Gates of Heaven

There is something inherently appealing about cemetery gates. Needless-to-say, not all cemeteries have them. My SOP upon reaching a cemetery is take a shot of the cemetery sign; that way I know where the following shots come from. If there's no sign, I write the name of the cemetery on a piece of paper and shoot that. These photos have all been tweaked more or less and had borders added to them. It's entertaining but time consuming.

Vandals, Huns, and Visigoths

Jonathan asked: “Have you ever done anything on graveyard vandalism? Forgive me if you have and I missed it. I know you like the uprights, but they invite wackoes to knock them over.”

No, Jonathan, I haven’t; and I’ve been pondering that ever since you asked: “What could I say about vandalism”? Other than it’s fucking stupid?

For the purposes of the blog or Flickr, I don’t record vandalism, other than occasionally. It tends to be a given in any cemetery to one degree or another. The most successful cemeteries on combatting vandalism are Jewish cemeteries (at least around here) which often have resident caretakers; the surest protection known. Larger, more expensive cemeteries have a degree of immunity, but are not entirely safe. Every cemetery is at risk. Small, unattended, rural cemeteries are ripe fodder for disenfranchised youth (vandals are most often young).

If the vandals are not young, I’d suggest that a more sinister motive is in play: bigotry. Certainly, bigotry can be a motive for the young, as well, but sheer indifference and mischief making are heavy factors, too. Tell the Jews about bigotry and cemetery destruction.

The practical question is how to combat it. Punishment is probably ineffective and pointless and, at best, after the fact. If one is always paying for the pound of cure, one never gets to the ounce of prevention. There are many practical steps one can take to make one’s cemetery less inviting to vandals, such as trimming up the bushes and keeping lines of sight open, which are undoubtedly good advice. In general, the better the maintenance, the less vandalism. Vandals are less likely to target places they think are under observation.

For rural and pioneer cemeteries, your best bet is to make the communities “own” the cemeteries; and by “own,” I don’t mean “have physical title to,” I mean “own” in the sense of “having, with pride, accepted responsibility for.” Involve the community in making the cemetery a place of community, not just a repository for dead people. Get the community to care about the cemetery. Have classes and school clubs take up maintenance. Do things in the cemetery. Have art shows, plays, concerts. Hire local graffiti artists to do art/promotions. Bring your history to the cemetery. Do whatever you can to involve the neighbors in believing they have both a treasure and a sacred place on their hands.  You’re never going to win it all, but you can make a big dent.

The tougher problem is altering one’s views on the origins of vandalism, in the first place. Or, for that matter, the origins of social deviance and what to do about it. One’s views determine one’s response.

One response is punishment for acts of transgression. Punishment has two components: revenge and behavioral modification. Our legal system, if I understand it correctly, operates almost entirely on punishment as a response to transgression. In theory, both components, revenge and modification, are justification for the punishment.

Revenge, as a punishment component, has the unfortunate effect of multiplying itself. Revenge turns to revenge and cycles are set in motion that are almost impossible to eradicate, witness Turkey-Greece, Israel-Arab, Sicily, Hatfield-McCoy, and on. Old scores die hard. The only way to stop revenge is to stop it. There’s no compromise out of it. It simply has to be stopped. Revenge is counterproductive.

With that out of the way, we can concentrate on punishment as behavioral modification, as deterrent, as reprogramming.

But, perhaps, it’s better to begin by asking, not how effective punishment is, but what do we know about behavioral modification and how can it most effectively be achieved? If we were serious about reprogramming criminals, we’d be a lot further along than we are. The most that can be said for our behavioral modification program is that it relies almost exclusively on fear (of further punishment which could well extend into the afterlife, if you believe the believers); but it’s long been known that positive reinforcement is much more effective than negative. Punishment that doesn’t include community building and the integration of the transgressor into society is pointless, useless, and expensive. It does, though, provide for a lot of jobs.

Just offhand, I’d put all cemetery vandals on cemetery maintenance patrol. I’d have a few classes on what cemeteries mean to people, what they do for society. Maybe I’d have the vandals assist with a few funerals. Maybe involve the vandals with putting on a community art show in the cemetery. You get the idea.

Just keep it in mind that nothing solves everything. Be realistic.

Other Spaces

There are places I remember all my life  
Though some have changed  
Some forever, not for better 
Some have gone and some remain
 
All these places have their moments  
Of lovers and friends I still can recall 
Some are dead and some are living 
In my life I loved them all

 

Dying doesn't have to be ugly.

 

House in Highgate Cemetery

Okopowa Street Jewish Cemetery, Warsaw

Santa Rosa Memorial Park

Sonoma Cemetery

Spring Grove Cemetery

Texas State Cemetery

The Silence of the Lambs

It started with my wife, Kay, and me visiting Patience McMaster’s grave in the Lowell, OR cemetery in the early/mid-1970s. There aren’t but four or five graves in the Lowell cemetery; it was a humble beginning. Thirty years later, in 2004, I decided to purchase a camera and a new computer and set off recording the cemeteries of Oregon. Another humble beginning.

Exactly why I wanted to record the cemeteries of Oregon is muddled but was mainly a factor of my liking cemeteries; I find the stories and art compelling. Regardless, why I like cemeteries isn’t germane to this account. The first trick, of course, was to find the cemeteries. I developed my techniques, but was always on the lookout for better sources. At the same time, I began reading whatever I could find on cemeteries; which, it turns out, is a lot smaller library than I was expecting.

Academically, the study of cemeteries is limited to folklore studies, landscape architecture, and geography; but within those categories the amount of work done is minimal. The best work is done by landscape architects who tend to approach cemeteries as would a geographer: fitting the place to its function. Most general writing about cemeteries are local guides to both the cemeteries and the people buried within them. There tends to be confusion, especially amongst amateurs, about what one is studying when one is studying graveyards; and the study of the inhabitants of the cemetery is often conflated with the study of the cemetery, per se. Cemetery symbolism is one area that academics like to concentrate on; and, in this country, the East Coast is obsessed with carving styles and eras, thanks to its abundant old cemetery resources.

A notable exception is Richard Meyer’s Cemeteries and Gravemarkers, a collection of twelve essays, largely in the folklore vein, on a variety of topics by differing authors. It’s a highly entertaining book, arguably the best I’ve run across on the subject of American vernacular cemeteries. Better yet, Richard is an Oregonian and his piece in the book was regionally oriented.

Ah ha!

In the late 70s, I tracked Richard down and sent him an email explaining what I was doing and asking for any tips he might have for locating cemeteries around here; to which he replied that, unfortunately, he was no longer in the cemetery research business and couldn’t provide any assistance. Okay, I could live with that, despite wondering why, if he was no longer in the business, he should have forgotten how he tracked down his cemeteries. I understood that he was no longer interested enough to be bothered with answering the question, even should he have the advice. It was, I thought, unfortunate, but a reality I had to live with.

That was the beginning of my curious relationship with the world of cemeterians. I had little idea what an insular group they are. Perhaps it comes from toiling for years out of the sight of the sun or people. Despite Richard, of course, I managed to find more than enough cemeteries to visit. Then came a gathering of the National Society for Preservation, or some such, here in Portland, perhaps in the early 80s or there abouts, and they were planning on visiting some cemeteries while they were here. Maybe it was still in the 70s. In any event, I hadn’t been to that many cemeteries at the time—sixty or seventy—but I was concerned that the cemeteries that would be chosen to be visited would most likely be the stock cemeteries that everyone knew and talked abut, and that the more interesting and representative cemeteries would probably be missed; so I wrote to the state office in charge of cemeteries and in charge of selecting the cemeteries to visit and asked to be added to the group that was doing the deciding.

Can you say “stonewall”?

I got a reply saying, thanks for my interest, they’d contact me later, etc. Nothing happened and I persisted and eventually got a rebuking reply from the state cemeterian telling me to be patient, they’d get to me.

They didn’t. The conference came and went without any more contact from the state. I eventually sent the lady a note asking if I’d been patient enough, yet, but I never heard back from her. Hmm? (Should you want to know, yes, they did choose the old standards.)

My suspicion, way back then, was that not many people, even the cemetery folk, have visited that many cemeteries. My suspicion was that people had their favorite cemeteries and those are the ones that they visited. I still have that suspicion. I did, of course, run across the Oregon Burial Site Guide, with its wealth of information, and those people had visited a bunch of cemeteries. The OBSG, though, was a locating guide and not a descriptive guide and it was burdened down with large numbers of lost, unavailable, and no longer active sites. Furthermore, it did its locating by section and range numbers, a decidedly difficult and imprecise way of finding things. To be fair, the book was compiled prior to GPS locating; but, then again, so was my database. (On the other hand, I had Google Maps.)

Then came the Oregon Historical Cemetery Society (again, these names are approximate; I can never remember their exact wording and I’m not interested enough to go look them up). They are the non-governmental equivalent of the state office. I’d joined them even though they were (and are) fairly moribund. Their newsletter (which hasn’t come our for years) was sporadic at best. They did, as one can imagine, send out constant requests, when they did publish newsletters, for people to come join their board.

Silly me, I said sure, I’ll join. I went to a couple meetings. That in itself was difficult to set up; there was obviously a reluctance to have me attend. I stressed my database and offered it to their organization and its website. By the time the third board meeting came around that I could attend, they told me that there was no point in attending because there was only regular business to address, nothing special; which I found curious, as from my experience that’s what boards and board members deal with. I understood it as an oblique way of say, “No thanks, we’ll do without you.”

Which they’ve been happy to do without ever since. Now, the fact that they seem to have disappeared can’t have anything to do with their rejection of me, but one has to wonder what their objectives are/were.

Enter the Association for Gravestone Studies (AGS). They’re pretty much the only serious gravestone people out there. Quasi-academic, they publish a newsletter and an annual. I eventually joined them, too. It turns out the Richard Meyer, that Richard Meyer, was a longtime editor of the annual and a prominent member of the association. In fact, he stepped in to do some relief work within the association, which surprised me, as he said he was out of the business. Maybe he’d taken a sabbatical when I contacted him. The AGS, too, puts out a regular call for papers, and a while back I suggested a piece on, I believe, cowboy images on tombstones. The editor said it sounded right and I should send it on to her for vetting. Well, time went on again, and I contacted her about what was happening, and there was a vacation and this and that and she’d get back to me and never did. Eventually, I stopped asking. I figure I’d gotten lost in the cracks and wasn’t of enough interest for her to remember or pursue. Cest la vie.

Then the AGS decided to hold it’s annual meeting here in Oregon, highly unusual for this East Coast organization; but Richard’s influence looms large. A call for papers went out. I responded with suggestions, but, in particular, stressed that I’d like to help with setting up tours to appropriate cemeteries. I recounted my past history with the state and said I didn’t want that to be repeated. By this point, my database of Oregon cemeteries had grown to well over 600. It had long since become the definitive website for Oregon cemeteries.

I got a response from a guy named Robert Keeler on behalf of the AGS. He thought my presenting a paper on epitaphs would be a good idea. I wrote back saying I was more concerned abut the tours and would like to discuss that first; I emphasized the time factor and thought that tour decisions should be being made, and that, if someone was already on it, they should get in touch with me; and I further urged that anyone coming to Oregon to visit cemeteries should familiarize themselves with the DeadManTalking Flickr site. It would be foolish not to.

Then I made the mistake of looking up this Robert Keeler. His email address implied he was employed by a local community college, and, indeed, he is. That got me to wondering who he was and what his interest in cemeteries was. I’d never heard of him and he’d never made any effort to contact me. I have no indication that he ever visited DeadManTalking or Bogging a Dead Horse; and I asked him that, straight on, “Who are you and what’s your interest in cemeteries?”

That’s the last I’ve heard from him, despite nudging emails. In further reading his website, I caught what might be part of the problem: he’s on the state commission that’s I’d run into before. He already knew who I was. But, still, I found it amazing that the AGS, which knows who I am and what I’ve done for Oregon cemeteries, would set up a conference in my state without consulting me to begin with. I’m sure this Robert Keeler likes cemeteries, but his school website doesn’t mention any interest in cemeteries other than his position on the cemetery commission. He does no academic work around cemeteries. Nor, does anyone else in the state, to my knowledge. As far as I can tell, since Richard quit, I’m it. If there’s anyone else, they’re very quiet.

I went further in trying to maintain contact with Keeler since he stopped answering my emails. I wrote the AGS proper to see if he was okay, that he wasn’t overcome by illness or other calamity. You may find this strange, but the AGS didn’t respond either. Not a word.

I took my last step. I have a Flickr contact, John Martine, who’s also an AGS member. John is very active in AGS, goes to all the annual meetings, etc., and takes great photos. A while back I sent John a Flickr message explaining the situation and asking him what should I do? John has posted pictures on his Flickr site since I wrote to him, so he’s had a chance to read my note; but, and this is going to doubly surprise you, John hasn’t answered back, either. Hmm?

Offhand, I’m not in favor of conspiracy theories, but I’m beginning to detect a pattern here. And an interconnectedness. I have no fears that anyone from the AGS will read this, considering how they avoid me like the plague, but I’d certainly like to know what goes on among them. It’s a long string from Richard telling me he’s no longer in the business to John ignoring my inquiries. I can tell you right now that the AGS folk are going to come here without talking to me. Whatever I do to give them the heebee-jeebees, it sure works. It’s too bad, I know a lot of good cemeteries; I could show them a good time. Why they don’t want to know, is beyond me. Are they all Republicans?

Sayonara.

Home, Sweet Home

The following photos are copyright of Gary Tepfer and the Mongolian Altai Inventory, University of Oregon Libraries. They are of cemeteries in the Altai region of Mongolia. They were taken in 2007. Mr. Tepfer has no idea I crimped his photos to show you. Shame on me.

I mentioned this earlier, but it doesn't hurt to say it again. Native American bloodlines point to relationship with the folks who currently live there. The common ancestors to both may, of course, have lived elsewhere; but the Altai, for all their barren inhospitality, have been a crucial meeting place between East and West for millennia. This is the true dividing line between Europe and Asia rather than the Urals.

The mountains are north of the Tarim Basin of China where the Takla Makan mummies were found. The mummies have distinctive Indo-European features and were accompanied by plaid cloth similar to that found in Scotland.

New York State of Mind

We’re pretty much convinced that the New York state of mind is it. There’s not really a state that goes along with that city. I mean, how would that work, the city would be larger than the state? New York, it’s bigger than anything except California and Texas, right (we’re not sure Alaska counts; it’s not truly a part of the U.S.).

We do know that New York is surrounded by other suburbs they call boroughs and that there’s practically an unlimited number of them. Famous boroughs are Brooklyn, Long Island, and New Jersey. Apparently, there’s a hilly, Jewish park called the Catskills where all the Jews go for comedy shows. It might be part of Central Park; we’re not sure.

Genesee Brewery, Rochester, NY

There’s supposed to be another city in New York called Buffalo, but that’s highly unlikely. Why would they call a city in New York, Buffalo? That would be like naming a city in California, Fugidaboudit. Well, there is a city over there called Buffalo, but it’s in Niagara, not New York. Easy mistake to make; everything so crammed together over there.

I was out there recently in a place called the Finger Lakes, and I won’t go into that anymore than that. Enough’s enough. While there, I chanced upon nine cemeteries that I visited. Two-thirds of them I ran into by accident, whereas I intentionally hunted down three cemeteries in Ithaca. Not only was I not in Kansas anymore, I wasn’t in Oregon, either. They speak the same language out there, but it’s different. Maybe it’s part of the U.S., maybe it isn’t. They accepted my money.

It is cute out there, and the architecture is fantastic. There are perfect villages that looked dazzling in their fall colors. The lake I drove around, Cayuga, is rimmed with vineyards producing, rumor has it, unpalatable white wines. Quite where they grow their grapes in somewhat of a mystery as the roads aren’t flanked with vines as they are in other wine producing areas. This is no Alsace. Nor Oregon, for that matter.

Still, these glacially scoured lakes up to forty miles long and no more than two-and-a-half wide that settle into slumps in the earth have an unmistakable charm that lack of vines doesn’t diminish. One could live here under certain privations, but comfortably, nonetheless.

Cornell University, high above Cayuga’s waters, lords over Ithaca lapping the southern terminus of Cayuga Lake. It inspires no end of loyalty and love from its alums and faculty and deservedly so. It’s a proud and venerable institution in a marvelous setting. What more could a college student hope for?

It has, though, not inspired a flourishing for the death arts, so to speak. Death around here is still subdued and restrained. Diamond engraving has reached tombstones here, but grave decoration and homemade monuments are scarce to non-existent. Ithaca cemeteries are fairly sober affairs with little of the exuberance exhibited on the West Coast, which, frankly, surprised me. It is, I’m sure, a cultural thing. This is a part of the world where the 18th and 19th centuries reigned supreme, and in one way or another they’ve become locked into that mindset. This is a part of the world where “transcendentalist” still has meaning.

Granted, though, New York is a big state and the East Coast is bigger yet, so my nine cemeteries visited aren’t even a drop in the bucket. I can make no comparison nor draw any conclusions. I saw what I saw; that’s it.

I saw Carl Sagan’s grave. If you don’t know who Carl Sagan was, you should quit reading this blog and go play basketball or something. You’ve no business here. If somebody told me this was the stone that Jesus rolled away to rise up from his tomb, I’d be nonplussed, but Carl’s grave, that’s something else. Carl really existed. And I understand that Carl was a modest guy and talked in a much more soothing voice than Garrison Keillor; still, something more than a flat stone with name and dates would be nice. A little respect, eh?

Aside from Carl, what I liked best were ubiquitous, thin, severe stele from the early part of the 19th century, with shallow illustrative carvings and the most delicate flourishes in the script. Picture the “John Hancock” signature on the Constitution, then translate that into stone. Considering the technical nature of the carving, the fineness of line is noteworthy. They could use a program of identification and restoration for many of these stones; they are a local treasure.

It is probably best I don’t live east of the Mississippi. The sheer number of cemeteries is overwhelming. The maps show scads of them and I ran across others not listed. I didn’t begin to stop at all those I saw. I’d have to move there. And New York is but one small part of a vast territory. At least in Oregon I have a chance at knowing what’s here. On the other hand, I could have found my 850 cemeteries a lot closer to home if I lived out there.

All-in-all a fruitful if too short trip.

Back to the Future: Neighborhood Cemeteries

I'm giving a talk here in a few days to the annual convention of Oregon funeral directors and cemetery operators at Seaside, OR. Primarily, I'm focusing on do-it-yourself cemeteries, but I end with a few remarks about the future of cemeteries, which I've reposted here. The photos are selected from those illustrating DIY cemeteries.

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Agency Warm Springs Cemetery

Correlation: The rise of the lawn cemetery has been accompanied by the rise in cremation rates. Is there a causal relationship? If there is, what is it?

I believe that the rise of the large lawn cemetery—taking the maintenance of the cemetery out of the community and leveling the playing field—has withdrawn the value and use of the cemetery to the community. That, along with the steadily increasing cost for an increasingly abstract service, has driven many people out of the market place. Why buy sterility?

The lawn cemetery, as much as anything, was the result of the commercialization of the industry in the U.S., the necessity to trim costs and to stay in the black. The rest of the world did not follow our lead.

Other than National cemeteries where they give their plots away, can lawn cemeteries expect to survive?

Rob Strasser Grave: American Legion Cemetery (Manzanita, OR)

Question: should cemeteries ever have been commercialized? What are we going to do with all these stone parks that weren’t designed as parks very well? Are we creating a network of private parks that have little value for their communities? If we know all cemeteries eventually turn into parks, shouldn’t we design them with that in mind? Could the private sector ever afford to do that? What kind of job would they do? What are the constraints?

Two questions: 1) is the shift to cremation permanent? 2) what are the consequences of no longer having a memorial place for the dead? If we no longer have a physical spot to be with our departed, will that connection be lost? Do we care? Places where ashes are scattered tend to be lost to succeeding generations. Can we recoup memorialization without reversing the cremation trend? Do we want to?

Supposition: the majority of communities in Oregon are already in the cemetery business either directly or through maintenance districts. Some still have functioning IOOF or Masonic cemeteries that are, essentially, a community responsibility. All those cemeteries are still in business. I would wager that none supports itself.

Fire Pit: Camp Polk Cemetery

Fact (as I know it): aside from the golf course fantasy—it seems every golfer has come up with it—the idea of integrating cemeteries into a communities general park system has not been explored. Off-hand, I don’t know of any parks which include pocket cemeteries or free-standing columbaria. I don’t know of any park schemes considering burials or niches as a partial funding mechanism. For the most part, cemeteries operate as sub-functions of parks and recreation departments, not as an integral feature; and they’re certainly considered a drain, not an asset. Does that need to be reassessed?

Fact (as well all know it): parks developed out of cemeteries. Are the functions antithetical? Could governments use internment fees as a way of generating acquisition funds?

Who should be in this business and what’s it going to look like tomorrow? Is memorialization a thing of the past? Is it worth recovering? Is there a partnership available? Do you want the Post Office to manage your burial? Perhaps not.

It would be nice to have a dialogue about this, but I’m not sure how or with whom. Grade school kids and politicians? Neighborhood cemeteries?

Paul Washington Cemetery

Angels We Have Heard While High

 Little help here; I’m out of my element.

I know what angels are; they’re ghostly figures with wings that young girls believe in. They ride unicorns, I think (the angels, not the young girls). Over rainbows. I think they’re either obtuse (which means “dumb” or, possibly, “fat”) or acute (which all young boys hope they are). I think they’re supposed to hang around to keep your cotton candy from getting dusty on the midway. Or slip some money into your pocket. Everyone need an angel.

Dead people especially. Except, of course, those who already are angels. As in, “She’s an angel.”

Whichever!

I do know that angels are wont to hang around cemeteries—although you’d think, with the people being dead already that they wouldn’t need so much protecting—nonetheless, angels show up in cemeteries with regularity. In fact, it’s a poor cemetery that doesn’t harbor one or two.

My experience is they’re polite and are happy to pose (the angels, but, I suppose, the cemeteries, too). They can stay remarkably still. Much better than killdeer.

I did try to find out about them at Wikipedia, as the ones I ran across were reticent to talk much. They’re shy, if inert. I would say “taciturn,” but I’m not sure you can be taciturn and acute at the same time. Wikipedia was less than helpful. Once the debate got around to how many could sit on the head of a pin, I knew I was lost. As far as I can tell, religion is like cricket: you have to be brought up with the game if you’re ever going to understand the rules and the nuances. All I understand is the tea break. I certainly don’t understand angels.

But because they’re acute, I thought I give you some of their best shots. I wish I could give you their names, but they demurred.

The Cemetery Dog Barks

Drewsey Cemetery
Ah, the speed at which things come and go.

My wife brought home from a trip a guide book to Colorado cemeteries published by the august house, Caxton Press of Caldwell, Idaho. Before I got a chance to thoroughly study the book or write down its particulars (like the author’s name or the title of the book), she shipped it back to the friend from whom she’d borrowed it. But that’s not essential to what I have to say.

Some years back when I first had visions of writing a guide to the cemeteries of Oregon, Caxton was the first publisher to which I turned. I got a brief letter back from them saying, thanks, but I didn’t have any stories about who was buried in the cemeteries; that’s what they wanted.

Oh.
Juntura Pioneer Cemetery 1888

The book Kay brought home bore that out. Their guide to Colorado cemeteries was in reality a collection of stories about some of the people buried in some of Colorado’s cemeteries. Other cemeteries were lumped together in lists, sans addresses. There were driving instructions to the highlighted cemeteries and usually a short description before plunging into the stories. They certainly accomplished what they set out to do, if their letter to me was any indication. They got their collection of stories. But it’s as if someone set out to write a guide to the famous buildings of New York and ended up talking about the tenants. It’s a fine collection of little vignettes, but it tells one hardly anything about the cemeteries. A guide to them it definitely is not.

And it was practically without photos. Which, I suppose makes sense, if you’re really interested in local biographies, but is less than helpful in a purported guide to particular landscapes. I can accept that a publisher isn’t interested in cemetery guides, but it’s more disturbing when they sell a product whose contents don’t jibe with its title. Simply because one has arranged a batch of local histories by cemetery location, does not make the stories a guide to those cemeteries. I don’t think Caxton Press is being disingenuous by falsely titling their book; I sincerely think they don’t understand the difference.

It’s a slippery point. Not many people appreciate the difference between the cemetery and who’s buried in it. One is not the other. History is no substitute for place.

The point gets blurred, though to a lesser extent, in the pages of the AGS Quarterly, “The Bulletin of the Association For Gravestone Studies,” and their annual journal Markers, as well. As their name implies, they concentrate on the stones themselves, though they’re not above dipping into the local history vat. They, too, rarely give much consideration to the cemeteries themselves and overweight their entries with discussion of stone design, history, etc. The geography and societal place of cemeteries is seldom broached.

Except here, of course, where we plod along building up the database so one day someone can come along and say, “Holy Cow! Where did this mountain come from?”

From the cow.
Riverside Cemetery (Payette, ID)

Woodmen of the World Unite: A Photo Gallery: I

IOOF/GAR (The Dalles)

Granite Hill Cemetery
No one forgets their first Woodman of the World faux stump headstone. Cemetery novices tell you in an excited voice of this incredible find they made in a small cemetery near their home. Yep, WoW, as they’re known. The stump—fallen tree and all that—is a traditional symbol of death and has been used informally both here and in Europe for a long time, but the Woodmen of the World, in its program of providing tombstones for its members, kicked the image into high gear (can I say that?).

Union Cemetery

Riverside Cemetery (Albany, OR)
Hard information on WoW headstones is hard to come by; I don’t think there’s been a book about them, yet (authors take note). As this gallery attests, faux stumps were not the only motif the WoW used, but they were definitely the most notable. What’s particularly notable is that, despite their popularity and ubiquity, as far as I can tell, each one is unique. My understanding is that orders and drawings were sent to local craftsmen to execute the monuments, who in turn interpreted the drawings as they saw fit. Whatever the cause, the result has been a windfall of unique monuments across the entire country. In lieu of the book yet to come (I’m open to offers), I’m going to present here a selection of WoW headstones in a series of posts; there are too many for a single run.

Lone Fir Cemetery (Portland)
Testimony that at one time, at least, the WoW folk were more than a simple insurance agency is via a fabled performance venue in Eugene, OR, the WoW Hall, which was my introduction to the Woodmen of the World. Their active involvement in the WoW Hall has long since passed, but their name remains stuck with the theater they put together, which was—and still is—a showcase for some amazing performers. My most memorable nights there were watching Reverend Chumleigh and the Flying Karamazoff Brothers, along with Artis the Spoon Man, doing amazing feats of derring-do never equally anywhere, except, perhaps, at the Country Fair (little children, be warned). I’ll forever have a picture burned into my memory of Robert, the Juggler, backing offstage, his hands afire with lighter fluid, eyes as wide as pancakes, trying to keep the flaming tennis balls in the air before screaming. Ah yes, the good old days. The WoW Hall.

Brownsville Pioneer Cemetery
The Woodmen of the World still exist—they’d be happy to sell you some insurance—but their policies, alas, no longer come with a tombstone. It’s a pity, but we’ll just have to suffer through. Carve your own.

Mount Calvary Cemetery (Portland)
Technical Note:
The framing for these pictures was done in Picnik, as a part of Flikr. It's slow, but I found opening two windows at a time (thank God for Firefox) kept me going full time. The hint to use it came thanks to fellow Flickrdick doubledcop. If anyone else wants to use the basic program (there's a "premium" package one can pay for), I have a couple hints. A) You can put multiple frames around one picture by simply repeating the process. B) When choosing frame colors, the little eye-dropper will pick up the color from wherever it's pointed, not just the color chart provided. I like to get my frame colors from within the photo itself; that way I'm sure the colors are complimentary.

Calvary Catholic Cemetery (Galveston, TX)