To many people, graveyards are places to whistle past, but not for the members of the Association for Gravestone Studies. When they gather this summer for their 12th annual convention, they will be talking about history, preservation, art and how to combat a nasty new trend: the growing black market in gravestones for use as coffee tables and wall hangings.
”These are people who don`t have too many other people to talk to about this passion they have,” notes Michael Cornish, conference chair. ”They talk about old gravestones. They show slides. There are late-night dorm parties. They bring in booze. You wouldn`t believe that people could talk about gravestones for a whole three-day weekend. But they do.”
This year, the event, which will start on June 22, will be at Governor Dummer Academy, a boy`s boarding school 23 miles north of Boston in Byfield, Mass., an area rich in interest for the association`s 500 members, a group that stretches from Wisconsin to Scotland and includes artists, genealogists, art historians, preservationists, stone conservators and monument workers.
Some are interested in rubbings. Others like to make casts of stones. The convention, as it does every year, will include workshops on gravestone cleaning and repair, sessions for teachers on how to use cemeteries as teaching tools and all-day bus tours to 17th and 18th Century churchyards, this year featuring trips to Ipswich, Rowley, Newbury and Newburyport.
Much of the interest stems from the nature of modern life, an era of bewildering change. In times when people casually leave their homes and move
across continents for new jobs, when whole towns become obsolete and are demolished, one appeal of cemeteries is their sense of permanence. To many, troubled by the pace of the planet, old graveyards reflect times when human souls were thought of as individual creations, not as so much unanchored flotsam. Such places, association members point out, are irreplaceable.
One highlight for conventiongoers will be a chance to study a distinct local carving style, the invention of long-ago carvers in Haverhill who declined to mimic European styles, said Cornish, who at 35 is toward the younger end of the group`s age scale. One popular pastime, he said, is to identify early carvers, a difficult sport because many craftsmen did not sign their works, make design books or leave written records.
”Cemeteries offer a sense of history,” said Cornish, who lives in the Dorchester section of south Boston, where, ”except for one house, the burying ground is the only link to the 17th Century. Everything else has been urbanized.” The association acts as a clearinghouse for information on such matters as crumbling marble and safe rubbing practices. Among other available benefits: a book, ”The Graveyard Primer” by Lynette Stringstad, a conservator who offers tips on stone repair and sprucing up graveyards; bumper stickers (”I Brake for Old Graveyards”) and a 30-minute video, ”Looking at Old Gravestones.”
”We`re collecting a body of knowledge,” Cornish says, but there are disputes, often over use of stone-repair materials that conservative members consider inadequately tested. Some members, Cornish said, still gasp at the thought of one among them who coated a stone with epoxy to hold it together. The maneuver cut the stone`s ability to breathe and shed water, a necessity if the stone is to avoid freezing and cracking in winter.
Another graveyard horror story involves the time about 100 stones in an old Boston churchyard were painted gray, a sloppy shortcut to cover graffiti instead of removing it from the bare stone. In another area, stones were replanted in concrete bases, an error because concrete does not yield as earth does, making stones vulnerable to breaking off if pushed.
”They are great places to find mushrooms,” Cornish said. ”There is a lot of wild life, as well as wildflowers, pheasants, toads and things you generally don`t see outside the gates. It`s rich ground.” Unfortunately, ”a lot of partying goes on,” too. Gravestone researchers often find empty liquor bottles, condoms and occasional evidence of voodoo, such as headless dead roosters and containers of plastic flowers.
Besides being tourist attractions, graveyards, which rarely move, also offer a guide to geography, indicating the location of forgotten roads and old town centers. According to Darrell Norris, whose reflections were contained in a recent issue of the association magazine, Markers, gravestones play five other roles:
They are a memorial to an individual; they express the ”presence and position of a family in a community;” they celebrate ”the fact of belonging, to a church, an ethnic background, social standing and place of residence;”
they ”petrify and endorse the complex social order of a North American community,” and they reflect popular taste of the day.
As Norris pointed out, gravestones, one of the first items to involve large numbers of makers, sellers and buyers, marked the beginning of a material culture in the Industrial Age. Allied to the marketing of Victorian furnishings, fittings and fixtures, gravestone production became standardized. Carvers followed common forms, adding a veneer of individuality to offer an illusion of uniqueness amid the realities of consumer manufacturing.
Speakers frequently mention at association gatherings the fact that American attitudes towards death have changed considerably over the years. In the 17th Century, for example, death was treated as a religious event. Puritans felt that graveyards were a ground for discourse between life and the hereafter. Cotton Mather encouraged trips to cemeteries to engage in ”a conversation with heaven.” Icons were heavy with images of death. Skulls and coffins abounded. So did dire warnings:
Stranger stop and cast an eye
As You are now so once was I
As I am now so you will be
Prepare for Death and follow me.
By the 19th Century, the emphasis had shifted towards heroic and patriotic considerations. Glowing pictures of the deceased were a fixture in front parlors. Grief was expressed in public with wailing, though in the 20th Century it became more private.
As the country moved into the sentimental Victorian era, the Puritan grip loosened. Flowers and cherubs emerged. Descriptions of entries into Heaven became popular. The word ”death” yielded to such euphemisms as ”asleep”
and ”awaiting Jesus.” One survey of motifs in the 1800s found that 46 percent of stones contained a replica of a willow, a symbol of spring and rebirth, far ahead of urns, at 12 percent, and hands of admonition, 5.1 percent. Roses and lambs tied at 2.5 percent.
Many of the learned papers reprinted in Markers deal with such topics as carving styles, stone sizes, gravestone arrangements and the symbolic use of hands, hearts, flowers, cherubs, skulls, crossbones and hourglasses. Oddities abound. One carver, for example, never carved pupils in the eyes of subjects. Another used the moon as a motif, usually on the decline, considered an appropriate phase for gravestones.
To many, gravestones have powers that reach beyond other forms of communication, as Lucien Agosta suggested in his paper, ”Speaking Stones: New England Grave Carvings and the Emblematic Tradition.” With gravestone emblems, ”the hallucinatory life is more intense than, say, pictures in a book because the story is associated with a dead body and with what was believed to have been a living soul. Through this illusion, the dead come to life and communicate about the afterlife through their stones.”
”The Twentieth Century, to be sure, is neither comfortable with the idea of death nor much given to memorializing the dead,” wrote Robert L. McGrath in ”Death Italo-American Style: Reflections on Modern Martyrdom,” an essay on the ”necropolis” of Barre, Vt., where ”thousands of immigrant quarriers, stonecutters and sculptors came to work in the granite industry from the northern provinces of Italy in the late 1800s.”
Hewing slabs of stone for the nation`s cemeteries, many granite workers were, indeed, martyrs, McGrath said. They died of lung disease before the invention of modern suction devices to cut down on granite dust. One who suffered that fate was sculptor Louis Brusa. McGrath describes the monument to him in Barre that shows Brusa expiring against a slab of rough, unfinished marble, attended at the moment of his death by his wife, who cradles him in her arms, ”an evocative comment on the act of dying itself.”
Perhaps, some lament, the golden age of cemeteries is past. ”For most of us, eternity will be an undistinguished, compacted, high-density, even high-rise place of rest,” wrote Paula Frenza in ”Communities of the Dead:
Tombstones as a Reflection of Social Organization.” ”Occupancy costs, monumental expenses and the recession of family and community bonds all have stifled a repose which once offered more space, substance and scope for expression.”
Cemetery care is another matter of concern for association members. Though cemeteries can be owned by churches, municipalities, groups or private citizens, a legal jumble offers no consistent pattern for continuing preservation. Burial stones, unless out of the ground for seven years, cannot be owned by private collectors, though Cornish reports there is a brisk underground market in stones for use as coffee tables or wall hangings. Not all dealers are reputable, and the use of consecrated stones for such secular purposes is illegal, as the association strongly reaffirms.
But the decline of cemeteries as, well, viable institutions will only spur those who love them. That was what inspired the association`s founder, Peter Benes, a New Hampshire history instructor with an interest in colonial gravestone iconography. In 1976 he pulled together a seminar for scholars and lay persons with similar interests, expecting perhaps 40 participants. He was stunned when 116 showed up.
This year, several hundred are expected, including such heroes of the movement as Dan Farber, the association member with the largest photo collection. One-third of its members are retired. Many are teachers, which is why the convention is held in June after schools let out. They will discuss such matters as landscaping, signage, stone repair and security, a matter of concern for wealthy Chinese families in the Philippines, where mausoleums make attractive housing for squatters who must be persuaded to camp elsewhere. Another rule for graveyard trips: No crayons.
It is a group for people with a sense of history and the curiosity to dig into arcane areas and to root out details, Cornish says. He lives with his wife behind the Dorchester Historical Society in the third-oldest house in Boston, a home with a huge fireplace and the same decor as when English settlers built it in 1710. ”We know the date,” says Cornish, ”because the builder fell off the roof and broke his leg. It`s in the town records.”
