Tag Archives: cemeteries

Cemetery Travel in San Francisco

The time has come to gather all the San Francisco cemetery pieces spread across Cemetery Travel into one place. These posts served as research for the Laurel Hill Cemetery speech I gave at the Swedish American Hall last night. If you’re visiting Cemetery Travel from last night’s Memento Mori event, welcome.

This list of links does not yet tell the complete story of San Francisco’s eviction of its dead. I’m very close to finishing a new book with the working title of The Pioneer Cemeteries of the San Francisco Bay Area, which will go into much more detail — and have more pictures. My search for a publisher will begin shortly. Stay tuned!

A selection of the graveyards of San Francisco:

BroderickLone Mountain001

Image from a stereoview card of Senator David Broderick’s obelisk in Lone Mountain Cemetery, San Francisco, 1866

Former Laurel Hill Cemetery site:
https://cemeterytravel.com/2014/09/03/cemetery-of-the-week-145-the-ghost-of-san-franciscos-laurel-hill/

Former Russian Hill cemetery site:
https://cemeterytravel.com/2014/01/08/cemetery-of-the-week-119-san-franciscos-russian-hill/

Former Marine Hospital Cemetery memorial:
https://cemeterytravel.com/2012/11/14/cemetery-of-the-week-83-united-states-marine-hospital-cemetery/

Mission Dolores:
https://cemeterytravel.com/2011/04/27/cemetery-of-the-week-13-mission-dolores-cemetery/

Neptune Society Columbarium at the former Odd Fellows Cemetery:
https://cemeterytravel.com/2011/08/31/cemetery-of-the-week-30-the-san-francisco-columbarium/

Thomas Starr King’s grave:
https://cemeterytravel.com/2012/09/25/weekly-photo-challenge-solitary/

San Francisco National Cemetery:
https://cemeterytravel.com/2013/02/20/cemetery-of-the-week-91-san-francisco-national-cemetery/

Where San Franciscans were moved to in Colma:

Cypress Lawn obelisk001

An obelisk marks the Pioneer Mound at Cypress Lawn

Cypress Lawn Memorial Park:
https://cemeterytravel.com/2012/04/11/cemetery-of-the-week-55-cypress-lawn-memorial-park/

Home of Peace:
https://cemeterytravel.com/2014/05/07/cemetery-of-the-week-135-temple-emanu-els-home-of-peace/

Hills of Eternity:
https://cemeterytravel.com/2013/11/13/cemetery-of-the-week-116-wyatt-earps-gravesite/

Woodlawn Memorial Park:
https://cemeterytravel.com/2013/01/02/cemetery-of-the-week-85-the-gravesite-of-emperor-norton/

Olivet Memorial Park:
https://cemeterytravel.com/2018/04/04/cemetery-of-the-week-165-olivet-memorial-park/

Win a Copy of Wish You Were Here

Tell me your favorite graveyard in the comments below and win a paperback copy of Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel. I’ll pick one winner at random on Halloween.

WIshYouWereHere-coverAlmost every tourist destination has a graveyard. You go to Yosemite National Park: there’s a graveyard. You go to Maui: graveyards everywhere you look. The Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park: both graveyards. The number one tourist destination in Michigan has three cemeteries. America’s best-preserved Gold Rush ghost town has five. Gettysburg is a National Park because it has a graveyard. Some graveyards are even tourist destinations in themselves: the Old Jewish Cemetery of Prague, the colonial burying grounds of Boston, and Kennedy’s eternal flame in Arlington National Cemetery. Jim Morrison’s grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery ranks in the top five tourist sites of Paris.

Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel contains 35 graveyard travel essays, which visit more than 50 cemeteries, churchyards, and gravesites across the globe.

The book trailer:

Praise for Wish You Were Here:

“Lovingly researched and lushly described, Loren’s essays transport you to the graveyard, where she is quite a tour guide. Curiosity and compassion burn at the heart of these essays.”—Paula Guran, editor of Dark Echo magazine

“Rhoads is particularly adept at finding deeper meanings in what she sees, and the questions she puts to the reader about the places she visits can gently guide us in our own search for meaning in the places we encounter. If you’ve struggled to explain your love of burial grounds to others, this may be a great way to help them understand.”—LisaMary Wichowski, The Association of Graveyard Rabbits Online Journal

“Loren Rhoads started visiting cemeteries by accident. It was the start of a love affair with cemeteries that continues to this day. In Wish You Were Here, Rhoads blends history with storytelling and her photos accompany each essay.”—American Cemetery magazine

Wish You Were Here captures well why many of us find cemeteries fascinating: because of the history and stories of so many interesting people buried there!”—Richard Waterhouse, Waterhouse Symbolism Newsletter

“‘It’s good to be a card-carrying member of the Association for Gravestone Studies,’ Loren writes. I agree. After half a lifetime of guided and self-guided tours, Loren observes, ‘What I’ve learned from cemeteries is that limestone melts, marble breaks, slate slivers, and sandstone cracks.’  That is what draws some of us to graveyards.”—Christine Quigley, Quigley’s Cabinet

“With her dead-on honesty and her fascination for the dark side of life in all its complexity, Loren’s writing never fails to make me think.”—Thomas Roche, Loren’s editor at Gothic.Net

Ordering information:

Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel  was published by Western Legends Press in May 2013.  Autographed and inscribed copies can be ordered directly from me via PayPal from my bookshop. To request inscriptions, use the Contact Me form above.

Adventures in Cemetery Travel

This is reblogged from the Western Legends Publishing blog, where it appeared almost two weeks ago.  I’ve been traveling and blogging from my phone was much more difficult than I expected.  This will be a new Cemetery of the Week tomorrow, though, so tune in again!

Adventures in Cemetery Travel

Click to order!

How did I pick all those cemeteries I visited in Wish You Were Here? That’s a funny story…

I visited the first cemetery by accident. I found a lovely book of cemetery photos — who knew such a thing existed? — in the bookshop at London’s Victoria Station. That was toward the end of our unexpected stay in England, but my husband Mason decided he would rather see beautiful, overgrown Highgate Cemetery than the Tower of London. It was the right choice.

We’d already planned to work Pere Lachaise Cemetery into our trip to Paris, because Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, Chopin, and so many other famous people were buried there. I’d found a cemetery guidebook (my first!) calledPermanent Parisians in the Rand McNally store in San Francisco. That book also led us to the cemeteries of Montparnasse and St. Vincent and the Paris Municipal Ossuary, but I wasn’t such a geek yet that we saw a single graveyard when we visited Amsterdam that same trip.

For a while after that, I simply stumbled on cemeteries. My mom saw the sign for the Pioneer Cemetery in Yosemite while I was looking for the anthropology museum. Jack London just happened to be buried at the State Historical Park that bears his name. A friend was touring St. Louis Cemetery in New Orleans and encouraged me to come along.

Other places had such an impact on history that I wanted to see them for myself. When Mason and I went to Japan for the first time, I wanted to go out of our way to see Hiroshima and the Peace Park. When my mom took me to Honolulu, I went alone by tour bus on Easter morning to see Pearl Harbor and the USS Arizona Memorial. I ducked out of a family trip to Washington DC to visit Arlington National Cemetery.

Then I started to get a reputation. Japanese friends took us to the old capitol of Kamakura to show me a monks’ graveyard. A friend who’d grown up in Westchester County said I shouldn’t miss the Old Dutch Burying Ground in Sleepy Hollow. Other friends gave us a private tour of the Soldiers National Cemetery and battlefield at Gettysburg.

By the time Mason and I went to Italy in 2001, we were building our vacations around cemeteries. In Rome, I targeted the Protestant Cemetery, final home of Keats and Shelley. In Venice, I wanted to see the island set aside as a graveyard, where Stravinsky is buried. Strangely enough, my goal in Florence was La Specola, the jaw-dropping medical museum — but we managed to score an hour alone in the English Cemetery, where Elizabeth Barrett Browning is buried. It had the most amazing iconography. Oh, and we discovered that the roads into the archaeological site at Pompeii are lined with tombs, although that story didn’t make it into Wish You Were Here.

Graveyards are everywhere you go. Next time you travel, take a look.

Facebook Groups: Cemetery Scavenger Hunt

Cemetery Scavenger Hunt
Administrator: Dorothy Loney
https://www.facebook.com/groups/155251581333748/
147 members

St. John's Cemetery, San Mateo, California. Photo by Loren Rhoads.

St. John’s Cemetery, San Mateo, California. Photo by Loren Rhoads.

Mission Statement: Each Sunday morning, Dorothy posts the Weekly Theme. Members of the group then post as many cemetery photos as they can find fit the theme. Members are encouraged to go out to cemeteries to look for the week’s theme, search the internet, or draw from their own photo collections as long as the photos they post have to do with the theme and are from a cemetery.

Q: There are a lot of cemetery aficionado groups on Facebook. What sets yours apart?

A: The scavenger group started because a lot of members of the Cemetery Oddities group wanted to do weekly themes. Carole Lynn and I thought people might think they could only post what the theme was — we didn’t want to change anything about Cemetery Oddities. That group is so much fun the way it is!

Q: Do you have a policy about what is appropriate to post?

A: Since my group is like a game, we do have rules you have to follow to play along.
We require that you only post something that fits the weekly theme, but we’ll allow questions and requests for help with cemetery stuff. Anything goes, so long as it’s not upsetting other members. No selling of any kind, though.

Q: Are you a member of any other cemetery groups?

A: I am a member of quite a few groups, but I usually only post in the ones that I help to run. It gets to be too much otherwise. I will like and comment on other groups’ posts, though.

Facebook Groups: Vintage Cemetery Mausoleums

Vintage Cemetery Mausoleums
Administrator: Casey Robertson Cañez
https://www.facebook.com/groups/214693185246585/
322 Members

The Dodge mausoleum, Detroit. Photographed by Loren Rhoads

The Dodge mausoleum, Woodlawn Cemetery, Detroit. Photographed by Loren Rhoads

Q: There are a lot of cemetery aficionado groups on Facebook. What sets yours apart?

A: Ours was created to acknowledge VINTAGE mausoleums and vaults, primarily late 1800s, early 1900s. There are other mausoleum groups, but most of them include the huge mausoleums or modern-day mausoleums.

Q: Do you have a policy about what is appropriate to post?

A: We don’t have an actual written policy about what is appropriate, but we won’t tolerate photos or posts that are disrespectful to the dead in any way.

Q: How old is your group?

A. We were established in 2011.

Q: Is your group open to new members?

A. Yes, we are open to new members. There are no criteria, other than a love for vintage mausoleums and vaults.

Q: Are you a member of any other cemetery groups?

A. I belong to 33 cemetery groups and have “liked” many other pages. Cemeteries are definitely my passion!