Ways to Think about Cemeteries

A Lot of Ways to Think About Cemeteries The first week of September, I have been thinking about cemeteries, and I have been watching a pbs program called The World’s Greatest Cemeteries. One of the reasons I have been thinking about cemeteries is that I visited the grave and memorial of Peter J. Maguire at Arlington Cemetery in Pennsauken, NJ. It is a striking monument with a colonnade behind a life size statue on a grand plinth. One of the many things Arlington is famous for is a rare tree called the purple ash. It is a lovely park setting, very peaceful and beautifully maintained. Something I learned from the pbs program about these large public park types of cemeteries is that they evolved from the courtyard burial grounds because the churchyards were becoming overcrowded and the graves were vulnerable to exploitation. Grave robbers would dig up graves to sell fresh bodies to medical schools and sometimes grave robbers were interested in the wood and metal in the coffins, the clothing and jewelry on the bodies. Also, burying was not carefully overseen and some graves were so shallow that a good storm would open the graves. Many philanthropists took an interest due to thoughts of their own eventual demise or because they wanted a grand memorial to the family name, or because they wanted a safe and beautiful place for a loved one’s final rest. These park-like cemeteries were designed by landscape architects to maximize the views, and the geography of the location. Naturally each well known cemetery became the final resting place of many notables. One of my favorite cemeteries is Harleigh, just on the border between Camden and Collingswood on the Cooper River. Walt Whitman is buried there and I often visit his tomb. It goes without saying that I have visited the cemeteries of all of my known ancestors during my years of family history research. My maternal grandparents are buried at Bethel Cemetery, also in Pennsauken, because there is a section for World War I veterans. One of my favorite nearby cemeteries is the Newton Burial Ground established in 1683 by a group of Irish Quakers beside Newton Creek in Collingswood. The original Newton Meeting House is in Camden near the Ben Franklin Bridge approach. There is a section of Revolutionary War veterans from the Gloucester County Militia buried there, and a section established by a man named Sloan, for non-Quaker burials, as his wife was not a member of the Society of Friends and at the time, she was denied burial in the Friends section. There is a plaque devoted to that story at the site on Lynne Avenue. The cemetery is beside the old train Depot.

The thing that first drew me to the Woodbury Friends Meeting burial ground was that James and Ann Whitall are buried there. I had felt as though I had gotten to know Ann Whitall when I digitized a typed version of her diary at Gloucester County Historical Society. Often at Meeting, I feel something like her presence.

I don’t think of cemeteries as ‘spooky’ places, but more as peaceful places to contemplate our mortality and to remember those who have come before us. I grew up walking in the cemetery at Gloria Dei ‘Old Swede’s’ Church in Philadelphia after Sunday School.

A year before the pandemic, a friend and I were on a historic tour sponsored by a Burlington County Historical Society and one of the sites was a cemetery where research had been done and volunteers dressed in period appropriate costumes told visitors about the lives of the people in the graves where they stood and whom they represented. I thought that was a wonderful idea. It brought to mind a poetry book I read as a freshman at Glassboro State College called Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters, a very touching collection of poems that serve as the epitaphs of deceased citizens of the fictional town.

The saddest cemetery I have visited was Mount Moriah in Pennsylvania which was simply abandoned. My paternal grandfather was buried there but it is now an overgrown jungle and a place where people have dumped construction waste debris. Groups of citizens have periodically made attempts at cleaning up and maintaining but it is simply too big a job for volunteers.

I once met a cemetery volunteer in Gloucester City who went from volunteer to owner when the cemetery grounds came up for sale. His family were buried there and he took on the responsibility of maintaining the grounds. It makes you think there should be some legal requirement for cemetery owners to put a part of the profits into a trust for future maintenance. However, so many are cremated these days, that many public cemeteries may be at risk due to falling numbers of new graves being purchased to keep the flow of financial support.

Finally, I like the idea of the Mexican Day of the Dead, when families go to the graves of their loved ones to sit and visit, tidy up, and share a beverage, have a family picnic. Perhaps this year, at the end of October or on All Soul’s Day, November 2nd, you might visit a cemetery and put a flower on a grave and honor a memory.

Jo Ann