Preservation and Respect

Today, I am reading Norman J.G. Pounds' The History of the English Parish: The Culture of Religion from Augustine to Victoria (2000) and enjoying it very much. If you ever wanted to know anything about medieval/early modern English parish churches — from how the sextons were paid to where the stones were quarried — this is a good place to start. I'm finding Pounds' systematic explanation very helpful for reconstructing the church that New England's emigrant generation would have known.

Like any good British historian of a certain generation, Pounds sometimes interrupts his history with a bit of armchair pontification. While I appreciate the detail work he has done in recovering the history of the English parish, I disagree with many of his pronouncements, some of which seem reactionary and shallow. For example, Pounds says of the erosion of inscriptions on church floors:

The parish church is the community's mausoleum. The floor of its nave might have been covered with slabs and monuments to its departed members, but the tramp of feet has over the centuries dislodged the brasses and worn inscriptions smooth. Effigies, sculpture and heraldry have been mutilated or removed. This is a tragedy and a violation of the rights of the dead. It is also an act of vandalism, destroying historical evidence which deserves to be protected for its own sake. For every church there should be a careful record of its monuments and of the persons commemorated, both within it and in the enclosing cemetery.

I've discussed this attitude before — particularly in regard to the preservation of grave offerings at Arlington National Cemetery. As an historian with a particular interest in material culture, I love old things, but the idea of preserving objects by removing them from their contexts bothers me. I'm all for documenting objects — photograph them, record the names on the old gravestones, etc. But should we "protect" them by alienating them from their original purposes? That strikes me as selfish.

In the case of the Arlington offerings, I argued that preserving artifacts is not inherently more respectful than destroying them. Should a letter left on a loved one's grave be preserved for the eyes of future historians? As an historian, I say yes, please say everything! As a person, I say no — that object isn't meant for me and I do a sort of violence by claiming it. I feel the same about putting gravestones in museums.

In the case of the worn inscriptions in the English churches, I don't agree with Pounds' accusation that erosion is "an act of vandalism." In fact, I think it's lovely that the congregation has shuffled over those inscriptions for so many years that the words have worn off under their feet. It's not that someone stole the plates for personal gain or destroyed them out of malice. Things decay. It's part of their existence. And trying to forestall that decay by "protecting" them seems to miss the point. You could install a plexiglass floor over the memorials in these churches so no one could actually touch them or remove them from their places and put them in a museum, but why is that better than preserving their place in the life of its community?

Gravestone of the Day: Daniel Guild

Daniel Guild, 1795, Wrentham, MA

Here lies Deposited

The remains of Mr

DANIEL GUILD

who Died June 22d. 1795

Atatis 58 who for 40 Years

was employ'd as a Saxon in

Commiting his fellow mortals

to the silent tomb.

Oh! Stranger

Contemplate that ere long

thy dust must mix with

mine -------------

Another epitaph cut short by an unfortunate preservation effort. Most of the old stones in Wrentham's Central Cemetery are embedded in concrete strips that keep them in straight, mowable lines. Sadly, many of the epitaphs were cut off when the stones were sunk into the concrete.

I think that Daniel Guild was probably a sexton, rather than a Saxon, but who am I to nitpick? I always love finding gravestones dedicated to carvers and others who made their livings creating the graveyards in which they were buried. It's interesting to see how they were memorialized. Daniel Guild (or his family) chose a winged skull that was decidedly old-fashioned by 1795. The Fisher/Farrington shop was still producing these stones in the 1790s, but they were not the height of fashion.

Some other stones dedicated to men in the mortuary industry:


Josiah Manning, 1806, Windham Center, CT

John Stevens, 1736, Newport, RI:

Gravestone Identification Challenge

Here's a little challenge from reader RJO:

The gravestone fragment shown here was recently found in the South Street Cemetery in Fitchburg, MA. South Street is Fitchburg's first cemetery, and the earliest stone dates to 1766. This fragment may have been buried under the leaves somewhere, or been tossed over the fence and returned by a neighbor who came across it. In any event, it has not
been recorded before.

Whose stone is it?

I can tell you this fragment is 72 cm tall and the family name is Thurlo, and what's left of the stone reads:

]d the
T]hurlo,

]arah
]ed
]. Age
]ths


]in
]tchburg.

First of all, what can you deduce just from this fragment alone?

Going further, using only Google and the information above, I think I've figured out who the stone belonged to, or at least have narrowed it to two possibilities, but I could be wrong. See if you can track it down yourself. (If you're like me, the first track you take will be a side track, rather than the main route.)

Anyone up for the challenge? I've done a little poking and have some leads, but am not as confident as RJO! Leave thoughts in the comments.

Restoring Daguerreotypes Digitally

Cincinnati, 1848, Cincinnati Public Library

Pete's friend, Ross, is getting his Ph.D. in computer vision at the University of Rochester. One of his recent projects involved magnifying and restoring a series of daguerreotypes taken by Charles Fontayne and William Porter on September 24, 1848 in Cincinnati. Strung together, the daguerreotypes show two miles of the city's waterfront.

A story about the restoration project appears in this month's Wired magazine. The article and images are available online — I highly recommend them. The level of detail they were able to recover is truly amazing.

The Strange Journey of an Abandoned Gravestone

A New York man finds a gravestone on a Manhattan sidewalk.

Army Completes Investigation at Arlington

The Army has completed its inquiry into the mishandling of remains at Arlington National Cemetery. Investigators have found two cases in which recent veterans' graves have been mismarked and 209 other cases of unclear records, mismarked graves, or misplaced remains from other historical periods (no word on whether that means Vietnam-era or Civil War-era — probably a mixture).

I'm glad that Arlington has conducted a review of their records and procedures and it sounds like they will be making some improvements to their record-keeping to guard against future errors. I hope that Army officials are being open, honest, an apologetic with the families involved in these cases. Soldiers' loved ones have been through enough and they deserve to be treated with respect.

I find this story fascinating because it confirms for me the extreme expectations of Americans regarding the treatment of the dead. Not only do we want our dead to be buried in fixed, marked locations, we expect those locations to endure eternally. This is a peculiarly modern and (as I hope to argue in my dissertation) a somewhat American-specific concern. Our impulse in these matters seems to be toward preservation and archiving — we are very uncomfortable with the concepts of decay, silence, and oblivion.

I don't mean to minimize the failures of management at Arlington. The two recent cases of mismarking are especially disappointing. Still, the Arlington records (as they are described in the CNN article) seem remarkably accurate by cemetery standards. Over 330,000 people have been buried at Arlington in the past 150 years and, having visited many cemeteries in the course of my research, I find it amazing that the investigators were only able to turn up 211 cases of discrepancies between the records and the reality. I don't think any other 19th-century cemetery would survive a similar inquiry with fewer errors.

Of course, any inconsistencies at Arlington are troubling because they seem like just one more way in which the Army fails to provide the highest standard of care for American soldiers. If you expect that a cemetery will preserve and mark the remains of individuals for all time, any failure to do so reads as an insult to the dead. I just wonder why Americans have those expectations in the first place.

Lowell's Abandoned Cemeteries

The Lowell Sun ran a substantial article on cemetery preservation yesterday, highlighting the abandoned Hunt-Clark Cemetery. No one has been buried there since 1942 and no one is really sure who is supposed to be in charge of this. The city of Lowell does not want to take on responsibility for it, so private citizens are hoping to create a non-profit foundation to restore and preserve the gravestones.

This is actually not an uncommon occurrence — many small New England cemeteries that were once owned by families or towns have an ambiguous legal status because their most recent trustees died in the 19th century. In some towns, the municipal government takes over, while others are cared for by the local historical society, but many are left to chance. The fact that some stones in these abandoned cemetery is due to custom and watchful neighbors, rather than to legal protections or oversight.

Good luck to Kim Zunino and the other volunteers, and thanks to bob for pointing me toward this article.

Grave Offerings at Arlington

My least favorite investigative reporter, Mark Benjamin, has published another frantic article about Arlington National Cemetery over at Salon. As ever, the shrillness of his writing and the shallowness of his inquiry sets my teeth on edge, but I suppose I must keep reading him if I hope to stay current on the cemetery news.

As far as I can tell, Benjamin's purpose in this new article is to whine about not receiving enough credit from the AP for his role in changing Arlington's policies on grave offerings. Last summer, Benjamin wrote a thoughtless piece about mementos left on graves being "trashed" by callous staff members. Though Arlington's policy clearly stated that items left on graves would be removed after a few days, Benjamin implied that anything less than the perpetual preservation of all grave offerings was an affront to the dignity of the soldiers buried at Arlington and a slap in the face to their grieving family members. The article was long on outrage and short on consideration of the purpose of grave offerings, public vs. private meaning, or the cycle of decay as a legitimate part of death and dying. My full critique of that article is here, though I will reprint an excerpt below the fold.

Now, the Army has embarked on a new program to preserve the mementos left on graves in section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery, where many of the dead from Iraq and Afghanistan are buried. Benjamin's new article is not really about the policy change — it is about the fact that the AP did not give him credit for spurring the change. Benjamin spends the article calling editors and cemetery officials, "wondering why the AP had omitted Salon's earlier reporting in its feature on Arlington's new Section 60 policy." 

Benjamin's articles make much more sense to me now that I have read Jessica Mitford's The American Way of Death. Like Mr. August Chelini, the man who sued an embalmer when he found that his mother's body had decayed a year and a half after her death, Benjamin believes that preservation of the ephemeral is both possible and desirable. According to Mitford, it is a peculiarly American way of approaching death and its trappings. It makes me think of the sadness I felt as a child when my siblings and I would buy glo-sticks at fireworks shows. We would put them in the freezer to last just a bit longer, but the knowledge that they would die made it difficult for me to enjoy them while they lasted.

Devastation at Amesbury's Union Cemetery

I went out with my camera today to take advantage of the fantastic weather. I decided to go up to Amesbury, where I found the Union Cemetery on Route 110 in complete disarray. The storms of the past week have downed at least 6 full-sized trees and many smaller branches. As far as I could tell, only a few monuments were broken, but the trees are huge and there may have been more crushed stones that I couldn't see. Most of the damage is in the 19th-century section — the 18th-century stones were largely untouched. I saw at least one City of Amesbury truck in the cemetery, so I imagine that they're on top of the situation.

Connecticut Cemetery Theft

Many thanks to commenter jnyfritz for pointing me toward this very sad story.

Police in Norwich, Connecticut have arrested a man for stealing and destroying a 120-year-old bronze statue from a Yantic cemetery. The statue used to adorn the grave of Sarah Osgood (d. 1881), but has been cut into pieces by the thief or thieves, who tried to sell it for scrap metal.

A restoration expert says that the statue can be repaired, but that it will be expensive and some pieces may have to be remolded.

Cemetery News

In New Haven, CT, preservationists are opposing a proposal to alter the sandstone wall surrounding the Grove Street Cemetery.

While I'm not 100% clear on the details, it seems that Yale wants fences put into the wall to make the sidewalks near its new residential colleges more friendly. Preservationists argue that the changes would destroy the integrity of the wall and (implicitly) that they have no interest in cooperating with a university that shows precious little respect for inconvenient historic structures that stand in its path.

Mementos at Arlington

I've been reading Salon's series on "Grave Offenses" at Arlington National Cemetery and I have to say, I'm pretty underwhelmed. Despite the author's outraged tone, there seems to be little cause for the sensational titles. Coming in the wake of the Burr Oak disaster, I think it's somewhat irresponsible of Salon to sensationalize this series which, as far as I can tell, has uncovered no malicious intent or actual wrongdoing.

The first installment made a few serious (though unsubstantiated) accusations — some bodies are not buried beneath the correct headstones — that, if true, are truly troubling. Other complaints — the computer database project is taking longer than expected — are par for the course and hardly outrageous. The boss sounds like a jerk, and, should the investigation find that he did mistreat his employees, he should be punished. That said, Salon presents no evidence to back up its most sensational claims about the actual treatment of bodies at Arlington.

Today's follow-up piece examined the treatment of mementos left at veterans' graves. The author, Mark Benjamin, writes in high dudgeon about personal artifacts being "trashed" at Arlington, rather than catalogued and preserved as they are at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial:

The sun was out after several days of rain . . . Left out in the rain to rot were crayon drawings by children who had lost a parent, photographs of soldiers with their babies, painted portraits and thank-you notes from grade-school kids to fallen soldiers they had never known. Colors of artworks ran together. Photos were blurred and wilted. Poems and letters were illegible wads of wet paper. A worker in a brown uniform wandered among the graves, blasting the headstones with a power washer without regard to what was left of the mementos -- or the obviously uncomfortable mourners looking on. Some items got further soaked. The worker blasted others across the grass. Many of them would end up in a black trash bin in the cemetery's service area.

Benjamin goes on to interview family members who are "distraught" to discover that their grave offerings are destroyed after they are collected during regular cemetery maintenance. He is shocked at the paltry collection of artifacts preserved by cemetery staff — medals, uniforms, children's drawings — which pales in comparison to the vast collection of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. "What war stories had been lost forever? What words from a father to a son or wife to a husband were sitting in some landfill? What meaningful personal artifacts had been relegated to the Arlington trash bin?"

Benjamin has two major objections: the artifacts are treated disrespectfully and they are not being preserved for posterity. The first seems quite overblown — he admits that he visited after several days of heavy rain and the "disrespect" he witnesses seems to consist mainly of soggy letters that have blown about. Does he want Arlington to build a dome? And yes, items left at graves are often removed and discarded in order to keep the cemetery uncluttered. I don't think that this comes as a surprise to anyone. The word "trashed" seems harsh, but I haven't read anything that suggests to me that the Arlington staff has treated grave offerings with callous disregard.

The second complaint is more interesting to me. As an historian, I'd love to see every artifact ever created preserved, but that's a very selfish impulse.

I started out on Benjamin's side, but his over-the-top indignation lost me by the end of the article. His major complaint is that Arlington's collection policies are not the same as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial's. Of course they aren't. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial's policy of collecting, cataloguing, and preserving every photograph, flower, and teddy bear left by visitors is extraordinary, not routine. The collection is vast and growing and is already a valuable resource for scholars.

Benjamin laments that no similar collection exists at Arlington, but that strikes me as an unreasonable standard. No cemetery saves all of the grave offerings — how could it? Set aside the logistics of collecting artifacts from Arlington's 600+ acres vs. the VVM's 500 linear feet, set aside the logistics of cataloging and preserving all of those tons of artifacts, set aside the fact that Arlington has never made a commitment to building a collection (in fact, they ask people not to leave items other than flowers). Should Arlington save the offerings? I'm not so sure.

What is the function of a grave offering? Is it meant for the historian's eye? Or does the historian commit an act of violence merely by gazing? Does it do its work in an archive? Or is it the exchange between the bereaved and the beloved that matters?

As historians, we want to know everything, read everything, and speak for others. We want to dig below the surface, expose everything to the light, claim understanding. It is very hard for us to accept the sacredness of silence and the utility of decay. I would like nothing better than to dig up every body in the slave section of the Newport Common Burying Ground and count the beads, examine the bones, analyze the offerings. What stories I could tell! But I have accepted that those offerings are not for me. It's why I don't support the idea that gravestones should be removed from cemeteries in order to preserve the art — decay is part of the life of that object and it can never mean the same thing in a museum as it did on a hill overlooking the harbor.

Why should we save a letter left on a soldier's grave? Why is it disrespectful to let it dissolve in the rain, soak into the soil, or fly away in the wind?

Benjamin's article reminded me of a seminar I attended when I was in high school at a local historical society. A preservationist from the SPNEA was speaking about preservation techniques for textiles and furniture to an audience of amateurs with attics full of family relics. The preservationist's specialty was quilts, and her eyes widened with wonder when one elderly woman brought forward an ancient quilt that had passed from generation to generation in her family. It was a beautiful quilt — intricate, colorful, and very, very old by quilt standards. When the woman started talking about how their family uses the quilt for their annual family picnic, the preservationist's eyes just about fell out of her head. There was a lot of stammering about wrapping it mylar and NEVER EVER taking outside ever again. The woman looked at the preservationist like she was crazy and said something along the lines of, "everyone in my family for eight generations has sat on this quilt, and you'd better believe it's going to see nine and ten."

What is the value of a quilt? Should it be protected from moths and studied by professors? Or should it decay with use by a family that values it for what it means to them, not for what it tells us about the social and cultural history of quilting?

I'm a professional scholar of material culture. I love an old quilt. I love an old letter. If I had a box full of grave offerings from the 18th century, I'd faint with delight. But I'm not troubled by the treatment of artifacts at Arlington as described in the Salon article. The artifacts are not preserved, but they seem not to be mistreated. What's wrong with that?

Don't Rub the Sandstone

Many Connecticut gravestones are carved from native red sandstone. Unfortunately, this material is not particularly durable — it is vulnerable to spalling when moisture infiltrates the tiny cracks and then expands by freezing. In its most fragile state, sandstone can crumble at the lightest touch. Whole sections can slough off at a time. Graveyard visitors shouldn't really take rubbings of any stone, especially red sandstone.

Here is what happens to red sandstone over time:

Stage One: Minimal Damage

 Stage Two: Largely Illegible

Stage Three: Disintegration

Stage Four: Collapse

Buried in the Parking Lot

Today, I was running errands in Somerville when I came across the Milk Row Cemetery on Somerville Ave. Established in 1804, this graveyard holds the remains of several members of the Tufts family, a British soldier killed in the Battle of Milk Row (19 April 1775), and prominent citizens of Somerville, along with the Somerville Civil War soldiers monument. Many of the headstones seem to be in rough shape, but the city has a plan for preservation.

The Milk Row Cemetery is not exactly in the Market Basket supermarket parking lot, but it is very, very close.

It reminded me of a link I ran across a few months ago — I can't remember whether I posted it back then. Back in October, Wesley Treat's Roadside Resorts posted a collection of photos of cemeteries that have been swallowed up by parking lots. I haven't seen any of these in person, though I might stop by next time I find myself in New Jersey or Long Island. I wonder if there are any in New England.

Are there any cemeteries in your local mall parking lot?