Cedar Hill Cemetery

Found this intriguing example of a vernacular concrete marker in the Cedar Hill Cemetery in Scottsboro, Alabama, on Saturday. The Cedar Hill Cemetery is located directly behind the Unclaimed Luggage Center so both it and the marker were purely serendipitous -- wasn't looking for either, but spotted the entrance sign to the cemetery when we pulled into the parking lot for the Unclaimed Luggage store. I wasn't really sure if it was concrete or not until I got a good look at the top and could see the overlap between the front and back sides. The duplication of two motifs often in late 19th, early 20th century markers -- the clasped hands and the open book -- had me initially wondering if it was actually a commercial limestone marker. There are times when it can be hard to tell the difference between a vernacular limestone and a vernacular concrete. A close examination, though, revealed the maker of the stone sculpted it from concrete. Definitely a more ambitious effort than the typical simple tablets or slabs one usually finds when cement is the chosen medium.

Cedar Hill Cemetery is a large community cemetery with sections dating back to the 19th century. It is an active cemetery, and includes a number of nice examples of contemporary markers with the personalizations that are once again becoming fairly commonplace, e.g., portraits of the deceased.

Rhetorical question

Ever wonder why Non Sequitur seems to include cemetery humor on a fairly regular basis? Didn't think so, but here's the latest:

Getting personal

Two words you don't want to read in a radiologist's report: aortic ectasia. I feel the need creeping up to write a long, intensely personal piece on death and dying, but not today.

Intriguing marker

I found this in a Springfield, Illinois, cemetery. It's not far from Abraham Lincoln's tomb.

At first blush, it's a pretty ordinary 1920's commercial marker, although it does appear that Mr. Ervin was a joiner -- I count three different organizations' symbols, with the last one being the one and only example of its type I've ever stumbled across:

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.