Laurel Hill Cemetery

Posted on October 31, 2016 by admin

Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia is known as the second major rural cemetery in the country, dating from 1836. Its location isn’t remotely rural now, but in its early days the cemetery was outside the city on a sizable hill overlooking the Schuylkill River.

As the cemetery’s web site says, “Previously, churchyards were the only places available to bury the dead, and they were often as crowded and unsanitary as the streets that bordered them. Worse yet, rapid industrialization and population growth commonly led to the disinterment of burial grounds to make way for roads and buildings…. Laurel Hill was not only established as a permanent, non-sectarian burial place for the dead, but also as a scenic, riverside sanctuary for the living.”

As the city grew around it, Laurel Hill itself become crowded, and it’s now a sizable necropolis with about 33,000 permanent residents in 74 acres. Many spots are lush with growth.Trees grow on the slope down to the river.Many parts are thick with stones.Some monuments reach toward the sky.
There are less conventional stones. Find a Grave says that “the shattered urn symbolizes a violet death. Stewart was murdered by his manservant.”
The cemetery also has a large stock of striking funerary art, such as the Warner Memorial. Bellamorte.net says: “The Warner Memorial, sculpted by yet another Scottish craftsman, Alexander Milne Calder, shows a full-sized female figure opening a casket while the spirit of its male inhabitant slips free and takes wing. Sadly, the monument has been the target of vandalism over the years; both of the woman’s arms are missing as is the nose of the rising male spirit.”
Another detail from the Warner Memorial.
I didn’t seek out too many notable burial sites, except for Gen. George Meade, resident of the cemetery since 1872. He and some of his family have a spot with a nice view of the river, and I can report that people put stones on his grave.
One of the oddest stones I saw belonged to Catharine Drinkhouse Smith and Levi Franklin Smith, a five-sided pillar (not four, as it says on Bellamorte.net). Mrs. Smith was a noted spiritualist of her time.

Her side of the stone said, with curious precision about some things: “Mrs. Catharine Drinkhouse Smith was born at Reading, Berks County, State of Pennsylvania, on Thursday, the Fifth day of August, 1824, at 15 minutes past 5 O’clock in the morning, and passed to spirit life 15 minutes before 12 O’clock the 27th day of March, 1893, from the residence of her husband, Professor Levi Franklin Smith, 2430 Thomson Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Mrs. Smith was a devoted Spiritualist, and one of the best mediums of her time, and accomplished great good, in spreading this beautiful truth, and in demonstrating a continuity of life.”

Another odd thing: the cemetery had a gift shop. Besides Arlington National Cemetery, I think that’s the only time I’ve run across that. The man behind the counter was an informative fellow, happy to talk about the place (and a bit about Professor and Mrs. Smith). I did my little part to support the cemetery by buying some postcards and a refrigerator magnet.

Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery (Or, I Ain’t Afraid of No Ghost)

Posted on September 1, 2016 by admin

By the end of August, summer’s a little tiring, but I’m also not glad to see it go. Odd how that works. Back to posting again on September 6.

As if I hadn’t seen enough cemetery grounds for the day last Saturday after I visited the Oak Woods Cemetery, I decided before going home to fulfill a longstanding ambition and see Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery in south suburban Bremen Township. Going all the way to the south suburbs just to see Bachelor’s Grove has always been a stretch, but I was already further south than I usually go, making the cemetery relatively close.

Bachelor’s Grove is known for one thing locally, and maybe even in the wider world: ghosts. Graveyards.com’s Illinois page, which usually includes fairly sober assessments of burial grounds, says the following:

A small, abandoned graveyard in the southwest suburbs has been called the most haunted place in Chicago — and one of the most haunted places worldwide.

This is Bachelor’s Grove.

WARNING: Do not go in or near Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery at night. Do not go in or near Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery at Halloween, or for several weeks before or after that date. You will be arrested and charged with trespassing.

The author of graveyards.com recommends that you don’t go to Bachelor’s Grove at all.

How do we know the place is haunted? Same way we know anywhere is haunted: people say it is. If I sound skeptical, I am. Not necessarily about the reality of noncorporal beings, but about the tales of Bachelor’s Grove. It’s easy to tell stories about an abandoned graveyard in the woods, especially if those woods happen to be in a suburban area where teens are looking for places to hang out undisturbed.

On the other hand, I’m not skeptical that forest preserve police — Bachelor’s Grove is on forest preserve land in our time — might go looking for nighttime visitors. The cemetery has an indisputable history of wankers showing up to vandalize the stones. Otherwise I can’t see that visiting the cemetery counts as trespass, since the point of a forest preserve is public use.

To get to Bachelor’s Grove, you park at one of the Rubio Woods Forest Preserve parking lots on the north side of the Midlothian Turnpike (143rd), and then cross that road not far to the west. A trail leads into the woods from the south edge of the turnpike. A sign on a chain between two posts says NO ENTRY, but I took that to mean vehicular traffic, since the path is wide enough for a car.
I’ve read that this is the former route of the Midlothian Turnpike. If so, that would have taken traffic next to the cemetery, which is about a fifth- or a quarter-mile walk away. The cemetery itself presumably predates any modern paved road, having been founded, according to Graveyards.com, in 1864. The most recent burial was supposedly in 1965, but in any case it never was a large or populous necropolis. Instead of a city of the dead, more like a hamlet of the dead.

Older pictures of the cemetery, such as at Graveyards.com, depict a unkempt place, but on August 27, 2016, I found a well-maintained graveyard, at least in terms of undergrowth control, surrounded by a tall, newish chain-link fence, but with no gate. There are no signs telling you the name of the place or anything else.

Could be that the forest preserve is now taking a “broken windows” approach to discouraging vandalism. That is, if the grounds look cared for, people are less like to do further damage. There’s still plenty of evidence of earlier damage, however, such as tumbled-down tombstones.
Evidence of wankers with spray paint, too.
Many of the stones merely look old and weather-worn, some of them beyond deciphering any names or other information.
Others have held up better, or maybe are more recent replacements.
The cemetery clearly has living visitors who do the opposite of vandalism. People have left items for the “Infant Daughter” at the largest stone in the graveyard, with the name Fulton on the other side. According to Graveyards.com, a descendant of these Fultons was the last trustee of the cemetery, turning it over to the forest preserve district in 1976.
I was the only living person at Bachelor’s Grove early that afternoon, but as I was leaving the forest preserve, I saw a man and a woman headed in the direction of the cemetery. So I guess there’s often a trickle of curious visitors. Unless I saw a couple of really life-like haints, down to the sunglasses and baseball caps.

Confederate Mound

Posted on August 30, 2016 by admin

Something I didn’t know until I visited Oak Woods Cemetery on Saturday: Confederate Mound, which is within the bounds of the cemetery but on land owned by the federal government, is thought to be the largest mass grave in the Western Hemisphere. Not only that, the memorial at the site is the largest one in the North dedicated to Confederate soldiers.

“Near the southwest corner of Oak Woods Cemetery in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood [sic] stands a monument dedicated to the thousands of Confederate soldiers who died as prisoners of war at Camp Douglas,” notes the National Park Service. “The monument marks a mass grave containing the remains of more than 4,000 Confederate prisoners, reinterred here from the grounds of the prison camp and the old Chicago City Cemetery.

“Confederate Mound is an elliptical plot, approximately 475 feet by 275 feet, located between Divisions 1 and 2 of Section K. The most prominent feature of the plot is the Confederate Monument, a 30-foot granite column topped with a bronze statue of a Confederate soldier, a figure based on the painting ‘Appomattox’ by John A. Elder.” (The sculptor doesn’t seem to be known.)

As for Camp Douglas, it “opened in 1861 as a training site for newly recruited soldiers from this area, and part of it would remain so,” says the Chicago Tribune. “It was named for the man who donated its 60 acres of land: Stephen A. Douglas, the politician known as the ‘Little Giant,’ most famous for his 1858 debates for the U.S. Senate with Abraham Lincoln (Douglas won re-election).

“It became a prisoner-of-war camp in early 1862, as 5,000 Confederate soldiers moved in after being captured when Fort Donelson in Tennessee fell to Union troops led by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant.”

From there, things at the camp went from bad to very, very bad in short order, as usual for 19th-century POW camps. The result was a mass grave in a corner of Chicago probably unknown to most 21st-century Chicagoans.

At least the Confederate dead are memorialized in a highly visible way, a result of sectional reconciliation late in the 19th century. “General John C. Underwood, a regional head of the United Confederate Veterans, designed the monument and was at its dedication on May 30, 1895, along with President Grover Cleveland and an estimated 100,000 on-lookers,” the NPS says.

“In 1911, the Commission for Marking the Graves of Confederate Dead paid to have the monument lifted up and set upon a base of red granite; affixed to the four sides of the base were bronze plaques inscribed with the names of Confederate soldiers known to be buried in the mass grave.”

Near the Confederate memorial are the graves of 12 guards at the prison who probably were carried off by the same diseases that beleaguered their prisoners. Their stones are all marked Unknown.

There are also four well-preserved cannons at the site as well.
Elsewhere at Oak Woods Cemetery are a smaller number of Union graves — as far as possible from Confederate Mound, our guide pointed out (sectional reconciliation only went so far).
If I remember correctly, they were residents of a Chicago old soldier’s home, and so their burials were a good bit later than the Confederates’ (as at the Texas State Cemetery). A weather-worn soldier watches over them.
So does Lincoln, in an unusual posture for depictions of the 16th president.
Post 91 of the Department of Illinois GAR put up the statue, which is a copy of a statue erected in 1903 near Pana, Ill. The sculptor was Charles Mulligan, who also did “Lincoln, The Railsplitter” in Garfield Park.

One more stone at Oak Woods, though it has nothing to do with the Civil War. It’s a memorial to railroad engineer Cale Cramer.
Sacred to the memory of
CALE CRAMER
who lost his life by saving
the train at York, Indiana
July 27 1887.
Aged 37 years, 1 month
and 11 days.

It was a story I’d never heard before. Graveyards.com tells us that “Cale Cramer’s monument resembles a pile of disassembled locomotive parts. Cramer was an engineer for New York Central. On July 27, 1887, Cramer stayed at his post as another train approached. Attempting to prevent a head-on collision, he activated the brakes and shut off the steam. Cramer was killed in the crash, but had reduced speed enough that his passengers escaped without injury. The passengers raised funds to provide this monument.”

Oak Woods Cemetery

Posted on August 29, 2016 by admin

Large thunderstorm during the mid-afternoon today following a clear morning. That wasn’t so odd, but when I checked the radar maps it looked like only the northwestern suburbs were getting any rain at all. The storm also decided to linger here, and pour and pour, rather than race to the southeast as usual.

Oak Woods Cemetery occupies about 183 acres on the South Side of Chicago, only a short distance southwest of Jackson Park and about a mile west of Lake Michigan. On Saturday morning, I got up earlier than usual, drove down to Oak Woods and joined a Chicago Architecture Foundation tour of the cemetery. No one else in my house was interested, so I went by myself.

Skies were overcast, but at least the rains had stopped. Oak Woods, founded in 1853 south of the city — I believe it wasn’t in the city proper until the great annexation of 1889 — was part of the 19th-century vogue for park-like cemeteries. Which it remains to this day, green and leafy in late summer.

To design the place, the founders of the cemetery tapped one Adolph Strauch, a Prussian landscape architect who did parks and park-like cemeteries in the United States (Ve vill haf Ordnung, he was known to mutter). He was especially active in Cincinnati, but in Chicago, Strauch also did the highly picturesque Graceland Cemetery, the North Side equivalent of Oak Woods.

There are also a number of water features that add to the overall aesthetic.
The tour was partly concerned with the burial sites of well-known people. Oak Woods has quite a few, such as a number of Chicago mayors. Here’s Big Bill Thompson’s obelisk, for instance.
Here’s Harold Washington.

Other notable markers we saw included baseball player Cap Anson; Bishop Louis Henry Ford, head of the Pentecostal Church of God in Christ; John H. Johnson, founder of Ebony and Jet magazines; Rep. James R. Mann, who lent his name to the Mann Act; Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe, star of the Negro League; and activist Ida B. Wells.

Along with Jesse Owens.
As well as Illinois politico Roland Burris. Former Sen. Burris, it should be noted, is still alive. He’s planning ahead with a sizable tomb detailing some of his career in stone, in a way that earned him a fair amount of ridicule. It did seem like a pompous exercise. Perhaps he doesn’t understand that Death doesn’t care about your CV.

Interesting stones I didn’t get to see included Enrico Fermi, Nancy Green, Chicago Mayor Monroe Heath, and pre-Capone Outfit boss Big Jim Colosimo, who was rubbed out in 1920. Or the monument and flag for the 16 firefighters and workers who died fighting the blaze at the Cold Storage Building at the World’s Fair on July 10, 1893.

Off in a corner of the property is a small, separate Jewish cemetery, fenced off probably to discourage vandals from disturbing the stones.
Reminded me a bit of the old Jewish cemetery in Krakow, though that’s had a few more centuries to age.

Mount Holly Cemetery, Little Rock

Posted on July 14, 2016 by admin

In pricing rooms in Little Rock, I discovered that a downtown room provided by a limited service hospitality chain (as they say in the biz) wasn’t much more expensive than one out on the highway. I opted for the downtown property.

You get what you pay for at that kind of place: the ice machines were all broken, and so was our room’s landline, though I except few guests would notice that any more. I only noticed because I wanted to call the front desk to ask if any of the ice machines were working. The answer to that, which I got at the front desk in person: no. Something about the filters breaking at the same time.

The front desk clerk helpfully got some ice from the restaurant for me, however. He also told me the location of a nearby grocery store, since one thing to do when you’re on the road is enjoy a grocery store-based meal in your room, the contents of which depend on whether you have a refrigerator or microwave in the room.

As I drove to the grocery store, I noticed an old Little Rock cemetery. The Mount Holly Cemetery. The next morning, before the day’s heat kicked in on June 27, I walked to the cemetery from the hotel while Ann still slept. A sign in front says the cemetery was founded in 1843 — part of the first wave of park-like burial grounds — and is the burial places of six U.S. Senators, 11 Arkansas governors, four Confederate generals, 15 state Supreme Court justices, 21 mayors of Little Rock and “others prominent in the history of Arkansas.”

Sad to say, I’m not up on Arkansas history. I have a list of the prominent burials in front of me and I don’t recognize any of the names. Still, that isn’t why I went to the cemetery. This one was for aesthetic reasons.

Not bad. Not as fine as Woodland Cemetery and Arboretum in Dayton, but few burial grounds are. Mount Holly has a lot of weathered old stones (which for some reason, bastards vandalized recently). The plots are organized in rows and columns, like city blocks. Necropolis blocks, I guess.

There’s some funerary art, such as an angel over GOOD DOCTOR Craven Payton.

Or this one, whose name I cannot read.

This one’s definitely for a child. I think the dates are 1919-1926.

A new historical marker (dated 2015) at one edge of the cemetery told me that three cadets who fought at New Market, all natives of Little Rock, are buried at Mount Holly: Samuel B. Adams, Chester G. Ashley and Francis S. Johnson.

Also in the necropolis: David O. Dodd, “Boy Martyr of the Confederacy,” whose story I didn’t know until I read about it. I didn’t see his grave. Casualties of the “Brooks-Baxter War” are also in Mount Holly, I read. It’s another story from Arkansas history I didn’t know, and a fairly remarkable one at that — an armed quarrel over who would be governor of the state in 1874.

One unusual feature was a small bell house deep in the cemetery.

A sign inside the structure says, “Ring Bell For Sexton. These streets were designed for carriages. Please be cautious with your automobile!”

GTT 2016

Posted on July 10, 2016 by admin

On June 23, Ann and I left the Chicago area and headed south, returning earlier today. I’m calling the trip GTT 2016, as in Gone to Texas, but also Gone to Tennessee, another destination. Our route took us south to through Indiana and Kentucky and then to Nasvhille; west through West Tennessee and Arkansas and on to Dallas; and south again to Austin and San Antonio. The return was via Dallas and through Oklahoma and Missouri. All together, from backing out of my driveway to coming back to it, I put exactly 3,005 miles on my car, mostly on Interstates and US routes, but also a fair amount on the streets of Nashville, Austin and San Antonio.

None of the routes or places were new to me, except maybe Texarkana, where I’d never stopped before, and it’s been a long time since I’d traveled US 281 north of Johnson City, Texas, or on US 67 on to Dallas. But no matter how familiar the place or the route, you can always find new things.

In central Kentucky, near Elizabethtown, we visited Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park, which features a granite and marble monumental building with a not-really-Lincoln’s log cabin inside. Near Mammoth Cave NP, we walked through Diamond Caverns, an unrelated show cave.

By the time we got to Nashville, the heat was on — in the 90s at least every day, which made stomping around outside less pleasant, especially for Ann, but I did manage to take her to the Nashville Parthenon, which she didn’t remember seeing in 2008. The more important thing we did in Nashville was spend time with old friends Stephanie and Wendall, and pay a visit to Mike Johnson’s widow, Betra.

In Memphis, we saw the Peabody Hotel ducks and the National Civil Rights Museum. In Texarkana, we drove down State Line Road and stopped at the only post office in the nation in two states. In Little Rock, I visited Mt. Holly Cemetery in the morning just before the heat of the day and then the Clinton Library (in full, the William J. Clinton Presidential Center and Park) and, just before we left town, the Arkansas State Capitol.

Dallas was mostly given over to visiting my brother Jay and working. Jay joined us for our few days in Austin, including the Fourth of July, and for a few more days in San Antonio. In Austin on July 2, Ann went to RTX 2016 at the Austin Convention Center, a sizable event held by the media company called Rooster Teeth; I was her chaperon. We visited my old friend Tom Jones the next day, and on Independence Day, saw both the Baylor Street Art Wall and municipal fireworks over Lady Bird Lake. San Antonio was mostly about visiting my mother and brother Jim, and (for me) holing up in a cool place with Wifi and doing more work.

Naturally, the trip involved long stretches of driving. I want to do that while I still want to do that. Because of my obstinance in not getting Sirius or the like, terrestrial radio helps fill the yawning spaces between destinations. The trip was bookended by two news events whose coverage was limitless, even when there was no new information beyond speculation: Brexit near the beginning, and the murder of Dallas policemen toward the end. I also listened to more religious radio more than usual, mostly only minutes at a time, except for the erudite Alistair Begg, whom I will listen to until his show’s over or the signal fades.

The selection of music was mostly what you’d expect, drawn from the rigid genres created by the radio business, though there were a few oddities, such as the Mesquite Independent School District radio station (KEOM) in metro Dallas that played teacher and student shows, besides a selection of completely conventional ’70s music. On I-40 between Nashville and Memphis — the Music Highway, according to official signs along the way — I picked up an oldies station whose playlist was a little older and odder than usual. I heard it play “Waterloo” (Stonewall Jackson), “Ahab the Arab,” “and “Running Bear and Little White Dove,” the last two I haven’t heard in years.

We stayed in a nondescript chain motel in Elizabethtown; in Stephanie and Wendall’s fine guest rooms in Nashville; in another, less nondescript motel in Little Rock; with Jay in Dallas; in the Austin Motel on South Congress in Austin, an updated version of a tourist court that’s been there since 1938; and in an updated former company hotel (vintage 1914) in San Antonio, the Havana Hotel, since there were too many of us to be comfortable at my mother’s house.

During the return home, we stayed at the Munger Moss Motel in Lebanon, Mo., last night, because of course we did.

It’s the same as it was in 2009 and two years ago. Except (maybe) a couple of signs like this were added to the grounds.

Motel co-owner Ramona Lehman was selling Gasconade River Bridge postcards, sales of which help support the restoration of the bridge, a structure about 15 miles east of Munger Moss on the former US 66. I bought one. I didn’t stop to look at the bridge — this time — but it’s visible from I-44 if you know when to look, and I did.

The Woodland Cemetery and Arboretum, Dayton

Posted on June 6, 2016 by admin

In the Spring/Summer 2014 edition of American Forests magazine, Tate Williams wrote, “In the early 19th century, as cities like Boston grew, inner-city burials were no longer cutting it. Land prices were rising and the small church burial grounds were overcrowding. Storms would flood the grounds with gruesome results. Outbreaks of diseases like cholera and typhoid fever had communities fearing urban burials.

“In response, the Massachusetts Horticultural Society presented a vision that would solve the city planning problem, while carving out a piece of land they would turn into a horticultural wonder to rival the gardens popular in Europe at the time. It was dubbed a ‘garden of graves’ or a serene ‘city of the dead.’ Mount Auburn Cemetery grew into a feat of landscape design, sculpture and meticulously manicured Victorian-style gardens.

“The rural cemetery movement spread as other cities established their own garden cemeteries, from Green-Wood in Brooklyn to Laurel Hill in Philadelphia. They were extremely popular among locals and visitors alike, becoming regular gathering places for strolling and picnicking. ‘In a country sorely lacking in public green spaces, these cemeteries provided these graceful, elegant places,’ says Keith Eggener, architectural historian and author of the book Cemeteries. ‘They were all around recreational and artistic centers for people. They became seen as major urban amenities.’ ”

So they still should be, but mine is a minority opinion. In 1841 — ten years after the founding of Mount Auburn — the growing manufacturing town of Dayton founded its own garden of graves, which in our time is called the Woodland Cemetery and Arboretum. Cemetery because about 107,000 souls repose there; arboretum because about 3,000 trees grow on its 200 acres.

It’s a hilly, gorgeous place. I spent about an hour and a half there on the morning of May 29.

Woodland Cemetery, Dayton

Some cemeteries make it a chore to find the noteworthy burials, such as way that St. Mary’s Cemetery in Appleton, Wis., doesn’t seem all that eager for you to find Joe McCarthy. Woodland helpfully provides signs to famed permanent residents, and it wasn’t five minutes before I spotted the one that pointed to the Wright family plot — including Wilbur and Orville, their sister Katharine, the two children who died as infants (Otis and Ida), and their parents (Milton and Susan).

I spared a penny each for the Wrights.

Woodland Cemetery, Dayton - Wirght Brothers grave Wonder who left the shells. Not far away is the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, who also happened to know the Wrights.

Near the entrance is a sign that says that Dayton native Erma Bombeck’s grave is nearby. So I went looking for it. My mother read some of her books, presumably because they amused her. I remember seeing them around the house. I never had much interest in her writing until I read an article of hers in the early 1990s, in Outside magazine (I think), of all places. It was remarkably good article about her and her husband’s visit to Papua New Guinea. One of her main points: if you’ve got the time and means, but don’t ever go anywhere interesting, you’re a dullard.

I couldn’t find anything with her name on it in that section. I did notice a large orange-ish boulder in the section, and it had a few withered flowers nearby, but no plaque or carving that I could see. Was that her monument?

Yes. I read later at Find-a-Grave: “A 29,000-pound rock has become a monument for her grave. It was brought by flat-bed truck from her home in Arizona. It reflects the empathy she had for the Southwest desert and to her years of residency.” That Erma. What a card, even in death.

In keeping with my idea that it’s important to note the obscure as well as the famed, here’s one near Erma Bombeck’s boulder. An interesting one, at least in a place like western Ohio.
It’s a bilingual stone: the other side is in English, informing me that Peter and Anastacia Piatnicia, along with (I assume) their daughter Ludmila de Ybarra, repose there.

The stone also says “Cossack” in Roman letters, as opposed to the more complicated designation in Cyrillic. Cossacks in Ohio. People get around.

The Ulysses S. Grant Memorial Highway & Lundy Lundgren

Posted on April 20, 2016 by admin

If you have time, US 20 is the best way between metro Chicago and Rockford. I-90 is faster but not as interesting, and a toll road besides. We went to Rockford on the Interstate for speed, but returned at our leisure on the US highway, which is sometimes four lanes, sometimes two, along that stretch.

US 20 is also known as the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial Highway in Illinois, honoring Gen. Grant, who spent some time in western Illinois. In fact, the highway runs by his house in Galena. (US 20 itself runs cross-country, from Boston to Newport, Ore., or vice versa.)

The honorary designation has been in place since 1955, but most of the original signs were lost or fell apart. In 2007, the Illinois DOT started replacing them with brown-lettered signs that include a portrait of Grant. The route passes very close to where I live in the northwest suburbs, and I remember starting to see the signs appear nearly 10 years ago. I thought the designation was new as well, but now I know better.

One of the places on US 20 between Rockford and the northwestern suburbs is Marengo, a burg of about 7,500 in McHenry County. Oddly, it seems to be named after the battle of that name, which did so much to solidify Napoleon’s top-dog status, at least until Waterloo. Maybe some of the town founders included Bonapartist sympathizers, but well after the fact, since it was established in the 1840s.

For years, I’ve been driving by a sign that points to a historical marker just off US 20 in Marengo. High time I took a look, I thought this time. The marker is a few blocks north of US 20 on N. East St. This is what I saw.

Carl Leonard Lundgren (1880-1934) hailed from Marengo, and behind the sign is the very field where he perfected his pitching skills, at least according to the sign. As a young man, Lundy Lundgren pitched for the Cubs from 1902 to ’09, and in fact pitched for the team during its most recent appearances in the World Series — 1907 and ’08.

He’s buried in the Marengo City Cemetery across the street from the plaque.

I took a look at the place from the street, but didn’t venture in. Most of it’s modern-looking, or at least 20th century, but there’s a small section whose stones look very old, older even than Lundgren’s, wherever it is. That bears further investigation someday.

Fredericksburg Stroll & Der Stadt Friedhof

Posted on March 15, 2016 by admin

March 4 was sunny and pleasant in Fredericksburg, a settlement dating back to the efforts of German immigrants to Central Texas before the Civil War. A good day for a small town walkabout. As I walked, looking into the Main Street boutiques and wine shops and jewelers (James Avery has a shop there) and bistros and art galleries, it occurred to me that there needs to be a term for a town that partly or mostly lives off of upper middle-class day-tripers, retirees many of them, from near but not-too-near major metros.

Not tourist traps exactly, though there’s an element of that. I’ve been to a few of these towns, such as Galveston and Galena, Ill., and Sturgeon Bay, Wis., and Portsmouth, NH, and now Fredericksburg. Its locational advantage is proximity to Austin and San Antonio, and the town has a pleasant Main Street, a.k.a. Hauptstrasse, sporting a lot of repurposed 19th-century structures, many of historic or architectural interest.

The building on the left below was once the White Elephant Saloon, dating from 1888, featuring a whitish elephant above the entrance for reasons probably lost to time.
This was once a hospital.
I didn’t try for an exhaustive photo record of the many fine buildings in Fredericksburg. These visitors did a much better job of it, including many things I missed.

According to one source at least, St. Mary’s Catholic Church — which is off Fredericksburg’s Main Street by a block — counts as one of Texas’ Painted Churches, most of which are east of San Antonio. Some kind of adoration was ongoing at St. Mary’s, so I was able to drop in to see the lovely interior. Painted, yes, but also featuring stained glass and other objects of beauty.

“Still known as ‘new’ St. Mary’s, the church provides a classic example of Gothic architecture and was consecrated on November 24, 1908,” KLRU tells us. “Its principal architect was Leo Dielmann of San Antonio, with the contractor and builder, Jacob Wagner of Fredericksburg. Built of native stone quarried near the city, the total cost of building and furnishing the church was around $40,000.

“Still fully functional is the original pipe organ built by George Kilgen & Son of St. Louis, Missouri. It was installed in 1906 as a pump organ and has been completely electrified. The beautiful stained glass windows were added around 1914 and 1915.”

Further away from Main Street — and with absolutely no day-trippers or anyone else (alive) around — was the Der Stadt Friedhof, a cemetery established in 1846.
It’s more interesting than picturesque. For one thing, there are no trees or other large plants to speak of on the grounds, except out at the periphery. There’s a little funerary art, but its presence is fairly muted.

Still, I enjoyed looking around. The further you get from the boundary roads, the newer the stones become. Among the older stones at the edge of the cemetery are a number of graves surrounded by iron fences.
Many of which are neglected.
Almost all of the oldest stones are German, with ethnically appropriate names, such as Durst, Kallenberg, Keidel, Kramer, Lochte, Schmidt, Schuchard, Stein, Weiss, Zincke, usw. Adm. Nimitz’s parents are somewhere in the cemetery, though I didn’t look for them, and the admiral himself is buried at Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Fransisco.

The Waxahachie City Cemetery

Posted on November 3, 2015 by admin

Jay and I passed through Waxahachie in Ellis County, Texas, on October 22, and besides visiting the handsome Nicholas P. Sims Library for a little while, we also spent a few minutes at the Waxahachie City Cemetery a short distance away.

According to a Texas Historical Commission marker on site, “the first burial here occurred on Jan. 1, 1852, after the death of pioneer merchant Silas Killough (b. 1805), one of the founders of this community. The original 4.16 acre tract was given in 1858 to trustees of the Methodist church by Emory W. Rogers (d. 1874), who was Waxahachie’s first settler (1846) and donor of land for the townsite. About 1900, the cemetery was transferred from church to municipal jurisdiction. By gifts and purchases of additional land, the site has grown to 65 acres and contains about 10,000 graves.”
It had been dry in this part of Texas since a wet early summer, so the cemetery was rich in earth tones in October ahead of the massive rains that fell over the next few days.

Not the most ornate cemetery or the shadiest one, but a nice small-town Texas boneyard, something like the one I saw in Flatonia, Texas a half-dozen years ago, and not as tumbledown as the old San Antonio cemeteries I saw earlier this year.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Cemeteries