Do you like to visit old cemeteries?

I do, especially if famous people are buried there. They are very peaceful. I found this old cemetery in bumfuck Cumberland County, Virginia with an interesting grave. The epitaph was written by Charles Dickens. It is one of only two such writings by Dickens and it is the only remainder of Dickens American tour in 18??. The grave is that of a child who died, Dickens knew? or met the parents and wrote the epitaph. Pretty cool.

I've spent hours scouring the old cemetetaries in Charleston, SC. In one, there were all these signers of the declaration of Independence, a former Vice-President (John C Calhoun) and other founding fathers (and mothers) of Charleston with all of their accomplishments noted on their tombstones. But the one that fascinated me the most? One that simply said, "Her record is on high."

Indianola, a Texas ghost town:
http://www.texasescapes.com/TexasGhostTowns/IndianolaTexas/IndianolaTx.htm
There are definitely older places in Texas, but this is a close one, and it is virtually gone, only a few resident around. And most of them are roseate spoonbills.

Some of them where people were buried in wooden coffins can be tricky. I actually sank a bit through a spot where one collapsed.

during my cross country drives back and forth across the US, I would stop at cemeteries along the way.

Not anything famous, but some of the old copper mining areas in the upper peninsula of Michigan have some old ones with dates to the 1830's and 40's.

I was there last summer.:hi:

north of Houghton. That is where the old boneyards that I mentioned are. I need to get back up there this summer.

:hi:

and enjoy. Is one of my favorite places in Kentucky. It is huge and the grounds are wonderful. Hundreds of different types of plants and trees, shady, serene, dignified and beautiful.

Breathtaking in its beauty there is also a sense of pathos. Civil War dead from both the North and the South are buried there. It was considered unseemly to bury enemies next to each other so on side by side hills lay thousands of simple white headstones listing the names of young men who all died too young, one section for the Union, the other for the Confederacy. The lotus pond is wonderful, some of the oldest specimens of trees are found there and all are politely tagged for your viewing pleasure. The roads are wide and perfect for walking or jogging. There are lakes, famous people (Colonel Sanders, and Meriwether Lewis Clark, Jr. (son of, established the Kentucky Derby), 10 foot high brick wall around the entire cemetery and a strictly enforced "dignity" rule - no parties, picnics, etc. It is a refuge for cool, shady calmness in the middle of a city.

And finally, it got the name from a "cave" located on the property that was actually a quarry. The quarry was used to house prisoners before the city finally shut down the operation and turned the grounds into a cemetery.

From their web site:

When it came time in late 1846 to add the graveyard component to Cave Hill, the mayor and the city council apparently did not consciously set out to make a garden cemetery, which by then was a concept gaining popularity in the major cities of America. But, propitiously, they appointed a committee that selected a civil engineer who had firsthand experience of the emerging cemetery concept. Edmund Francis Lee (1811-1857) convinced the city fathers to utilize the natural features of Cave Hill, which previously had been considered quite undesirable for burying purposes. To Lee, the old Cave Hill farm was perfectly suited for cemetery purposes. Its promontories would become the primary bury sites. The roads to these hilltop circles would curve gently following the natural contours. The intervening basins would become ponds or be planted with trees and maintained as reserves. The garden setting would be a natural backdrop for the lots and monuments and the cemetery would receive perpetual attention and could never be violated—stipulations never before provided for. Here then was a place not to be shunned, but a park to be sought out for its beauty and the spiritual elevation gained from contemplating the collective accomplishments of its inhabitants.

http://www.cavehillcemetery.com/index.html

I'm real not a morbid person, but I am curious about the sort of things that go on in cemeteries, and wonder about the people buried there...

Here's a few...

One from my home town...



And the cemetery where Emily Dickenson is buried...

found the New Orleans cemetaries weird with burials above ground

looked for oldest graves in St Johns Nfld and Bell Island

was the old cemeteries.

:)

there's an ole masonic cemetery here in sac with a headstone dated: 1760, all steeped in masonic imagery so there's that = all grown in with tilted stones & ornate, rock hard mausolem'...kind'a kew'l ~

It was a beautiful peaceful place.

And it's such a powerful, telling way to find out what a community was, where it is, and where it's going.

Lost, forgotten cemeteries are especially meaningful discoveries.

My travelling buddy LOVES cemeteries, and to humor him, I accompanied him to Pere Lachaise. OMG, how impressive! We also managed to see the Montparnasse cemetary and the Catacombs on the same visit.

When I went back to Paris a year ago, we saw the Montmartre and Passy cemeteries. My favorite tombstone was Vaclav Nijinsky's in Montmartre. It is a life-sized full-color statue of Petrouchka, his title role.

I thought it was perfectly normal but now think it must be a southern thing.

Though on the subject of old cemeteries, the state mental hosptital, Bryce, is in my hometown and sometimes I go to their old cemetery. Interstingly, the only thing carved into rock tombstones are the person's race and patient number. I always found this to be so very sad. Most of the grave yard, specifically the "colored" section as it is called is almost completely over grown in some ares. A friend who commited suicide left directions for his ashes to be poured throughout the cemetery. So to feel somewhat close to him, a group of us try to meet fairly often to clean the graves, and the area but the woods are working just as hard to reclaim its own space.

i've lived in louisiana for over two years now, and never got around to visiting a cemetery, so we stopped at one in the older part of town.

it was nothing like the ones in new orleans i've seen from the street. this one wasn't for the wealthy. it was jumble of concrete vaults, sarcophagi. whatever you call them, they were stacked on each other, jammed together wherever there was room. almost all concrete, with no marble or granite in sight. vaults on top of vaults, and graves on top of graves, so you had no idea how many you might be standing on. you could hardly walk without climbing over the vaults, and sometimes there were hollow thumps underfoot and we realized there were parts of coffins sticking out of the ground beneath our feet. no markers for many of them. those which did were often homemade. many were scratched out in wet concrete. one was spray painted on all four sides with the name of the occupant. vaults had their lids broken, and some were caving in. many were partly sunken, crooked and falling over. you could see part of a rib cage through a hole in a metal coffin which had been exposed by a cracked concrete lid. i nearly stepped on a shin bone that had been scattered, whether by people or animals i don't know, near a brick vault whose entire side had collapsed. i replaced it, not that it'll do much good. it felt strange, and a little sad. there were a few ribs left, but most of the bones were missing. another brick vault was broken and empty, except for some trash someone had clearly placed in it. it was a double, one on top the other, and someone had clearly broken a hole through to the vault underneath.

it was a fascinating place to visit, if a bit depressing. it was clear hardly anyone ever went there, and it even more clear no real effort was being made to care for it, except for a few of the most recent sites. it was open to the public, but i felt like wasn't supposed to see it. some of the vaults near the road had been whitewashed, and they had put some caution tape around the area. but it was old, and hadn't been touched since. i researched a little online, and think the whitewash was the result of an effort to renovate the cemetery in 1998. they didn't get far.

The oldest cemetery in my city is down the street from my house; most of the early movers and shakers are buried there. Old cemeteries are desolately beautiful...

I visited a cemetery where some Civil War-era ancestors of mine were buried. A whole bunch of them served in the same unit and most of them survived the war to die of old age or illness or whatever.

in northern New Jersey which was split in two so that the Garden State Parkway could be built right through it. Awful thing to do to people's final resting place.

That was cool. There was also a sort of cool spot in Germany. The story goes that the Archbishop of Fulda was in Frankfurt, and died suddenly. He was buried in Frankfurt, but later they wanted to move him to Fulda to be buried. He was in an underground crypt. After they moved him, a spring burst through the ground. Now there are steps going down to the crypt that are half covered in water.

This statue is from a headstone in the historical Mt. Olivet Cemetery in Nashville. I used to go there sometimes to take pictures and just meditate. There are some amazing tombstones there, and one very cool tomb-- a scale replica of an Egyptian pyramid. All my photos of it are in storage.

as a municiple historian. I have 14 abandoned ones under my supervision. For years they got little attention but now we have actually got them in quite spiffy shape. I sometimes visit other adjoining ones and have helped supervise their renovation. I also happen to live near 5 large active ones. Famous people yup, in fact I've got 3 governors buried in one. A few years back acting on a tip & field work I found the long lost Colden slave cemetery, he was the last royal Gov. of NY. I've got lots of strange stories from my time exploring, but mostly I like walking around checking them out. I have a buddy on the Gen Web and he & I go out sometimes and take digital photos of some of the more endanged headstones so they are preserved.