Poe Museum in Richmond offers several great renditions online, including “Ulalume,” which seemed magical to Ingram.
While I learned much about Poe during this project, I also learned about poets and writers I had not previously studied, including Philip Pendleton Cooke of Winchester, Virginia. Poe delighted in Cooke’s work and valued his opinion, so it was, in fact, Poe who introduced me to Cooke and his beautiful poetry. I read Cooke’s poetry about fall trees at his grave while early spring winds blew pollen around me. I still felt the magic.
Taking this journey — and visiting Poe’s grave numerous times — I was able to learn about him from so many different angles and perspectives. I admire his work ethic and his drive to make a living doing something for which he clearly had a talent. Writing was not pure joy for him. He did not always have an opportunity to advance southern literature or even American literature, frequently churning out popular stories that the newspaper readership demanded.
The amazing part of this project was that I was able to have a deeper connection to Poe’s life, work, literature, and the sacred burial grounds. Visiting the graves transformed me. On August 21, The Souls Close to Edgar Allan Poe will be published by The History Press. I hope that my book encourages readers to make their own connections with cemeteries and to visit some of the graves of Poe’s family, friends, and foes. Maybe you’ll bring your own toast.
You can order a copy of The Souls Close to Edgar Allan Poe from Amazon or directly from The History Press.
The first edition will go out of print sometime next year, in preparation for the updated new edition. If you prefer the black & gold cover, get yours soon! Click on the cover.
Things are coming along nicely on 222 Cemeteries to See Before You Die. Since my last update, my editor went over the text, but didn’t make many changes except to rein me in when I went on too long. I loved the photos she chose for illustrations. There were a few cemeteries where we couldn’t find good images — but I had pictures of the Canadian churchyard and some of the Facebook cemetery groups submitted photos of the other two. I am really pleased with how lovely the update is going to be.
Last week, the copy editor sent me her notes. She’s the person on the editorial team who doublechecks all the names, dates, and statistics. She was really thorough and I am completely relieved. There’s nothing better than an editorial team who’s got your back.
I think the next time I see the book will be after the designer finishes with it. I’ve already seen a draft of the beautiful new cover. I can’t wait to be able to share it.
I think we’re ahead of schedule for 222 Cemeteries to See Before You Die to come out in Autumn 2024.
I got yet another draft of the Death’s Garden Revisited ebook back from that book’s designer. We’ve had a huge struggle with those ebooks because all the photos made the book too large to upload to a Kindle.
I think we’ve gotten the problem sorted finally. I want to go over everything one last time before I release it into the world. Fingers crossed that it will be out in September 2023.
The hardcover and paperback are already for sale on Blurb.com. You can get 20% off with the code AUGBSTORE20 until August 16!
In and around everything else, I’ve been chiseling away at the essays for Still Wish You Were Here. This is the sequel to Wish You Were Here, my cemetery travel memoir from a couple of years ago. The first book started with me discovering Highgate Cemetery in 1991 and stretched almost to my daughter’s birth in 2003. The new book overlaps the first one some, then will carry me all the way to buying my dad’s headstone earlier this year.
As you can guess, there’s some deeply emotional stories in it, so the book has been a challenge to work on this year. I feel like I’m finally in a better place to get the work done.
The scope of the book is still shifting, but it looks like the book will include 35 essays, visiting cemeteries from San Francisco’s Mission Dolores to the gate of Hell in Kyoto. I’m not sure how many cemeteries in all I will be able to squeeze into the book — that depends on how many I can cram into the introduction! At this moment, I have plans to write about visiting eight countries and eight American states: roughly 45 cemeteries so far.
I had really hoped to get Still Wish You Were Here out in October, but that’s not going to happen. I’d rather have it perfect than timely. I think the new publication date will be in the spring next year.
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