Tornado damage at Oakland Cemetery

The Georgia State Historic Preservation Office has descriptions with accompanying photos of tornado damage to National Register listed properties in Atlanta, including the Oakland Cemetery.

The local ABC affiliate keeps promising to air a program about Oakland Cemetery, it's been listed in the tv guide several weeks in a row now, but each time I think it's going to be on the station shows something else instead. The latest disappointment came Friday night when they decided to run Gray's Anatomy instead. I'm thinking that maybe they're still doing editing and updates to the program because it was originally slotted to air right about the same time the tornado hit.

Ferndale, California

I bought a slide scanner a few days ago and decided to pratice with a box of slides labeled "Ferndale 1983." Ferndale is (or was) a lovely little town south of Eureka with wonderful Victorian buildings as well as this cemetery. Various television and movie productions have filmed in Ferndale because it looks so much like a New England coastal village, including the original television mini-series version of Stephen King's vampire classic, "Salem's Lot."

Vernacular concrete markers

I've mentioned this is a special interest so thought I'd put up a few examples. Both are from the Buffalo River area in northern Arkansas. The first one is from the Canaan Cemetery near Marshall. It was designed to hold a photo.
Unfortunately, as is true of almost all grave markers that incorporated a frame meant to hold anything printed on paper, the photograph has suffered so much water damage that it's now almost completely obliterated.

The second marker is from the Silver Hill Cemetery located just outside the boundary for Buffalo National River off US-65. It, too, was designed to hold a photo or plaque, which was either never mounted in place or has since been removed.

The Canaan Cemetery is also notable for its amazing two-tier table graves. Unlike the table graves common farther south in Louisiana, these are strictly false vaults. Actual interments were in-ground, not above.

Valentine, Nebraska

It's snowing in Atlanta today, and for some reason that got me to thinking about the last time I saw real snow -- Valentine, Nebraska, in January 2007. The cemetery there had the first grave markers I'd ever noticed that included brands.

Quite a few markers also included a typical Sand Hills ranch scene, too, like this one:

Death

Greta Christina has another good post on death and dying. http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2008/02/the-meaning-of.html#comments (And one of these days I need to learn how to do hypertext links instead of just copying the URLs)

Rationale

Back in high school or shortly after I read a book called A Fine and Private Place written by Peter Beagle, an author best known for another work of fantasy, The Last Unicorn. If you've never read the book but appreciate good fantasy, seek it out. It's set in a cemetery. Whether or not the book alone is responsible for my interest in gravestones, memorials, and rituals surrounding death and dying is unlikely, but it no doubt contributed to it. I plan to use this blog as a space for random thoughts related to funerary art, roadside memorials, grave goods, and whatever else catches my attention that's connected in some way to the ways Americans deal with death.

I plan to set up an occasional slide show from favorite cemeteries, speculate on the increasing paganism I see evidenced in the proliferation of roadside memorials and the truly bizarre (and almost always sad) offerings of grave goods, and to highlight interesting historical and curiousities. I have a strong interest in vernacular grave markers -- concrete, fieldstone, wood, and found materials -- so will probably do a lot of thinking out loud about them, too.

St. Augustine Cemetery, Cane River Creole National Heritage Area, Louisiana. Photo taken December 24, 2007.