Tag Archives: Protestant Cemetery

Death’s Garden: Tombstone Tales

Mackinac001

Fort Mackinac Post Cemetery

by Loren Rhoads

Just north of Michigan’s lower peninsula lies Mackinac Island, the #1 tourist destination in the state. When I was a kid, my folks took me and my brother up several times to explore the old fort—complete with costumed soldiers doing marching drills and cannons fired out over the water—and a museum dedicated to a doctor who had studied digestion through another man’s abdominal war wound. We loved it.

In 1898, the island banned motorized traffic, so the chief modes of transportation remain bicycles and horses. Horse-drawn taxis deliver tourists from the ferry docks to their hotels. Horse-drawn tour buses circle the island, lecturing about the island’s native history, the time it served as a hub in the fur trade, and the two battles fought on its soil during the War of 1812. Since those exciting days, Mackinac Island has become a quiet, relaxing retreat, where life moves at a slower pace.

I hadn’t been up to the island in twenty years when my mom suggested a trip. My parents and I reached the Mackinac (pronounced mack-in-naw) Island Visitors Center ten minutes before it closed for the afternoon. Mom asked if they offered the night tour of the village, led by a schoolteacher, which she’d taken on a previous visit. The answer was no. Not missing a beat, Mom asked, “Is there a tour of the graveyard?”

I couldn’t have been prouder of her for thinking to ask. Lucky me: there was a one-time cemetery tour. Tickets were ten dollars. I would have happily paid for Mom and Dad to join me, but they didn’t seem inclined. It was hard to decide to go alone, since the tour didn’t start until dusk and I wasn’t all that familiar with the island, but I really wanted to take a night tour—my first—of a cemetery. I bought an advance ticket, so that the tour wouldn’t be called off for lack of interest.

As the afternoon wore on, I grew progressively more anxious. I don’t like to explore unfamiliar places alone. Fifteen years earlier, I was attacked by a man my university had on suicide watch. He grabbed me in a busy hallway in my dorm as I walked with a girlfriend. Since then, my sense of safety requires the presence of other people. I have no illusion that just being with them would stop an attack—but maybe, like the last time, they could chase down my assailant. Still, my parents had no desire to climb to the top of the island to reach the cemeteries. If I went, I would have to go alone.

After dinner, I walked my parents back to the hotel to get Mom’s umbrella. They planned to stroll through the village and watch the sunset, but rain clouds threatened from the north. We said our goodbyes and I marched off like I wasn’t a coward.

My heart thudded in my chest as I climbed steep Bogan Lane. The street dead-ended at a wooden staircase that led upward for more stories than I could count. I wouldn’t have chosen such an isolated path, but I didn’t have time to find another way up the bluff to the cemetery. I paused at the foot of the stairway, trying to calm down. I would be safe, of course. This was an island. No one would dare molest me because they’d have no way to escape. The ferries stopped running at sunset.

Unless they owned a boat, I thought, realizing that it would look suspicious to sail away after dark.

It crossed my mind that I could just eat the ticket price, go into “town,” and have a drink somewhere until I could slink back to the hotel. Mom and Dad need never know that I was afraid to wander the island alone. All the same, I really, really wanted to attend the graveyard tour.

I would be safe, I promised myself, then started upward. Trees shadowing the stairs made them feel enclosed. Even though I didn’t pass a soul as I climbed, I couldn’t allow myself to pause and rest. When I reached the top of the staircase, my knees quivered.

A handful of mansions lined a paved street that stretched off to my right. I’d expected to find a bench at the summit, where I might catch my breath and load film into my camera. There wasn’t anywhere to sit. I guess the locals didn’t want tourists loitering in front of their houses. An old-fashioned street lamp stood there, so I knew I’d have at least one light on the walk back. I checked my backpack to be sure I’d brought my mini flashlight.

The path turned left, into the forest. I felt like I should leave a trail of breadcrumbs, so I could find my way back after dark. The lonely road dwindled to what seemed like a bike path between the trees. My nerves twanged again. I wished my sixty-year-old parents had come along, although my dad could never have made the climb.

I’d left the island map with Dad, but remembered that I wanted Garrison Road. When I reached the path that ran behind the fort, I found a sign pointing to the cemeteries half a mile away. Cemeteries, plural, I noted with excitement. I picked up my pace. I didn’t have any sense how long I take to walk half a mile. Usually distances aren’t so carefully measured for me. I hustled, since the ticket said the tour started at 7:30, instead of the 8 p.m. printed on the flyer I’d cajoled out of the clerk at the Visitors Center.

Rhoads_StAnn_horsesI reached Sainte Anne’s Cemetery first. Its stone gates opened on the left side of Garrison Road, where a sign forbade riding horses in the graveyard. It struck me as sad that tourists needed to be asked to behave.

I stopped in the shadows at the side of the road to load my Pentax K-1000. My watch said 7:15. I felt sticky in the August humidity, even in a T-shirt. My hands shook as I tried to thread the film. The light was fading, but I thought if I hurried, I might be able to take some pictures with the aperture dialed all the way open. Hopefully I could hold steady enough, once I calmed down.

Mosquitoes whined around my ears. I needed to get some bug lotion on fast. While I slicked myself up, a couple of costumed players wandered by, discussing whether they would have sex. The woman asked cheerily if I could share some “bug juice.”

After I gave her a handful of lotion, I ducked into the Catholic cemetery. Sainte Anne’s sprawled across an irregularly shaped piece of land, bounded by the curves of Garrison Road on the north. The oldest graves seemed to lie on the Garrison side. I didn’t see any angels, but lots of stones dated from the last half of the 19th century. I knew they must have been ordered and shipped from the “mainland,” so finding them was a nice surprise.

As the afternoon light failed, the colors looked very strange. Everything took on a yellowy pallor as the setting sun tinged the overcast. I attached my huge flash and tested it a couple of times, but it took forever to recharge. I hoped my battery would last. If only I’d come prepared for this, instead of rushing around. I wondered if I could settle down enough, once the tour began, to enjoy myself.

I watched people come into the Catholic Cemetery, then climb over its low fieldstone wall to get out, rather than backtrack to a gate. Probably these were same people who needed to be told not to ride their horses through the graveyard.

About 7:30 I crossed Garrison Road to the Post Cemetery. The burial ground lay in a slight depression, surrounded by a white picket fence. Even though summer hadn’t ended yet, a tree inside the graveyard blazed orange. Regulation military headstones stood at attention in straight lines, joined by a variety of other sorts of tombstones. I liked seeing a military cemetery with personality.

My camera crapped out. It was too dark to figure out if the battery had died or if I’d screwed up loading the film. One more reason to switch to a digital, I thought. Scowling, I put the heavy Pentax into my backpack. I’d have to come back in the daylight, if I wanted photographs.

I needn’t have worried about the tour being cancelled. People kept arriving on foot and by horse-drawn taxi until eventually sixty people clustered around. The organizers split us up. My group of fifteen went off with a good-looking college boy named Brian.

Rather than touring just the Post Cemetery, we saw all three graveyards. My group started in the Protestant Cemetery, the farthest one west and the most recently opened. Oaks, pines, and beeches separated the Protestants from the military graveyard. A low wall of openwork stone, pierced like lace, surrounded their graves.

Fragrant with cedar and pine, the Protestant Cemetery was one of the best smelling graveyards I’ve visited. I had to watch my step as acorns rolled under my feet.

The first grave we visited belonged to the man who’d made Mackinac Island a nationally recognized resort. An actor with a silver mustache and a long black coat played Eugene Sullivan, social director for the Grand Hotel, who reminisced about his boss, Jimmy “the Comet” Hayes. James R. Hayes had managed the Grand Hotel during the Victorian era. He decided that Michigan alone couldn’t support the hotel, so he courted the wealthy of Chicago. When he heard Theodore Roosevelt planned to tour the country, Hayes invited the President to be a guest of the hotel. Before Roosevelt could decline, Hayes wrote all the major Midwestern newspapers to announce the President’s visit. Roosevelt never came, but the press attention cemented the hotel’s reputation.

I knew from the flyer that there would be costumed characters on the tour, but I liked that they didn’t play the dead people at our feet. Instead, actors played friends and family reminiscing about the dead.

One of my favorite stories in the Protestant Cemetery regarded William Marshall, Mackinac Island’s longest serving soldier. During the Civil War, Marshall manned the fort alone, guarding three soldiers from Tennessee imprisoned there. When his term of service expired, he reenlisted himself.

mackinacOur tour group returned to the Post Cemetery, where interments may have begun in the mid-1820s. Records show that forty American soldiers died at the fort between 1796 and 1835, but only a dozen graves remained marked in 1835. Those who fell during the War of 1812 probably still lie under the Wawashkamo Golf Course, where the British buried them.

I halted beside by the lamb sleeping atop the monument for William A. and Frank M., sons of William and Matilda Marshall, aged “2 years, 4 months, 9 days” and “2 years, 3 months.” While it’s rare for wives to be allowed burial in military cemeteries, I don’t think I’d ever seen children buried amidst the soldiers. Their presence testified to the isolation of inhabitants of the island. Their epitaph made me sad: “Short pain, short grief, dear babes were they, now joys, eternal and divine.”

The last military funeral on the island celebrated Private Coon Walters in 1891. Four years later, the US Army abandoned Fort Mackinac, leaving behind the military burial ground. The cemetery fell into disrepair until the Mackinac Island State Park Commission began maintenance in 1905.

Rhoads_StAnn_handsThe final graveyard on our tour was Saint Ann’s, where I’d begun the evening. The cemetery had originally been called Bonny Brae, or goodly meadows. It contained older graves moved up from the first Catholic cemetery on Hoban and Market Streets, just north of the Village Inn restaurant, where I’d had dinner with my folks. That earlier cemetery, created in 1779, had filled to capacity before being disassembled.

Another ghost evoked by the tour was Matthew Geary, an Irish immigrant who became a government fish inspector and made his fortune. He was remembered by Jim Union, a cooper, who had a “wooden marker because he couldn’t afford a stone like Mr. Geary.” Coopers made barrels to crate up whitefish to ship to Chicago. Their necessary labor didn’t pay as well as the bribery fishing captains could offer the inspectors. Union’s grave, now unmarked, had been the first in Sainte Anne’s Cemetery in 1852.

When the graveyard tour ended, people drifted uncertainly off into the twilight. I’d hoped to meet some nice women with whom I could walk back to town, but the tour had been such a whirlwind that there hadn’t been time to speak to anyone else. The group simply hustled from actor to actor, heard the stories of the people whose graves we clustered around, and rushed on.

I still didn’t have a map of the island. I suspected that I could walk down past the fort and into the village below by following someone, but I wondered if I’d remember which street my hotel was on if I came at it from that direction. Better to go back the way I’d come.

I trailed a French Canadian couple down the road that wound past the back of Fort Mackinac. The fortifications glowed ghostly bluish white in the half-light. Oak branches strained toward the path, trying to close out the darkening sky.

When we reached the row of mansions at the crest of the hill, the French Canadians turned left, leaving me to face the staircase alone. Down is always preferable to up, but I stood at the landing, looking out over the village below. Old-fashioned streetlights twinkled in the darkness. The breeze carried me a breath of laughter. Somewhere, a dog barked. Other than that, the lack of automobiles on the island made for a kind of quiet that I’d forgotten existed.

I felt more peaceful now. I didn’t mind being completely alone in this strange place—and I felt entirely alone in the quiet darkness. I’d been calmed by exploring the graveyards. Nothing bad had ever happened to me in a cemetery, I realized. I’d always felt safe there.

A guttural engine revved up as the last ferry chugged out of the harbor. Once the boat left, we were trapped on the island for the night.

The wind blew colder, raising goosebumps over my humid skin.

Time to climb down.

This essay is excerpted from Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel, now back in print in paperback — with the ebook soon to come!

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mercy-street (1)Loren Rhoads is the author of 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die and Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery TravelShe was the editor of the original anthology called Death’s Garden: Relationships with Cemeteries.

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Death's Garden001About the Death’s Garden project:

I am starting up the Death’s Garden project again. If there is a cemetery that has touched your life, please get in touch. I would love to hear from you, particularly if there is one you visited on vacation — or if you got married in one. The submissions guidelines are here.

The Most Beautiful Cemeteries on Cemetery Travel

Last week I talked about the Most Morbid Cemeteries on Cemetery Travel. That was a fairly easy list to make.  Today’s list is much more subjective.  In addition to beauty being in the eye of the beholder, it’s also dependent on season.  A graveyard in spring is likely to be subjectively more beautiful than a graveyard in winter: flowers trump bare branches, blue skies trump gray, lush green lawn trumps unbroken snow.  A case could be made for the opposite, of course, but I’m sensitive to cold and live in foggy, brown-in-summer California. We long for what we don’t have.

Highgate Cemetery in May

Highgate Cemetery in May

Week #2: London’s Highgate Cemetery

I’ve been to Highgate twice: once in January, once in June. Although winter had stripped the branches, the ivy was still glossy and green and primroses bloomed on some of the graves, bright in the gloom.  Summer was an entirely different experience:  green thrived everywhere, all but swallowing up the old angels standing guard over the graves. The Friends of Highgate Cemetery oversee the place as managed wild land, encouraging foxes, birds, rabbits, and other wild things to call it home.  They try to keep the monuments from falling to ruin, but let Nature rule.  A trip to Highgate is what started me on the road of cemetery exploration. I think it would do the same for anyone. I’d love to go back and see it in spring sometime — and in winter, too.  This is one place where snow would add its own kind of magic.

The Aylsworth family monument

The Aylsworth family monument

Week #58: Swan Point Cemetery, Providence, Rhode Island

In 2002, I was lucky enough to plan a Grand Tour of East Coast graveyards.  The day we reached Swan Point, spring was in full sway.  One hillside shone gold with daffodils. The Seekonk River shimmered, visible through the trees, a startling hyper-rich blue.  The grass was green and the fruit trees on fire with blossoms.  Even the air smelled perfumed.  It was impossible not to fall in love.

Shelley's gravestone

Shelley’s gravestone

Week #8: The Protestant Cemetery of Rome in Rome

Every Italian graveyard I’ve visited was full of one-of-a-kind statuary that could take your breath away.  The Protestant Cemetery had the added poignancy that these were outcasts, buried here because none of the Catholic burial grounds would have them.  Here are remembered John Keats, who was so Romantic that his name doesn’t even appear on this gravestone, and Percy Shelley, whose friends soaked his body in wine and cremated it on the beach near Viareggio. Beyond them stands a forest of statuary lovelier than any museum’s collection.

Shrouded granite urns on family plot, Elmwood Cemetery, DetroitWeek #12: Detroit’s Elmwood Cemetery

I grew up in Michigan, so I’m partial to the particular shade of blue in the summer sky painted by the Great Lakes above my home state.  When I first started to drive down to Detroit to explore its historic cemeteries, I started with Elmwood, site of a battle in the French and Indian War. Frederick Law Olmsted (designer of Central Park) re-designed the graveyard to include roads that swoop over and around of the rolling hills. He also planted the groves of trees where squirrels, pheasants, and other wildlife now live.  A sense of peace pervades Elmwood that belies its location right downtown.

Archangel Michael in Lake View Cemetery, Cleveland

Archangel Michael in Lake View Cemetery, Cleveland

Week #42:  Lake View Cemetery, Cleveland, Ohio

I discovered Lake View by accident while my dad was at the Cleveland Clinic.  I knew that President Garfield was entombed there, but I wasn’t prepared for the wash of golden leaves that had drifted around the headstones.  Since I was guiltily stealing an hour away from the hospital, my photos don’t do the place justice, but one of my favorite cemetery statues anywhere is the brooding warrior angel Michael who stands over the grave of John M. Hay, Secretary of State under President William McKinley. I wouldn’t mind having him stand guard over me for eternity.

Honorable mentions:

It was hard to limit myself to just five beautiful cemeteries.  I’m sure I’ll regret leaving out Hollywood Forever, the New Jewish Cemetery of Prague, and Mount Auburn Cemetery.  There are others that probably would have made this list, if only I’d visited on a different day or in a different season.  There are so many, many more that I’m sure are lovely, but I haven’t had the opportunity to see for myself yet.

I’d love to hear you make a case for the cemetery you think is most beautiful.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Masterpiece

Death and the Sculptor

Death and the Sculptor by Daniel Chester French

The thing that drew me first to cemeteries was the artwork.  From the six-foot-tall limestone tree trunk in the graveyard near my parents’ house to the angels in Highgate Cemetery, I loved to see the sculpture best of all.  It draws me out in all weather from drizzling rain to humid summer sun, in the icy January breezes and in the high desert glare.  I’m well-known in my household for begging to see “just one more” sculpture.

I’ve seen some amazing things in my travels:

Angel of Grief001The original Angel of Grief by William Wetmore Story (in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery) is small, compared to the copy at Stanford University, but it may be even more lovely for being human-sized.  The “Angel of Grief Weeping over the Altar of Life,” Story’s last work, was made to mark the grave of his wife Emelyn in 1895.  Before Story’s sculpture, angels were always joyful emissaries, secure in the knowledge of Heaven to come for their charges.  A grieving angel, overcome by loss, struck a chord that echoes in cemeteries across the world.

Detail of Crack the Whip

Detail of Crack the Whip

Then again, Italian cemeteries are full of one-of-a-kind artwork.  It’s rarer to see in Midwestern cemeteries, but one of the most striking sculptures I’ve ever seen is in Sunset Hills Cemetery in Flint, Michigan. “Crack the Whip” is a collection of eight interconnected children running in a semi-circle. Sculpted by J. Seward Johnson, “Crack the Whip” is comprised of an Asian girl, two African American kids, a Native American, and four white kids, each distinct and individual. They are dressed in cleats and baseball shorts, a headband and a basketball jersey, a pinafore. The Asian girl has lost her Birkenstock sandal, which lies in the grass nearby.

The piece that blows everything else away for me is Forest Hills Cemetery‘s “Death and the Sculptor” by Daniel Chester French, the image that opened this post. Death is a stern-faced matron dressed in Grecian robes and a large-cowled cloak. She has wings, but doesn’t carry a scythe or hourglass. She merely reaches her shapely arm out to touch the sculptor’s chisel.

More than any other artwork I’ve seen, this one speaks directly to me.  I’ve always had a personal sense of how limited my time here is, how much work I have to do before I die.  Even though I am surrounded by a friendly community of other writers, I know I am the only person who can tell the stories I’ve felt called to tell.  I dread to be stopped in the middle of my masterpiece, as French’s sculptor was.

Father Time at Cypress Lawn

Father Time at Cypress Lawn Memorial Park, Colma

The clock is ticking, as Father Time reminds us. Time flies and no one knows the day or the hour.

Time to get busy.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Big

During the last years of the Roman Republic, after Caesar conquered Egypt and vanquished Cleopatra, Egyptiana became the fashion in Rome. Access Rome says, “Numerous pyramids sprouted all over Rome.” I don’t know if that’s true. I do know that the only Roman-era pyramid still in existence sits across the street from the Piramide stop on Rome’s subway line B.

The estate of Caius Cestius built his pyramid in 12 B.C. His tomb claims he was a praetor and tribune, as well as an epulo: one of seven priests who offered sacrificial meals to the gods. Other than the pyramid, he left no mark in recorded history. Only his tomb ensured the survival of his name.

Unlike the other tombs—long destroyed—which once lined the road to Ostia, Cestius’s pyramid survived because it was incorporated into the eleven-mile wall Emperor Aurelian built to protect the city from barbarians in 271 AD. During the Middle Ages, people believed the tomb belonged to Romulus, founder of Rome. I’m fascinated by how different ages mythologized the pyramid to suit their needs. Their veneration kept the tomb intact. In fact, the pyramid owes its continued existence to serving as a landmark as much as to the protection of the Popes, even though it was as pagan as pagan could be.

My husband Mason and I came up out of the Metro to see Cestius’s hundred-foot-tall pyramid directly across the road. Aurelian’s old brick wall connected right up to it. The crumbling bricks looked fragile in comparison to the older pyramid.

Half of the pyramid lies lower than the modern surface of the ground, which seems strange because the Protestant graveyard beside it rises much higher. The cemetery was built on a hill where Rome dumped its garbage, I understand. For how many hundreds of years had this area served as a dump? What treasures lie in the soil accumulated around the pryamid?

Outside the moat around the pyramid, an historical plaque said that in his will, Cestius stipulated that he wanted his Egyptian mausoleum constructed before a year had passed after his death. The project bankrupted his heirs.

A frescoed burial room inside the pyramid spans twenty-by-fifteen feet. Apparently, one can enter the pyramid through an entrance cut into its walls during its restoration in 1663. Unfortunately, I didn’t know that when we visited. It probably wouldn’t have helped if I had. My sources, published over a span of forty years, disagree on how one might get permission to visit the interior of the tomb.

The pyramid’s marble façade glowed bright white in the late April sunshine. Although Cestius’s inscription was still legible, grass and wildflowers had sprouted from toeholds between the stone blocks, bright crimson and lavender and deep pink. I hoped my photos would capture the colors.

The pyramid as seen from inside the Protestant Cemetery

The Protestant Cemetery lies directly beside the pyramid.  It was my Cemetery of the Week #8: The Protestant Cemetery of Rome in Rome, Italy.

Idiosyncratic collection of gravestone photos

Grave MattersGrave Matters by Mark C. Taylor

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Mark Taylor opens the book by telling how he discovered he had two siblings who died before he knew them. That leads him to what he calls his “ghosts,” philosophers and other modern figures who inspired and shaped his life. He traveled the world making rubbings of their graves, which led him to want to make a book of photographs “of the graves of cultural figures who created the modern world.”

The text segues from the personal to a brief idiosyncratic history of cemeteries in the West. From there, it drifts into philosophy, where I thought it lost its originality and interest. Luckily, the text makes up less than a quarter of the book.

The rest of the book is filled with black & white photos of gravestones. Any collection of gravestone photos is going to reveal more about the collector than the dead. Grave Matters takes that generalization to an extreme. There is no biographical information about the names illustrated here. Some like Galileo and Thoreau need no introduction, but George Berkeley and Denis Diderot were completely unknown to me. The unfamiliar names equal or surpass the recognizable. As a reader, I felt excluded.

The photos range from beautifully shot and reproduced to some that are so dark that their stone faces are illegible. Sometimes the photographer (Dietrich Christian Lammerts) shot the grave monuments in context, which I appreciated, but those photos don’t always appear in proximity. Beethoven’s grave appears on page 64 and again on page 73. Perhaps that’s an error of design, but it’s weird. On the other hand, sometimes the gravestones are shot in such tight closeup that they’re blurry, like Byron’s. Benjamin Franklin’s stone must have been shot through the fence, but it’s cropped so tight that it’s hard to read.

Other weird choices puzzled me. Gertrude Stein was buried in the grave in the photo labeled with her name, but the headstone in the picture reads Alice Toklas. The photograph was taken on the wrong side of the stone, instead of the side with Stein’s name. The cenotaph to Mozart — whose body went to an anonymous grave, but not in the cemetery where the marker stands — is included without remark. Later, several different bodies of water appear; one is labeled “Fredrich Engels, 1820-1895. Eastborne, England” without any explanation. Were Engels’s ashes scattered here? Did he drown? Jeremy Bentham’s preserved body is the only time human remains appear. It’s a shock to suddenly see a human face, albeit cast in wax. Text would have made those inclusions more understandable.

Still, the book shows an impressive breadth of travel, from American cemeteries to churchyards in England to graveyards in small villages in France, through Germany, Norway, and on into Russia to visit Chekhov. If only it included a table of contents or an index of the photos, so the dead would be easier to locate in the book than they must have been in real life.

You can get your own copy of the book through Amazon here:  Grave Matters.

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