Tag Archives: New York cemetery

AGS Conference 2018

IMG_9919I’m back from the Association for Gravestone Studies conference and slowly getting back to work. Last week was a wonder, full of beautiful things and interesting people doing fascinating work. I learned so much that I look forward to sharing with you in the next while!

Weather delayed my flights long enough that I missed the lantern tour of Wooster Cemetery in Danbury, but I was up and on the bus for Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx in the morning. Woodlawn will show up soon as one of the Cemeteries of the Week, but I wanted to call out the absolute highlight of the place: I found the grave of my heroine Nellie Bly. In case you don’t recognize the name, Bly was the nom de plume of a crusading female journalist. Reading about her as a kid  inspired my career choice. It meant a lot to me to be able to stand at her grave.

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Thursday morning I gave my talk about 199 Cemeteries to a group of people who are as fanatic about cemeteries as I am. I was really touched when several people brought me their copies of the book to sign — that thing is heavy to carry on a plane! Even better, one of the longtime members read my dedication to AGS aloud from the book. They asked great, knowledgable questions and totally understood that 199 cemeteries is just not very many, if you’re going to be comprehensive.

IMG_9960That afternoon, a couple of my cemetery role models invited me to explore the Newtown Village Cemetery with them. The lovely old cemetery spanned from sandstone monuments along the fence through Victorian marble to modern granite at the top of the hill.  Several victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting are buried there, which brought the three of us to tears and led to a heartfelt conversation.

We rushed back for a meeting of the AGS local chapters, then slipped out again for a pizza feast.  In the evening, I made it to a lecture about Native American mounds in Wisconsin cemeteries (the only ones I’ve seen were at Forest Hill in Madison), then jet lag and the emotional day sent me to bed.

IMG_9995Friday morning was spent poking around Danbury’s Wooster Cemetery, which has a wealth of white bronze markers.  I was meant to be participating in a photography workshop, but I was too wound up and wanted to roam. It was a pretty day, full of dramatic clouds. Squirrels, chipmunks, and a large flock of Canadian geese were out chasing around.  It felt good to clear my head.

That evening I attended lectures on sourcing epitaphs (thoroughly fascinating) and men killed while whaling (an impressive amount of work), followed by late-night talks on the Irish buried in Tolomato Cemetery, Pensacola’s rescued African American cemeteries, and a slideshow on animal headstones, followed by another on the Sandy Hook monuments.

IMG_0084Saturday was a rich, full day.  After breakfast, it was back on the bus to visit New Haven, home of the Grove Street Cemetery.  That one was featured in 199 Cemeteries, but I hadn’t had a chance to see it yet.  Unfortunately, my photos don’t do justice to just how lovely the cemetery was. Friday’s beautiful warm weather had given way to the threat of thunderstorms, so Grove Street’s colors were muted. Grove Street is the first cemetery in America to sell grave plots pre-need, so that families could arrange to be buried together.  It’s full of graves of Yale faculty members, famous inventors, and some remarkably lovely sculpture. It will show up soon as a Cemetery of the Week.

After much too short a time, I hustled over to Center Church on New Haven Green to see the New Haven Crypt.  In the early 1800s, the church was built above a portion of the old cemetery on the green.  When the headstones outside were removed in the 1820s, the segment of the burial ground beneath the church remained intact.  Old winged skulls still mark graves that date as far back as the 1680s. I’ll do a Cemetery of the Week about the crypt, too, just so I can show off some more of my photos.

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Finally, we stopped at the Milford Cemetery with only 45 minutes to spare.  That cemetery had a collection of sandstone monuments with skulls and deeply morbid epitaphs, as well as a forest of weeping willow stones, and an amazing sculptural monument unlike anything else.  The guides were very helpful in pointing me toward things of interest. I wish I’d had time to take some notes.

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After that, we rushed back to the dorms where we were staying, dressed up, and sped off to the Oakley Awards reception, which recognizes groups or individuals who have rescued endangered graveyards. That was followed by the Forbes Award, given to someone who’s spent their career saving graveyards.

Once the banquet was over, I made it through two lectures about Australia cemeteries, including the Rookwood Necropolis — which I would very much like to visit — but I was worn out and didn’t make it through the late night talks.

So six cemeteries in four days — and so many conversations with people whose names I know from their work in and around cemeteries.  For someone who has spent the last six months at home caring for a disabled kid, the conference was overstimulating and overwhelming and completely absorbing. My chief regret is that I didn’t get a chance to see the Mountain Grove Cemetery in Bridgeport, which also appears in 199 Cemeteries. Who knows when I’ll be back in Connecticut again? But clearly I can’t do everything.

Next year’s AGS conference will be in Boiling Springs, North Carolina. I’d like to go, but that will depend on where I am with the Bay Area pioneer cemeteries book — and whether my advance will cover both a book tour and cross-country travel. I hope I can swing it, because I’d really like to talk with all my new friends again.

Besides, I didn’t come away with as much of a haul as I expected!

AGS souvenirs

 

Cemetery of the Week #150: Hartsdale Pet Cemetery

War DogHartsdale Pet Cemetery
75 North Central Park Avenue
Hartsdale, New York 10530
Telephone: (914) 949-2583
Founded: 1896
Size: under 4 acres
Number of interments: between 80,000 and 100,000

Until the 1890s, people who had a pet die in New York City either buried it in their gardens (if they had one) or in public parks.  Out of health considerations, the city banned the burial of animals within its city limits in 1896.

After that, since it was illegal to bury animals in human graveyards, the only option when a pet died was to put the body out with the trash.

In 1896, one of the clients of New York City veterinarian Dr. Samuel K. Johnson was distraught at the thought of discarding their beloved dog that way.  Johnson allowed the dog’s burial  in his apple orchard. The idea became so popular, that Johnson eventually dedicated three acres of his land as a graveyard.

Johnson invited people to bring their deceased pets to his office on Manhattan’s 25th Street, where they could purchase a zinc-lined casket. Then they would travel 25 miles by train to the quiet village of Hartsdale in Westchester County, where Johnson’s apple orchard was filling with monuments and flower arrangements.

Hartsdale postcard

Vintage postcard of Hartsdale Dog Cemetery, circa 1927

In the early days, pet owners cared for their own cemetery plots, enclosing them with wrought-iron fences and adorning them with sculptures. When they died, moved away, or lost interest, the plots became dilapidated. That led to the incorporation of the cemetery. A full-time caretaker moved into a cottage on the property.

Monuments range from standard headstones to portrait sculptures, stone doghouses and cat baskets, and much more. The oldest surviving monument dates to 1899. It remembers Dotty, fourteen-year-old pet of E. M. Dodge.

Animals buried in Hartsdale Pet Cemetery vary from cats and dogs to horses, monkeys, rabbits, guinea pigs, goldfish, iguanas, snakes,and parakeets. One of the most exotic animals in the cemetery is a lion named Goldfleck. Princess Lwoff Parlaghy was a Hungarian artist who bought the lion cub from Ringling Brothers Circus and took him to live with her at the Plaza Hotel. After his death, he received a wake at the hotel and was buried in Hartsdale in 1912.

During World War I, thousands of dogs were trained to find wounded soldiers. The service dogs were given a monument at Hartsdale: a ten-ton boulder of granite from Barre, Vermont, topped with a bronze statue of a kerchief-wearing dog with a dented helmet at his feet. The cost of the monument was raised by donations. Police, fire, and weapons detection dogs are also buried at the cemetery. Among them are dogs who retrieved bodies after the Oklahoma City Bombing and one who worked in the World Trade Center ruins.

Although the practice of interring humans and animals together is illegal, more that 700 pet owners have chosen to have their ashes interred with their animal companions. Several of them shares gravestones with their pets.

Useful links:

Hartsdale’s website: www.petcem.com

On Atlas Obscura: http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/hartsdale-pet-cemetery

On Quigley’s Cabinent: http://quigleyscabinet.blogspot.com/2012/09/pet-placement.html

My review of the Hartsdale book: https://cemeterytravel.com/2017/04/01/a-guide-to-americas-first-pet-cemetery/

My review of Permanent New Yorkers

Another resource for grieving pet owners: https://cemeterytravel.com/2017/04/03/resource-for-a-grieving-pet-owner/

 

Death’s Garden: History Lives like Ghosts

Old cemetery on Hwy 20 in Warren, NY.

Old cemetery on Hwy 20 in Warren, NY. All photos by Trilby Plants.

by Trilby Plants

I love cemeteries. They are the keepers of memory and history. Every graveyard holds secrets and surprises. No, I’ve never seen a ghost in one, but I’ve seen family history in them. I’m an amateur genealogist and have visited cemeteries from New York to Iowa, searching for ancestors.

I knew there were two generations of my husband’s ancestors buried in an unnamed graveyard on Route 20 near Warren, New York. I’d found the information online, the burial place of my husband’s three- and four-times-great grandfathers and their wives. We had been there once before, but it was winter and we couldn’t locate some gravestones in the snow.

The next time we visited, I brought a collapsible shovel, as I intended to dig perhaps six inches of soil away from a tipped-over stone so I could take pictures of the whole inscription, and a wire brush to clean off lichen.

A fairly steep hill led up to the graveyard, with slate steps set in the slope. Some of the steps were broken; many were missing. It looked as if there had once been a wall that had collapsed. A narrow, mowed path led uphill. I was more mobile than my husband, so I promised to take photos.

Armed with my shovel and brush, I started off. The track curved around to the cemetery, which was a flat area halfway up the hill. The site was about half the size of a football field. It was surrounded by a dense stand of old trees that shaded the graves and cut the noise from the road.

Silence greeted me, along with the smell of freshly mown grass. I was surprised that an unused graveyard had been mowed. Several small American flags were stuck beside stones.

I walked a circuit of the cemetery, looking for other possible family members. Many of the stones and small monuments leaned or had fallen over. There were no other names I recognized, but in one corner I found the grave of a child with the family name I was looking for: Josephine Ely, who had died in 1847 at the age of five and a half. The surnames on the gravestones around her were not Ely. Perhaps she had been buried with a wife’s family, or was illegitimate. I probably will never know.

I took photos and then looked for more Ely gravestones. I found them in the center of the graveyard, one leaning and one tipped completely on its side. The letters on the tipped-over stone were partially readable: Simeon Ely, died June 19th, 1840, my husband’s three-times-great-grandfather. On the stone beside that one, only the name was barely visible: Margaret, his wife.

View from the cemetery.

View from the cemetery.

I was looking for this man’s father.

Beside these plots were two stones on their sides, the lettering on both completely illegible. Because there was an American flag by the stones, I assumed these were the father and his wife: Simeon the elder and Ruth. That Simeon died in 1817. He had served in the Revolutionary War army for two months, guarding the arsenal at Springfield, Massachusetts.

I set to work on the toppled stone with my shovel. I intended to excavate a small area so I could take pictures of the entire inscription. I had dug up perhaps four scoops of soil when a large snake slithered out from under the stone. I shrieked and ran.

Telling myself it was a harmless garter snake, I gathered my wits and went back. The snake was gone, so I continued digging. I enlarged a trench around the stone, brushed away the lichen, and got my photos of the entire inscription.

I spent a moment contemplating the graveyard. Unlike the previous time I’d been there, it was a warm summer day under a clear, blue sky. A feeling of peace stole over me. The view over the valley was stunning. Afternoon sun reflected gold off a small lake in the distance. The trees and fields gleamed verdant green.

This is memory: the stories of those departed who pass their histories on to the living.

This was where Simeon Ely the elder had come after the Revolution to farm and raise his family. His son Simeon, although born in Massachusetts, grew up here. Simeon the younger lived to see his son born, but did not live to see his grandson born: my husband’s great-grandfather, James F. Ely, who enlisted in the Union army in 1861. James was wounded at the battle of Petersburg, Virginia. He survived a musket ball in his thigh, barely avoiding a leg amputation.

I have been to both James Ely’s grave and the Petersburg National Monument, where he was wounded.

All this history bore down on me when I considered that one of my great grandfathers — from near Watertown, New York — had also enlisted in the Union Army, but was mustered out after a couple of months because of a leg injury he had suffered while farming. Had my ancestor stayed in the military, he would have been at Cold Harbor with my husband’s ancestor — and also at Petersburg.

The coincidence of all that staggered me. It placed my ancestors and my husband’s in the real world.

The sun was going down and we still had one more graveyard to visit, so I gathered my supplies and started back to the car. I met a man who was driving up the narrow track. He rolled down his window.

What do you say to someone who confronts you as you’re walking out of a long-unused graveyard, carrying a shovel? “It’s not what it looks like,” I said, holding up the shovel and wire brush.

“Good,” the man in the car said. “I hope I don’t have to call the cops.”

I explained what I was doing.

He lived behind the cemetery. He and his wife were the unofficial guardians of it. He had a contract with the county to mow it in the summer. No, he told me, vandals had not toppled the gravestones. Time had done that, just as it had scoured the inscriptions from many of the markers. One of the earliest stones marked the grave of someone who had died in 1806.

He was interested in who I’d come to visit. He had an ancestor or two buried there he said, but he didn’t know the family I had been looking for.

“What about the flags?” I said.

“The wife and I get a list from the local VFW,” he said, “and we put them out on Memorial Day.” He shook his head. “Just the two of us. Nobody ever comes to see a ceremony. Then a week later, we take them down and save them for next year.”

“It’s good that somebody remembers,” I said. I showed him the digital photo I’d taken of my husband’s great-great-great-great-grandfather’s unreadable stone and the flag beside it.

“What war was yours in?” he said.

“The Revolution.”

“Long time ago. Lots of wars ago.”

It was. But I will remember, and so will my husband. Hopefully, now that there is so much online, our children and grandchildren will see pictures of the gravestones and know their ancestors’ stories and their places in history.

When I returned to where my husband waited in the car, I told him about my encounter with the snake and the man.

“I’m glad I don’t have to bail you out,” he said. When he looked at the pictures in the digital camera, he became quiet. “Wow,” he finally said. “There’s a flag.”

“That’s the one,” I said.

I looked out across the valley. “I see why they came here. It’s great farmland.”

We left the gravestones behind, but not the history. Our history lives like ghosts of the past in the images that populate the Internet and in our memories and in those of our children.

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Trilby Plants writes for children and adults. She lives with her sports junkie husband in Murrells Inlet, SC, where she writes, knits and creates video book trailers for authors. TrilbyPlants.com

***

Death's Garden001About the Death’s Garden project:

For the next year, I’m planning to put a cemetery essay up every Friday. If there is a cemetery that has touched your life, I would love to hear from you, particularly if there is one you visited on vacation. The submissions guidelines are here.

Cemetery of the Week #125: John Brown’s Grave

Vintage postcard of John Brown's grave

Vintage postcard of John Brown’s grave

John Brown Farm State Historic Site
115 John Brown Road
Lake Placid, New York 12946
Telephone: (518) 523-3900
Size: small
Number of interments: 15?
Open: The grounds are open year round, but the cottage and other buildings are only open May 1 through October 31 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Closed Tuesdays.
Admission: Adults $2, Seniors/Students/ Groups $1. Children 12 and under are free.

To protest New York’s law that black men must own $250 worth of property in order to vote, abolitionist Gerrit Smith announced in 1846 that he would grant 40 acres of land to any black man who wanted to farm it. In 1849, fellow abolitionist John Brown bought an additional parcel of land for $1 an acre with the promise that he would move to the area and teach farming to the grantees. Many of them had worked previously as coachmen, cooks, and barbers and had no idea how to farm.

The land in New York’s Adirondack Mountains was rocky and difficult to work. Most of the black families gave up quickly. Brown himself stayed on his farm only briefly before heading off to oppose slavery in a more personal fashion. Some of his sons were homesteading in Kansas, which was vacillating between entering the Union as a slave or free state, so Brown joined them in 1855. He served as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, guiding runaway slaves to freedom in the North.

Vintage postcard of john Browns's gravesite

Vintage postcard of john Browns’s gravesite

Even that wasn’t bringing change quickly enough. On the night of October 16, 1859, Brown led 19 men in an assault on the US Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry (now in West Virginia). His plan had been to use the weapons to liberate slaves in the South.

He was captured two days later, imprisoned at Charlestown, Virginia, convicted of treason, and hanged on December 2, 1859.

Brown’s second wife, Mary, escorted his body back home from Virginia. On the journey home, his body lay in state, under guard, at the Elizabethtown Court House. On December 8, 1859, he was buried in front of his home near a boulder where he’d carved his initials in case he did not return home from the raid.

Captain john Brown's Revolutionary-era gravestone

Captain john Brown’s Revolutionary-era gravestone

At some point later, the gravestone of his grandfather Captain John Brown, who fought and died in the American Revolution, was moved to the farm from Connecticut. Brown’s name and Oliver’s — his son who’d died in the Harper’s Ferry raid — were added at the bottom.

In 1870, Kate Field discovered that the property was about to be sold by the Brown family. She collected donations and purchased the farm and graveyard as an historic site. The farmstead was acquired by the State of New York in 1895. The house and barn have been restored to circa 1859. Some original furnishings remain.

In 1899, the bodies of 12 of Brown’s followers, who fought and died at Harper’s Ferry, were reinterred in this small graveyard. A picket fence was added, to be replaced later by an ornate iron fence. The Revolutionary War gravestone was protected by a wooden frame. Around 1900, a bronze plaque was added to the boulder, to mark Brown’s actual gravesite.

The farm remains a popular tourist destination near Lake Placid. Outdoor displays provide photos of Brown’s men and explain their fates. In May, Civil War re-enactors camp out, paying homage to a man who had hoped that a small insurrection might stave off all-out civil war.

Useful links:

NY State Parks listing on the John Brown Farm

African American history in the Adirondacks

New York History Net entry on Gerrit Smith

Photos of the site: http://www.lakeplacid.com/do/activities/john-browns-farm-state-historic-site

Trail map of the John Brown property.  The cemetery is marked on the map by a cross.

Pete Seeger singing John Brown’s Body/The Battle Hymn of the Republic:

Cemetery of the Week #98: the New York Marble Cemetery

The entrance to the New York Marble Cemetery

The entrance to the New York Marble Cemetery

The New York Marble Cemetery
41-1/2 Second Avenue
New York City, New York 10003
Contact information: P.O. Box 315, New York City, New York 10159
Founded: 1831
Size: half an acre
Number of interments: 2080
Open: the fourth Sunday of the month, between April and October, from noon to 4 p.m.

I stumbled across this cemetery last summer while wandering Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The gate in the middle of the block was locked, but the graveyard looked so green and enticing… It seemed to be reachable only by passing two sets of locked gates, which stood on either end of a shadowy alley between two brick apartment buildings. If I read the cemetery’s homepage correctly, it’s open six days a year—unless you rent it for a small private party or as a film location.

The cemetery isn’t easy to find, since it doesn’t appear on Google Maps, MapQuest, or About.com’s maps of the area. Sometimes called the Second Avenue Cemetery, it’s bounded by Second Avenue, Second Street, Third Street, and Bowery.

IMG_1412The historic plaque on the exterior Second Avenue gate names the New York Marble Cemetery as “the oldest public nonsectarian cemetery in the city.” After in-ground burials were banned inside city limits, the New York Marble Cemetery was opened as a hygienic alternative in 1831. At the time the cemetery opened, Second Avenue stood on the northern edge of development. Several churchyards in the area already existed, so the developers had the sense that people would be happy to bury their dead this far from the center of town.

In fact, the 156 belowground vaults of Tuckahoe marble (the same brilliantly white marble as used in the U.S. Capitol) sold so quickly that the New York City Marble Cemetery (no relation) opened around the corner.

Through the gate of the New York Marble Cemetery

Through the gate of the New York Marble Cemetery

It was believed that these vaults, which lay completely beneath the sod, would prevent the spread of Yellow Fever. The vaults, which are the size of small rooms, are built in pairs 10 feet below the surface. They can only be accessed by removing the stone slabs that lay beneath the lawn. No catacombs or passages connect them.

Of the more than 2000 burials in the cemetery, most took place between 1830 and 1870. The first was a child of Dr. Post in 1830. The last was apparently Charles Janeway Van Zandt in 1937, although descendants of descendants of the original vault owners may request to be buried in their family vaults. When I visited, a sign on the gate said that two of the vaults had apparently never been used and no hereditary owners can be found, so the cemetery was planning to reclaim them.  I wonder what they’ll sell for now.

When the cemetery opened, gravestones were considered gauche. The vaults have only ever been marked by marble slabs on the walls – and those slabs only list the names of the vaults’ purchasers. In many cases, the people named on the walls are actually buried elsewhere, having been taken up by their families and reburied in newer, more fashionable cemeteries. It’s estimated that the Marble Cemetery lost up to a third of its interments when Brooklyn’s Green-Wood and the other rural cemeteries opened after 1838.

Unfortunately, the Tuckahoe marble is soft and susceptible to weathering. The original plaque that proclaimed the Marble Cemetery as a “place of interment for gentlemen” has not survived. Restoration is an ongoing concern for the cemetery.

Among the prominent New Yorkers once buried here are Mayor Aaron Clark, Congressman James Tallmadge (who also served as president of New York University), Uriah and Charles Scribner of the publishing family, and Benjamin Wright, the father of American Civil Engineering, who planned the Erie Canal.

The cemetery is both a New York City landmark and on the National Register of Historic Places.

Useful Links:

The Marble Cemetery’s homepage

The Atlas Obscura feature on their tour of the Marble Cemetery

GPS information from cemeteryregistry.us

My review of The Graveyard Shift: A Family Historian’s Guide to New York City Cemeteries

Other Manhattan graveyards on Cemetery Travel:

Cemetery of the Week #11: the General Grant National Monument

Cemetery of the Week #41: Trinity Churchyard

Cemetery of the Week #65: the African Burial Ground

Cemetery of the Week #75: St. Paul’s Churchyard