Showing posts with label zinc. Show all posts
Showing posts with label zinc. Show all posts

Sunday, March 29, 2009

Union Church Cemetery, Pleasant Hill, Mississippi

The Union Church Cemetery near Pleasant Hill, Mississippi, has a nice assortment of metal markers.
Photos were taken March 23 by Ray Mannikko. Ray estimates the obelisk below was at least 8 feet tall.

The lamb below is the first I've seen in zinc. The grave also includes a metal footstone.



Wednesday, January 7, 2009

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.

Monday, June 16, 2008

Cast metal grave markers

Spotted some cast metal markers in the cemetery in Houghton, Michigan, last week. Two were definitely zinc (aka "white bronze"), but the third, which is about 30 years older than the two zinc markers, is much heavier metal. No visible rust, but I think it's iron.

The Houghton cemetery is an interesting one. It's right on the edge of the Michigan Tech campus -- students cut through there constantly, shortcutting from Daniel Heights (aka married students housing) to the Student Development Complex, which houses the Athletic Department (PE classes and sports events) and health clinic. I can remember walking through myself on the way to PE classes in the 1980s and pausing to read headstones dating back to the 1840s. Several professors at Tech use the cemetery as a resource for teaching human ecology, sociology, and history. The cemetery is quite well maintained and is still active. I don't know about the National Register status of the entire cemetery, but it does contain at least one family mausoleum that's listed. There's Michigan SHPO plaque next to the door noting that the structure is historically significant.