Category Archives: Cemetery of the Week

The featured cemetery each Wednesday.

Cemetery of the Week #164: Purissima Cemetery

IMG_9215Purissima Cemetery
1103-1149 Verde Road
Half Moon Bay, California 94019
Founded: 1868
Size: 5.5 acres
Number of interments: more than 60

Just south of Spanishtown (now called Half Moon Bay), the Northern California town of Purissima was established in the 1860s. According to a monument placed by E Clampus Vitus, “The town, with store, school, hotel, saloon, dance hall, harness shop, and blacksmith shop, flourished from the early 1860s to the age of the motor car.”

Purissima’s population was mostly German, Scottish, and British immigrants, judging from the names on the cemetery’s tombstones. They were primarily dairy farmers who ranched the grasslands between the Coastal Range and the sea.

At one point, Purissima was expected to become the most important town on the San Mateo County coast. Instead, it could not compete commercially with Spanishtown, which was situated in an easier-to-reach location. Half Moon Bay — renamed in 1874 — now lies at the confluence of Highway 92, which crosses the mountains from San Mateo, and coastal Highway 1. In contrast, Purissima stood down Highway 1, miles inland from the sea. Even the stagecoach had to pass through Half Moon Bay before it reached Purissima.

By 1930, after the death of some of its founders, Purissima was all but abandoned. The cemetery and remnants of a schoolhouse are all that remains of the ghost town.

About five miles south of Half Moon Bay, the Purissima Cemetery stood on a little knoll on the south side of Verde Road. John Purcell deeded the cemetery, with its lovely ocean views, to the town in 1868. I went looking for it in the summer of 2011, despite warnings that poison oak blanketed the site. Directions on the internet suggested that visitors leap over the drainage ditch alongside Verde Road. I found the right section of Verde Road, all right, but the cemetery had no sign, no driveway, no address, and there seemed to be no indication it had ever existed. Purissima Cemetery had become a ghost graveyard, as lost as the ghost town for which it was named.

IMG_9218In 2013, the Coastside Land Trust acquired the Purissima Old Town site. They pursued a clear title to the cemetery land, planning to revitalize the old cemetery by using it as a green burial ground: no embalming, biodegradable caskets, no vaults or grave liners. It took years to clarify the permitting.

I made a second attempt to visit the cemetery last weekend. There’s still no driveway, but there is a place to pull over on the opposite side of Verde Road. Paths have been mowed through the underbrush, trees trimmed back, and signs made the place welcoming.

Approximately sixty historical graves are recorded in the cemetery. Most are unmarked now, due to time, weather, nature, and vandalism. Some have gravestones that date to the 1870s. Others are marked with relatively modern headstones. It appears that people who lived in the town of Purissima are welcome to be buried in their family plots. Some gravemarkers “bear familiar Coastside names,” according to Half Moon Bay magazine.

Even on a gray March day, the place was charming. Birds were singing.  The cemetery looks toward the sea in two directions. Flags of Spanish moss, festooning the old pines, waved in the breeze. At the top of the rise, masses of daffodils bloomed.

IMG_9225

The new owners have reset the antique stones, although some are still discolored from the years they laid in the dirt.  There’s still work to do, as evidenced by the obelisk remembering young James Henry and Samuel Miller, which has a dangerous slant to it.

IMG_9234

Still, I’m glad that the cemetery has been rescued and that the grounds are open to receive new burials once again. I’m always thrilled when history can be retrieved from the brink of destruction.

IMG_9240

Cemetery of the Week #163: Neptune Memorial Reef

Screen Shot 2018-02-28 at 11.14.31 AM

From the Neptune Memorial Reef gallery: http://www.nmreef.com/reef-gallery.html

Neptune Memorial Reef
International waters off of Key Biscayne, Florida
N 25° 42.036′ W 80° 05.409′
Founded: 2007
Size: 16 acres
Number of interments: There are 1200 places available “in the reef’s initial development.” More than 200 placements have been made.

Three and a quarter miles off the coast of Key Biscayne, Florida stands a one-of-a-kind cemetery. The Neptune Memorial Reef, inspired by sunken cities like Alexandria and Herakleion, is the world’s most beautiful underwater graveyard.

Sponsored by the Neptune Society — one of the largest providers of cremation in the US — the manmade reef is designed as a repository for human cremains. Families select a design created by Key Largo artist Kim Brandell, add their loved one’s cremated remains and small mementos like fishing lures or crucifixes to the concrete, and the unique monument is placed by divers forty feet below the waves.

The monuments are all huge and quite heavy: five-ton columns on fifty-ton bases. Even the smaller sculptures of shells weight ten pounds.  Because of their weights and the depths at which they are placed, the Neptune Reef has safely ridden out the hurricanes that damaged the historic cemeteries of St. Augustine.

Shipwreck diver Bert Kilbride — who was immortalized in the Guiness World Records as the oldest scuba diver when he was still diving at the age of 90 — has a place of honor atop one of the columns at the Reef gate. Other monuments in the cemetery include benches, columns, starfish, and more. Future monuments may include dolphins and Neptune himself.  Brandell considers his architecture futuristic rather than classical, but the broken columns, colonades, and massive bronze lions echo the mythical Atlantis.

The largest manmade reef yet conceived is in the process of transforming more than sixteen acres of barren ocean floor. The reef meets the guidelines of the EPA, NOAA, Florida Fish and Wildlife, and the Army Corps of Engineers. The Memorial Reef also belongs to the Green Burial Council.

The reef was designed to welcome fish and promote the growth of corals. Since 2007, the reef has attracted 56 species of fish. The most common is Bluehead Wrasse, followed by Sergeant Majors, Bar Jacks, and Tomtates. French angelfish and yellowtail snappers have been seen. Long-spined sea urchins and many species of crab have moved into the reef’s crevices. Sponges colonize the vertical surfaces of the reef, alongside trunkfishes, filefishes, and pufferfish. Fourteen species of coral have moved in, followed by spiny lobsters, spotted and green moray eels, and rainbow parrotfish. In fact, the ecosystem has developed faster than expected.

The Neptune Memorial Reef attracts recreational scuba divers, marine biologists, and researchers from all over the world.

Useful links:

The Neptune Memorial Reef homepage: http://www.nmreef.com

Atlas Obscura’s listing for the reef: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/neptune-memorial-reef

Night-diving in the Neptune Reef: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMvjvHxmrRE

 

Cemetery of the Week #162: Oakland Cemetery

Black Angel damage

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

Oakland Cemetery
1000 Brown Street, Iowa City, Iowa 52245
Founded: 1843
Size: 40 acres
Number of interments: at least 13500

In February 1843, the Iowa territorial legislature deeded one square block of land to the people of Iowa City for a public cemetery. Iowa itself didn’t attain statehood until December 28, 1846.

Since that initial city block, the cemetery has grown to forty acres. Unlike most modern cemeteries, which rely on the dividends from their perpetual care fund to pay for maintenance, Oakland Cemetery is a non-perpetual care cemetery, supported by city taxes. It’s overseen by the city’s Parks and Recreation Department.

Among the people buried beneath the oak trees are Robert E. Lucas, first governor of the Iowa territory, who served from 1838-1841; Samuel J. Kirkwood, Iowa’s two-time governor who served during the Civil War before going on to become a US senator, secretary of the interior, and then minister to Spain; several presidents of the Univerity of Iowa; and Mauricio Lasansky, an Argentine-born artist and printmaker.

Oakland Cemetery is most widely known for the supposedly cursed eight-and-a-half-foot-tall bronze angel standing over the Feldevert grave.

Born in 1836, Teresa Dolezal worked as a physician in Bohemia. After she immigrated to Iowa City with her son Eddie, she wasn’t allowed to work as a doctor, so she became a midwife.

In 1891, meningitis (an infection of the membrane around the brain) killed 18-year-old Eddie. Teresa buried him in Oakland Cemetery. To mark his grave, she chose a tree stump monument, to symbolize life cut off in its prime.

Teresa moved to Oregon and married Nicholas Feldevert. When he died in 1911, she returned to Iowa City so she could bury her husband’s ashes near her son. Teresa purchased a larger plot in Oakland Cemetery, buried her husband’s ashes there, then had her son’s remains transferred to it. Eddie’s tree stump monument was also moved to the new plot.

Teresa hired Mario Korbel, a Bohemian artist in Chicago, to mark their graves. His remarkable bronze angel arrived via the railroad in November 1912.

Twelve years later, Teresa succumbed to cancer in November 1924. Her ashes were buried in the family plot.

The bronze angel began to oxidize. Instead of taking on a green patina, as one might expect, the angel turned black. At that point, urban legends grew up around the angel.

Some say the angel was struck by lightning the night after Teresa’s funeral. Some say Teresa had vowed to remain faithful to her husband and the angel’s color revealed her infidelity. Others claim the blackened angel was evidence that Teresa had been a witch.

Urban legends swirl surround the Black Angel: if you kiss it, you could be struck dead. Pregnant women had to avoid its shadow or risk miscarriage. Only if a virgin was ever kissed in front of the statue could the curse be broken.

It’s harder to test that theory these days. Vandals have broken the angel’s fingers, so cemetery security watches visitors closely.

To be honest, the weather in Iowa is hard on bronze angels. In Council Bluffs, almost 250 miles away, a second black angel marks the grave of Ruth Ann Dodge, spiritualist wife of General Grenville M. Dodge, a Civil War veteran who became the chief engineer of the Transcontinental Railroad.

Black Angel 2

Vintage postcard from the author’s collection.

 

That angel, sculpted by Daniel Chester French, was created as a fountain, spilling the water of life from a basin in her hand. The figure was inspired by a dream Ruth had: a woman in a shining white gown appeared to her three times, urging her to drink from the vessel she carried. During the third time, Ruth drank — and she died a few days later. She was buried in Fairview Cemetery in 1916.

Oakland Cemetery is included in 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die.

Useful links:
Oakland Cemetery’s homepage: https://www.icgov.org/city-government/departments-and-divisions/oakland-cemetery

Prairie Ghosts report on the Black Angels

A more sensational report on the legends, which some pretty photos of the cemetery

A paranormal team’s investigation in the Press-Citizen

Findagrave listing for Ruth Ann Dodge

 

Cemetery of the Week #161: The Old Huguenot Cemetery

Huguenot gate

These photos are borrowed from the Friends of the Huguenot Cemetery Facebook page.

Old Huguenot Cemetery
aka the Huguenot Cemetery or the Public Burying Ground of St. Augustine
A1A Orange Street
Saint Augustine, Florida 32084
Established officially: 1821
Size: one-half acre
Number of interments: approximately 436
Open: Third Saturday of every month (see below for more details)

During the Spanish colonial era in Florida, this half-acre of land served as a potter’s field to bury criminals, other ex-communicants, and all non-Catholics who died in St. Augustine. The oldest graves have no markers, since the Spanish felt it was best to erase the memory of people who died outside the Church. Although the cemetery is named for the French Protestant movement, it’s unlikely any actual Huguenots are buried here.

When the United States took control of the Florida territory in 1819, the old potter’s field became the city’s only Protestant graveyard, opening officially in September 1821. Shortly thereafter, a yellow fever epidemic gripped the city. The mosquito-borne virus attacks the kidneys and liver, causing jaundice. Before a vaccine was developed, the disease was often fatal.

The cemetery’s owner, Reverend Thomas Alexander, deeded the land to the Presbyterian Church in 1832. The Presbyterians oversaw the cemetery until it closed in 1884. Since its closure, Memorial Presbyterian Church maintains it, aided more recently by the Friends of the Huguenot Cemetery.

Among the approximately 436 people buried here are US Congressmen Gideon Barstow, who retired to Florida and died in 1852, and Charles Downing, who also served as a Colonel in the Seminole War in 1836.

Famous names aren’t what draw most people to this old cemetery. By many accounts, the Huguenot Cemetery is the most haunted place in the ancient city. One ghost story begins with the body of a fourteen-year-old girl abandoned at the nearby city gates during a yellow fever epidemic. Since no one claimed her and she couldn’t be proven to be Catholic, she was buried in the Huguenot Cemetery. It’s said her ghost, clad in a flowing white dress, still wanders the cemetery after midnight. Sometimes she waves at visitors. She’s even been seen atop the cemetery gate.

The most famous ghost in the Huguenot Cemetery has been identified as Judge John Stickney, who died in 1882. When his children had him exhumed years later, the gravediggers opened his coffin to find the judge reasonably well preserved. In the mob of people watching the exhumation hid a thief, who stole the judge’s gold teeth right out of his skull in the commotion. Although Stickney’s body was moved to Washington, DC, the tall dark figure of judge’s ghost continues to prowl the cemetery, searching for his missing dental work. He’s been sighted day and night.

The fragile old cemetery is usually locked, but until earlier this month, the Friends of the Huguenot Cemetery opened it on the third Saturday of each month.

Huguenot hurricane damage

When Hurricane Irma tore up Florida two and a half weeks ago, it swept across St. Augustine and over the old cemetery.  A hurricane-spawned tornado toppled one of the centuries-old magnolias.  Other damaged trees landed on fragile old tombstones.  Damage is estimated to amount to $25,000.

Despite this, the Friends of the Huguenot Cemetery hope to open the cemetery on October 21 for its regular third Saturday visitation day.

If you’d like to help with the costs of tree removal and conservation of the gravestones, please email Friends of the Huguenot Cemetery President Charles Tingley at catingley (at) gmail (dot) com. The Friends of the Huguenot Cemetery is a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit organization.

Useful links:

The Old Huguenot Cemetery homepage

Friends of the Huguenot Cemetery Facebook page

Report on the damage from Hurricane Irma

Weird US report on the Huguenot Cemetery

Ghosts & Gravestones report on the Huguenot Cemetery

Links from Cemetery Travel:

The cemetery is mentioned in Famous and Curious Cemeteries

Key West City Cemetery

Cemetery of the Week #160: St. Ann’s Cemetery

Rhoads_StAnn_gateSaint Ann’s Cemetery
also called Sainte Anne’s Cemetery or the Catholic Cemetery
Garrison Road & Custer Street
Mackinac State Park
Mackinac Island, Michigan 49757
GPS: Lat: 45° 51′ 29″N, Lon: 84° 37′ 16″W
Founded: early 1850s
Size: 2 acres
Number of interments: approximately 1000
Open: Daily from sunrise to sunset
Information: Ste. Anne Catholic Church, PO Box 537, Mackinac Island, MI 49757

North of Michigan’s lower peninsula lies an island 8 miles in diameter. The local native tribes used it as a burial ground. Since it lies at the Straits of Mackinac between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, the French based fur trading operations there. The British occupied Mackinac Island during the Revolutionary War and built a fort. After the War of 1812, the island came under American control, was minimally staffed during the Civil War, and eventually became a resort for the wealthy of Detroit and Chicago.

Rhoads_StAnn_horsesMotorized vehicles were banned on Mackinac Island in 1898, so to this day the chief modes of transportation are bicycles and horses.  The island, with its restored fort, livery stables, and fudge shops, is the #1 tourist attraction in Michigan.

Originally, Mackinac Island had only a Catholic burial ground, set up by French fur traders in 1779. That graveyard lay down near Sainte Anne’s Church, close to the water. For nearly a century, Mackinac Island simply had no Protestant community. Not until the fishing industry began in earnest toward the end of the 1800s did Calvinist missionaries come to preach to the fishermen and convert the natives.

Eventually that original Catholic cemetery filled to capacity. As early as 1852, islanders buried their dead on military reserve land near the Post Cemetery behind the fort. This was one of the few areas on the rocky island where the topsoil was deep enough to dig graves.

By the 1880s, most bodies from the first Catholic cemetery had been moved to Saint Ann’s. Not all the graves were transferred, however. Several stray headstones have been discovered in the weeds in town over the years. One now resides in the village museum. The site of that original Catholic cemetery, on Hoban and Market Streets, is prime land in the village now.

This newer Saint Ann’s Cemetery sprawls across an irregularly shaped piece of land, bounded by the curves of Garrison Road on the north and Custer Street on the west. The oldest graves lie on the Garrison side. Lots of stones date from the last half of the 19th century. They were ordered and shipped from the “mainland,” as islanders call Michigan’s Lower Peninsula.

Rhoads_StAnn_BiddleThe oldest marked grave in Saint Ann’s Cemetery belongs to 8-year-old Mary Biddle, who died after falling through the ice in December 1833. Her parents, Edward and Agatha Biddle, paid for a stone carved by W. E. Peters in Detroit (he signed his work) to mark her grave, which had been moved from the earlier cemetery. Her father Edward, who served as the village president, was buried in the Post Cemetery across the road.

Mary’s epitaph sums up the brevity of many children’s lives at the time:
“As the sweet flower that scents the morn
but withers in the rising day,
Thus lovely was this infant’s dawn,
Thus swiftly fled its life away.”

Rhoads_StAnn_GraveraetAlso buried in the cemetery is Lieutenant G. A. Graveraet, a 22-year-old who oversaw Confederate prisoners of war at Camp Douglas, the notoriously unsanitary camp near Chicago, before leading the 1st Michigan Sharpshooters Company K into battle at Spotsylvania. His tombstone says he died in Washington of wounds received before Petersburg. Sharing his monument is 1st Sgt. Henry G. Graveraet, 57, one of the “boys” in Company K, who died in the battle. Henry was G.A.’s father and died under his command.

In Summer 2011, a place in Saint Ann’s Cemetery was set aside for the burial of bones repatriated to the Sault Sainte Marie Chippewa by the Smithsonian Institution.

Later that year, when the foundation for a new hotel was being excavated at the site of the old cemetery in town, human remains were uncovered.  Although no anthropological analysis seems to have been performed, the bones were considered Native American. Since the Chippewa believe that the body has two souls — one that travels to the land of the dead and one that remains with the body forever, soaking into the soil — they believe the soil surrounding the bones should be preserved with the same respect as a body.

Because of that, a dumptruck was brought to the island.  It was filled with earth and a jumble of bones and unloaded in the Catholic cemetery, where a turtle mound has since been built. Nearby a totem pole was erected, along with a sign reading “Jiibay Gitigaan” in Ojibwa, which translates to “Spirit Garden.”  The turtle mound has 13 sections, for the 13 moons of the year celebrated by the Ojibwa.

Useful links:

The Fort Mackinac Post Cemetery on Cemetery Travel

More information on rhe oldest grave in St. Ann’s

Sainte Anne’s continues to be an active church on Mackinac Island

Remains discovered in 2012 were buried in the Catholic cemetery

More information on the turtle mound memorial