Angela Wilson smiled as she watched several people repeatedly dig their shovels into a grave under darkened skies.
“This is very exciting,” the Clarendon Heights woman said, looking around at her companions on a rainy Friday morning at St. Mary’s Cemetery in Elmhurst. “I wonder what they’ll find?”
After several more minutes of intent digging, the group hit paydirt. The shovelers slowly pried their find out of the earth as others crowded around to gaze at a disinterred gravestone base that they were working to reset.
“This is fascinating,” said Wilson, a historian for the Des Plaines Historical Society. “Tombstones are so interesting.”
The average person doesn’t give tombstones much thought until needed. But for Wilson and about 100 other participants in the Association for Gravestone Studies 17th national conference held recently at Elmhurst College, the stones-their origin, history, folklore, art and preservation-were the focus of enthusiastic interest.
Using the college, nearby St. Mary’s Cemetery and 23 other area cemeteries as classrooms and workshops, conference participants from all over the United States examined tombstones, traded helpful hints and oohed and aaahed over one another’s photos and rubbings for five days in June.
“Tombstones are such a social statement,” said Robert Jenkins, an urban studies student at Elmhurst College. “They aren’t just monuments but a testament to people’s lives. And there are some terrific ones in our own back yard.”
Cemeteries were not always the park-like settings we see in the 20th Century, noted Jenkins. Pre-Victorian cemeteries were often crowded and ugly, although the oldest tombstones provide a font of information about past societies and their inhabitants.
“I mean, look at the pyramids. You can learn just as much history about any place just by walking through a local cemetery,” Jenkins said.
That history is what draws many to cemeteries in the first place, noted Glen Ellyn librarian Linda Hoornbeek, an amateur genealogist and first-time conference participant. Many people rely on tombstones and their placement to establish relationships between ancestors when tracing family lineage, said Hoornbeek, the owner of a small family cemetery in southern Illinois.
“You can get a good deal of genealogical information from county or city records, but at a certain point you have to visit a cemetery to learn more,” Hoornbeek said.
Carol Shipp of Princeton, Ill., co-organizer of the AGS conference, agrees. “If you don’t have at least a death date for a relative, you don’t know where to look in the records for information about them,” Shipp said. “Gravestones usually provide the date of death, and sometimes more. Then you can search archives for an obituary or more records.”
It is when people enter cemeteries for reasons other than mourning that they become hooked on the esthetic and social aspects of burial grounds, said Glendale Heights resident Wallie Mitchell, an avid gravestone hobbyist who often photographs unusual stones or makes rubbings of the more interesting carvings and etchings on the stones. (Rubbings are made by placing paper over a gravestone and rubbing a pencil or crayon over the paper to pick up the carved impression.)
“I know people think this is unusual, but I find cemeteries to be places of such peace and beauty,” said Mitchell, who owns a family cemetery in Texas. “And they are fantastic living art museums.” Many gravestone enthusiasts take the time to learn about various carvers and artisans who specialize in headstones and grave or mausoleum decoration, said Steve Shipp, co-organizer with his wife of the AGS conference. Although such interest is more prevalent with gravestones on the East Coast, where the stones are older, people are gradually becoming more familiar with Midwestern artisans such as Indiana carvers F.C. Dyer and A.J. Viquesney, Shipp noted.
Religious and philosophical beliefs are a large part of gravestone art. In his book “The Early American Gravestoneas Primitive Art,” author Richard Friswell notes that many symbols, such as a rising sun, torch or a peacock, allude to resurrection. A squirrel with a nut indicates religious meditation, while a weeping willow represents nature’s lament for the departed soul. Garlands, according to Friswell, mean the victory of a pure life; a flame may be the essence of life, and a fig can mean prosperity or happiness. The representations are likely based on classical Greco-Roman symbols and are found in many local cemeteries.
Lois Webster, a Glen Ellyn retiree, said she came to the AGS conference specifically to learn more about the symbols on gravestones.
“I thought I’d have a better understanding of what the symbols meant, and that would help me figure out the stories of some of these people,” said Webster, another genealogy buff. “Now, however, I also have more of an appreciation for the stones’ artistry. Before I’d say, `Oh, that’s a nice statue.’ Now, I say, `Oh, look at all the folds in that robe,’ or `Doesn’t she have a lovely expression?’ “
Although a preoccupation with cemeteries and tombstones might make some shiver, there’s no need to be squeamish, said Mitchell. “Really, cemeteries are as much a part of life as birth,” she said. “An important part.”
They have always been an extremely important part of DuPage County’s life, said Helen “Cemetery Lady” Sclair of Chicago, a noted cemetery historian. Although most area residents are at least marginally familiar with the numerous cemeteries in eastern DuPage, few know why they were placed there, said Sclair.
“Obviously, the large amount of land was there, an amount you couldn’t set aside inside Chicago,” Sclair said. “But the quality of that land is unsurpassed for cemetery land.”
Eons ago, the remains of a vast glacier covered much of northern Illinois. As this melted, it became Lake Chicago, shrinking over thousands of years into what is now Lake Michigan.
The glacier left a varied topography, including the moraine (a mass of rocks, gravel, clay, etc., carried and desposited by a glacier) on which Elmhurst was built. Because successful cemeteries need the good drainage provided by the gentle slope of a moraine, Elmhurst was chosen to house cemeteries such as St. Mary’s, Mt. Emblem, Arlington and Elm Lawn. Nearby Hillside, built on the same moraine as Elmhurst, was chosen for the same reason.
Even fewer people know about the history of local cemeteries, Sclair said. Conference attendees, however, made it their business to find out during area tours of what they call marble orchards. Mt. Emblem, for example, was once a working farm. The cemetery’s windmill, seen by motorists traveling on the Tri-State Tollway, was an actual gristmill built in 1865. Originally purchased by and named for the Masons, the cemetery is now open to all.
Arlington Cemetery contains not only the graves of members of the Bartenders and Beverage Union and Chicago Waiters Union but a monument to the Modern Woodsmen of America and large plots for the members of the Nation of Islam. The latter recently banned the placement of quotes from the Koran on gravestones so that the Holy Word would not be stepped upon, Sclair said.
Elm Lawn, attached to Arlington, shares with Hinsdale Animal Cemetery in Clarendon Hills areas for the smaller of earth’s creatures. Elm Lawn, however, also contains a pets and people cemetery that allows pets and owners to be buried together.
Elm Lawn also houses a large number of Korean graves and is the site of burial for followers of Zoroaster, a faith based on an ancient Persian religion. A figure of the all-powerful Ahura-Mazda, the Zoroastrian creator, adorns many of the gravestones.
And outside of the administration and some of the members of St. John’s Catholic Church in Bensenville, few people are aware of St. John’s cemetery at the county’s northernmost section, at the foot of a runway at O’Hare International Airport near Irving Park Road. The old German cemetery once stood near the church, which agreed to move when the airport was built in the early 1960s. The church still maintains the cemetery. Another airport cemetery is owned and maintained by Bethany United Methodist Church in Itasca.
Some old cemeteries are not always appreciated. Allerton Ridge in Lombard, Sclair noted, has been the focus of a struggle between a developer who wants to pave over the cemetery and relatives of the deceased who refuse to let the graves be moved.
Dave Lange is just one of the conference participants who appreciates old cemeteries. As the sexton for the 158-year-old Lisle Cemetery in Lisle, Lange and Dennis Michaels, the Lisle Public Works superintendent, spent a day at the AGS conference learning how to repair and preserve old gravestones.
“Some of the headstones at our cemetery are so old and dilapidated they don’t even have names on them anymore,” Lange said. “But there are a lot of the village’s founding families buried there, so its important that we save what we can.”
Instead of granite, the hardest stone used for monuments, most of the area’s gravestones are readily available sandstone or limestone, noted Minxie and Jim Fannin of Fannin/Lehner Preservation Consultants in Concord, Mass. While easier to carve, the softer rocks are particularly vulnerable to wind, acid rain, air pollution, lawnmower and animal damage, the Fannins said.
“We want people to have an understanding of simple methods of preservation as well as an appreciation for the art and history of gravestones,” said genealogist Rosalee Oakley of Hadley, Mass., president of the 1,000-member AGS.
After helping instructors C.R. Jones and Fred Oakley, Rosalee’s husband, scrub lichen off gravestones during a workshop at St. Mary’s Cemetery, Lange and Michaels said they hope to apply some of their newfound knowledge to their cemetery.
“This is fairly simple, but we didn’t have the scope of experience these people have,” said Michaels as he scrubbed a gravestone with an ammonia solution. “Now we’ve got some knowledge that will have a lasting effect.”
For others, who have been privately fascinated with gravestones for years, the conference was proof that their hobby was not unusual. “The misconception is that we’re all somber, dull old prunes,” said the twinkling-eyed Mitchell. “Well, we’re not. We’re old, young, short, fat, tall, skinny smart and dumb people. And we like cemeteries.”
The conference’s influx of gravestone knowledge will certainly provide Wilson of Clarendon Hills with some intellectual fodder. A graduate student of history at University of Illinois at Chicago, Wilson said she hopes to do her dissertation on African-American cemeteries.
“I think if my friends knew where I was today, they’d think I was really odd,” she said as she shook off the rain and leaned closer to look at the unearthed gravestone base. “If they only knew how interesting this is.”
