This Saturday night, I’ll be using my collection of cemetery postcards to illustrate the changes to the oldest European-style cemetery in Northern California.My talk will be part of the fabled Litcrawl in San Francisco’s Mission District. I’ll be joined by Odd Salon Fellows Laura Rubin and Casey Selden for tales from the surprising history of cities of the dead.
Saturday October 20, 2018 6:30pm – 7:30pm
The Laundry (downstairs) 3359 26th Street at Capp Street, San Francisco, CA 94110
Admission is FREE!
Loren Rhoads
Loren Rhoads is the author of 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die and Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel. She blogs about graveyards as travel destinations at CemeteryTravel.com. She’ll be talking about San Francisco’s Mission Dolores.
Casey Selden
Casey Selden is a Fellow of Odd Salon and a fermentation dabbler. She’s made beer, cider and wine for kicks in her kitchen. She’ll be talking about a grave in Chicago and the woman who goes along with it.
Expert talks on odd topics; odd talks on everything else.
Igualada Cemetery
Tomb Sculpture: Its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini
R.I.P. Memorial Wall Art
Milltown Cemetery: A Brief History
Two Acres of Irish History: A Study through Time of Friar’s Bush and Belfast 1570-1918
Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel
Sacred: New Orleans Funerary Grounds
The Victorian Celebration of Death
Graven Images: New England Stonecarving and its Symbols 1650-1815
Grove Street Cemetery
Also revolutionary: People could be buried with their families, rather than in the order in which they died. In the churchyards which predated Grove Street Cemetery, people were planted in the order in which they fell, filling up any available space. At Grove Street, families invested in large monuments with the family name—often an obelisk or an ornate marble confection—as the centerpiece for their plots: celebrating kinship, rather than individual achievement. Cemetery lots were large enough to bury family members for generations.
A massive brownstone Egyptian Revival Gate, designed by Henry Austin (buried here), greets visitors. The gate was dedicated in 1845, after the popularity of the smaller Egyptian gateway at Mount Auburn. Egyptiana became a worldwide fad after Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt at the turn of the 19th century.
A cenotaph stands to the memory of Major Glenn Miller, the swing band leader who went missing in action while stationed in Europe in 1944. Other cenotaphs line the back wall of the cemetery: the gravestones removed from the New Haven Green, where the Colony’s original burial ground lay. As I noted in the entry on the 
The cemetery continues to be in use. Modern graves are marked with geometric spheres of granite, copies of Remington’s western statures, and cryptic epitaphs, including at least one that quotes The Little Prince. Members of Yale’s faculty have come to rest here under some of the most unusual modern stones. The cemetery has been called the Westminster of Yale.
I’m off to the Association for Gravestone Studies’ annual conference, which is in Danbury, Connecticut this year. Getting there is going to be grueling, but oh, so worth it.