The RHS archives has a resource that I find unendingly interesting. It’s a book listing (almost) all of the cemeteries in Richmond. At the time it was published, it contained all of the then-known cemeteries, but a few more have been discovered since then.
I love cemeteries, the older the better. I know that sounds macabre, but I promise my interests run deeper than giving myself a fright on Halloween.
New England is full of tiny roadside cemeteries and they can tell you so much about the residents who lived here when these old towns were new.
The style of stone, the quality of the images carved into it, the style of script, and especially the content of the text itself can give you an understanding of the people whose lives these stones commemorate. The carved images on gravestones are full of symbolism, and the style can give clues about what was popular at the time it was created.
My personal favorite is the “Death’s Head” or winged skull image that was very popular starting in the late 1600s. It represents mortality and the reminder of the brevity of life. Personally, I think the gravestone itself is a perfectly good memento mori, but who am I to deny these early New England craftsmen a rare creative outlet?
The style of the stone could give you information about the deceased’s faith or social status. People who were wealthy or politically powerful might have tall, ornate stones while Quaker headstones tend to be small and unadorned. They abstained from ostentation in death as much as in life.
A flag signifies, of course, that the owner was a military veteran, and the details on the stone can give you more context about where and when they served. Very often, you can make inferences about details that are not stated. If the stone indicates that the veteran in question was a 19 year old man who died in 1863, it’s likely that he fought and died in the Civil War.
It’s also likely that the monument is a cenotaph, a grave that does not contain human remains. It was difficult and costly to recover fallen soldiers from the battlefields, which is why battlefields like Gettysburg and Antietam have their own cemeteries.
The most beautiful cemeteries, in my opinion, are the tiny family plots that accompanied farms, though the farmland has long since been divided and sold off. There are roads and highways and strip malls now that occupy acreage where farmers grazed their sheep and grew wheat. Amongst all of the modernity and progress, these tiny cemeteries remain. Sometimes the stones are broken and laying down. Trees have begun the long slow process of encapsulating them, and sediment from centuries of composting leaves buries the lower edges, but the stones live on.
Some of them state the names of the deceased in a rough, shaky hand. They were chiseled by someone whose job was not stone carving, because they were settlers, and there were too few people to have such specialized jobs. This was the grave of their loved one, their father or son or treasured friend, and they wished for them to be remembered, memorialized. What they lack in precision they make up for in duty and care.
These are the cemeteries I find myself revisiting again and again. I visit them because their loved ones wanted them to be remembered, but everyone who remembers them is gone.
So I’ll have to do.
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