Paint Rock, Alabama

The northwest corner of the intersection of state highway 65 and US highway 72. No identifying information and, given the weeds starting to block them, no recent maintenance.

Gone Home: a brief review

Gone Home: Southern Folk Gravestone Art is a good book, but a deceptively titled one. The word "southern" suggests it's going to provide examples from across the southern United States; in reality it focuses exclusively on cemeteries in the state of Alabama.

Similarly, the phrase "gravestone art" implies the authors are going to focus on the decorative elements of funerary art: statuary, carvings, headstone shapes and styles, and so on. Instead, the authors' passion lies in epitaphs. The authors do discuss carving, but the focus seems to be more on the development of the lettering used in epitaphs rather than on the decorative elements of a marker such as floral motifs and Christian symbolism. There is also an interesting discussion of folklore and memorialization, and the evolution of markers and inscriptions over time.

Nonetheless, while the book is a useful one for anyone interested in gravestones and the history of memorialization, a reader looking for a book that focuses on gravestone art overall rather than the content of the inscriptions would be doomed to disappointment. Similarly, anyone hoping for a book that provides a regional context should look elsewhere. This is a good book on a specific subject area, and as such as fairly limited in its content.

Maple Hill Cemetery, Huntsville, Alabama

The Maple Hill Cemetery in Huntsville, Alabama, is the oldest cemetery in the city. Located on the edge of a historic district, the cemetery is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It includes a number of notable grave markers, including these three cast zinc headstones (front above, back below).
I looked for a company name, but could not find one. The one thing that stood out was they seemed to be cast from heavier gauge metal than most of the cast zinc (aka white bronze) markers I've seen elsewhere.

The cemetery also includes more angels in various poses than I'm used to seeing, ranging from the relatively small and cherubic, as shown below, to monumental in every sense of the word.

Adult varieties come kneeling or standing, looking humbly down

or beseechingly (expectantly?) up:

I've never really understood why the kneeling on only one knee.

Maple Hill does include some elements that definitely had me wondering what people were thinking. As we were driving through the cemetery we spotted this monument with the book on a stick (interpretive plaque) standing next to it.

Knowing that Maple Hill is a National Register property, and also knowing that various Alabama notables are interred in the cemetery, a visitor's natural reaction is, oh, good, they've put up a wayside that gives more information about either the cemetery or that particular monument. The visitor is doomed to disappointment.

The marker commemorates the 1807 establishment of the Huntsville meridian, "which is the reference point for all property surveyed in North Alabama." How the marker commemorating the meridian wound up sitting in the middle of the cemetery is a mystery -- a meridian is a line, so there's no logical reason why the marker has to be in what is without a doubt the one place in Huntsville where it is likely to be seen by the smallest number of potential viewers.