stevenpiziks | Entries tagged with graveyard

I came across this cemetery by accident a few years ago when I found this empty-looking field surrounded by a ragged edge of trees. A bit of exploration, however, turned up tombstones and sunken graves. I did some research and discovered Woodlawn Cemetery.

Ypsilanti used to be a segregated community. The north side was White, the south side was Black. There were no cemeteries on the south side, and the north side White folk refused to let Black folk bury their dead in "their" section of town.

In 1946, Reverend Garther Washington had enough. He bought a plot of land and created Woodlawn Cemetery for the Black community. The cemetery acquired dozens and dozens of burials. Then disaster struck. Rev. Washington died, and the cemetery was left to his wife Estella and her friend Brooker Rhonenee. They went bankrupt and died in 1965.

Now we had a problem. Who owned the cemetery? Usually in cases of bankrupt land, the county, township, or state takes ownership and resells it. But a cemetery creates a unique problem: no one ever wants to buy a cemetery. Cemeteries don't make money, and moving the remains and the stones so the land could be used for something else would cost more than the land was worth. Also, if a township takes ownership of a cemetery, it's legally required to maintain it. So if Ypsilanti Township declared it owned Woodlawn, the Township would have to pay enormous sums to take care of it until someone else bought it--and no one ever would. Understandably, the Township was reluctant to do so.

As a result, the cemetery landed in legal limbo. Literally no one owned it, no one wanted it, and eventually, no one remembered it.

This happens more often than you might think. A lot of people think cemeteries are owned and run by the city, but few these days are. Most smaller cemeteries are privately owned, often by a church or a kind of co-op group. They earn money by selling graves. But cemeteries have finite space, and when they run out of graves to sell, their income dries up. This is why few groups are willing to operate them--they know their business will eventually, so to speak, die, leaving them with no income and an obligation to maintain the space.

Anyway, someone finally decided to do something about Woodlawn Cemetery. They got grant money from county to clean and restore the graveyard, and it'll be jointly run by the Township and this organization.

This is a splendid thing.

https://www.bridgemi.com/quality-life/abandoned-michigan-cemetery-unearths-history-segregation-even-death

Resurrection Men is a great book for the Halloween season. Autumn, abandoned graveyards, sneaking around in cemeteries, costumes, thrills, and chills! Reviews are coming in, and they're universally awesome!

"The pacing of this historical novel is perfectly balanced, from desperate action to the sweet, slowing unfolding of a deep connection between the two men. Historical details create a vivid setting that heightens the stakes, drawing the reader ever deeper into this compelling story." --Deborah J. Ross

How about an excerpt?

CHAPTER ONE

A resurrection man watched the funeral, and his expression was hungry. He stood behind the huddle of funeral-goers clustered around the grave and didn't speak with anyone, which was how Jesse spotted him. A dead giveaway, so to say. Jesse stared at him from the corner of one dark eye. The resurrection man wasn't yet twenty. Brown as a dead tree. Straight brown hair under a frayed brown cap, long nose, sharp jaw, long brown coat mended twice, worn brown shoes that were nonetheless carefully polished. Someone who was used to hiding who he was.

The resurrection man met Jesse's eye for a flick. He had good eyes, that one—clear and blue and strong—and Jesse touched his cap in salute. Jesse had a gravedigger's build, wiry and a little short, able to throw an eight-pound shovelful of dirt six feet toward heaven, and he could hold his own in a fight against two men half again his height. The resurrection man was taller, whipcord, and Jesse bet he wore gloves to keep his hands clean when he robbed night-time graves. No one who saw him by day would know what he did at night.

When their eyes met, blue on brown, it created something interesting and indefinable, like that boundary moment when water touches a burning coal, or warm ocean air brushes a chilly shore. The resurrection man looked away. Jesse clicked his tongue in mischief—and the chance to make some money.

The coffin rested on a pair of beams set across the grave Jesse had dug only that morning. Jesse always put a scattering of sawdust and a few pine branches in the bottom of his graves so the coffin wouldn't rest on dirt. It made no difference to the deceased, mind you, but it made the family feel better. Two solemn boys pulled the beams away, and the pallbearers lowered the coffin with ropes braced around their necks like pulleys while the preacher said his final bit. While all this was going on, the resurrection man slipped away, confirming Jesse's suspicions that the man was a grave robber who knew the best time to leave was when the family was occupied.

As the family drifted off, Jesse barely overheard a man and a woman in conversation. The woman murmured, "He won't get up and come after us, do you? He's stubborn enough to try."

"Jesus, I hope not," the man muttered back. "That copper-plated sumbitch was bad enough when he was alive. I can't think what he'd be like, lurching around, dead."

Death brought out the truth among the living. Jesse looked in the direction the resurrection man had taken and gave himself a private nod. It was going to be an interesting evening.

Jesse finished filling the grave of Mr. Elmer Pitt (b. 1803, d. 1889), then went home to the little shack he occupied at the edge of Highland Cemetery, made himself a pot of strong coffee on his bachelor stove, dropped a slug of Irish in it, and waited until sunset. When the early autumn night slid in cozy among the gravestones, Jesse put his shovel back over his shoulder and strolled toward the grave of Elmer Pitt. There was time to enjoy the walk and think about how to spend the money he would shake out of the resurrection man. It had been a while since he'd passed a good night's drinking and fighting at a pool hall. Or maybe he'd buy a new pair of boots.

The trek was easy. Didn't matter that it was dark. Jesse had dug plenty of graves in Highland Cemetery and knew the place like the end of his shovel. He even had a map of the place tacked to the wall of his shack, with every grave picked out in careful precision. People thought that graveyards laid out the dead in neat, cornfield rows, but Highland's graves made a swirling mosaic that twisted around the hills and trees, creating stars and flowers and teardrops that only God and Jesse's map could see. Jesse had taken over as the main gravedigger in Ypsilanti from Mr. Suggs two years ago. Mr. Suggs himself currently rested in a grave well back from the road that Jesse himself had dug with extra care. Jesse didn't run the cemetery—that job belonged to the great and gloomy Frederick Huff, who issued daily orders from the caretaker's house and only emerged to complain at Billy Cake and the other fellows who worked the cemetery. But it was Jesse who dug the graves.

Highland Cemetery had opened twenty-some years ago, a bit before Jesse was born, and it had stolen away all the business from Prospect Cemetery. Didn't seem to matter that Prospect was half a mile closer to downtown Ypsilanti, with its growing Normal School and expanding railroad system. Prospect still failed to prosper.

Problem was, Prospect had both proven too small, so the city had bought a big chunk of loamy hillside outside Ypsilanti and named it Highland Cemetery. The local Catholic community had been scandalized at the idea of sharing eternity with Protestants and even Lutherans, so they had bought a bit of land right across the road for their own dead, keeping Mr. Suggs, and now Jesse, busy digging graves for both. Meanwhile, the townsfolk stopped using Prospect Cemetery entirely, and no one seemed interested in paying Jesse Fair or Billy Cake to even trim its trees, so these days the verge ran wild. The inhabitants didn't complain.

It was a serpent night, with the chill breeze hissing in the leaves. Jesse wound through the stones until he came to the new grave of Elmer Pitt. The thin glow of a little lantern on the ground illuminated the markers from the bottom up, and the familiar quiet sound of a wooden shovel biting earth came to Jesse's ears. Resurrection men always used wooden shovels. They made less noise. Jesse crept closer.

The resurrection man had already made good headway and was knee-deep in the ground at the head of the grave. Two canvas drop cloths lay beside him, one to catch the dirt and the other to receive Elmer Pitt. Jesse noted the well-worn leather gloves covering the resurrection man's hands. The man also had a crowbar and a length of rope.

"So you're from the University Medical School," Jesse said in the dark.

To his credit, the resurrection man didn't drop his shovel or even shout. Instead, he turned and focused sky eyes on Jesse. Mud stained his trousers.

"You knew I'd be here," he said simply.

"Haven't seen your kind in a while," Jesse said. "They passed that law a few years back that says paupers and prisoners go to the anatomy lab, which means the dead poor and the poor dead get a free train ride to your dissecting table. Last I knew, there was no end of dead paupers, so what brings you down here to my cemetery?"

"We still run short of bodies now and again." The resurrection man went back to work. He was digging at the head, which was why he'd attended the service—he needed to know which way Mr. Pitt was pointed. "I saw the funeral notice in the paper and came on down."

"What's your name, friend?"

The resurrection man stopped his shovel again and sighed. "Are you going to call the constable, sir, or just empty my pockets?"

Jesse had been about to name a figure, one that would give him a delightful evening's entertainment and leave him with a fine morning's hangover, but something stopped his tongue. Something in the other man's posture, his face, his eyes. Jesse cocked his head, and a coyote grin crept across his face.

"Depends." Jesse stuck out a hand for the resurrection man to shake. "I'm Jesse Fair."

"Uh ... Arthur. Arthur Tor."

The coyote grin widened. "Does it bother you to dig up bodies for that fancy medical school over in Ann Arbor, Mr. Tor?"

"It does." Arthur's shovel bit the ground again. "I had to kill a dog to dissect during my first term, and I don't mind telling you, my hands were shaking for an hour afterward. Still, I did it. Now I'm doing this."

Jesse cocked his head. "Why?"

"We have to learn anatomy somehow." Arthur's voice was weary, the sound of someone who had explained this a hundred times. "We cut up the body of one person who died, and hundred other people get to live. And I have rent to pay. Why do you care, if you intend to turn me in?"

"Just wanted to see what you would say." Jesse stepped into the head of the grave with Arthur, close enough to smell cemetery sweat. "Move over, Mr. Tor, and I'll show you how a gravedigger digs."

Another pair of graves in Kalamazoo caught my and Darwin's attention. Two stones that had fallen flat on their reported that Guy Chandler and Chas Denison had died in 1859. DROWNED, the stones reported in big letters. Chas's stone included that he was 11 years old.

This we found heart-wrenchingly sad. Darwin and I envisioned two best friends going down to the river for a swim. One of them gets into trouble, and the other tries unsuccessfully to save him. They both drown together.

A cursory search on my phone turned up nothing on the the names, and we moved on to other graves. The story woudln't leave Darwin alone, however, and later that evening back at the bed and breakfast, Darwin revved up his laptop for some serious research. He turned up a great deal of information, including an article that appeared in the newspaper just after the sad events happened. The reality was rather different than we imagined it. Here's what he pieced together:

Charles "Chas" Denison lived in Dowagiac, Michigan, a ways southwest of Kalamazoo. A spiffy new railroad ran along what is now I-94, a short distance from Dowagiac. Chas's parents apparently decided to let the boy spend the summer at his maternal grandparents' home in Kalamazoo. They probably drove him by buggy up to the train station and saw him off not long after school got out in the summer of 1859. It would be the last time they ever saw him.

Chas's grandparents, Horace Penfield and Katherine Chandler Penfield, met Chas's train in Kalamazoo and he embarked on a summer of fun at Grandma and Grandpa's. Or maybe Grandma and Grandpa needed some help around the house and Chas was it. Or maybe it was a combination of both.

If you have sharp eyes, you will have noticed Katherine's maiden name was Chandler. According to census records, Grandma Katherine's brother Guy Chandler, who was 51 and a confirmed bachelor, was living with his sister and his brother-in-law Horace. This meant Guy was Chas's great-uncle.

One Thursday, Chas and Guy went down to the Kalamazoo river for some swimming. Perhaps Chas wanted to go but Grandma and Grandpa said he couldn't go by himself and they were too busy to take him, and Great-Uncle Guy offered. Or perhaps Great-Uncle Guy thought some swimming might make for some fine uncle-nephew bonding time. Or perhaps the two of them had been doing some hard work and decided a bit of swimming was the perfect way to cool off. (The awful part of my brain creates other, more sinister, motives for Uncle Guy wanting to spend some alone time in a bathing suit or skinny dipping with his pre-pubescent nephew, but Occam's Razor tells me to keep it simple.) They went down to the river together--

--and never came back.

Here we have supposition again. We know the river was running a little high. Most likely Chas got caught in a bad current and Guy jumped in to save him, only to be caught himself. Or perhaps it was the other way around. (Or, the sinister part of my brain says, Chas was fighting his uncle off in the river, lost his footing, and both of them were swept away.) We don't know. There were no witnesses.

Horace and Katherine must have eventually noticed that Guy and Chas had been gone for an awfully long time. Worried, they no doubt ran down to the river to check on them and found their things on the riverbank. Now terrified, Horace searched the river while Katherine ran back to town to shout for help. The town mobilized, searching riverbank and water, shouting their names, rowing in boats, perhaps even floating bread with dabs of mercury on it in a desperate folkloric attempt to find something, anything.

Telegraph lines had already appeared in Michigan by 1859. Horace and Katherine must have discussed whether or not they should send to Chas's parents, living in blissful ignorance down in Dowagiac. Did they do it, or did they wait until they had confirmation?

We do know that young Chas's body washed ashore on Friday. Great-Uncle Guy's body showed up on Saturday.

We can only imagine what it must have been like for Chas's parents to get the news, either by telegram ("Come to Kalamazoo. Stop. Chas drowned. Stop. Funeral tomorrow. Stop.") or in person. The self-recrimination ("If we hadn't let him go to Kalamazoo, he'd still be alive!") and blame ("How could you let him go swimming in the river?") and gut-punch sorrow.

The funeral was attended by over 100 children, Chas's classmates who came in from Dowagiac. Chas and his uncle Guy were buried side-by-side, not in the Chandler family plot, but in a plot of their own. Perhaps it was that the Denisons didn't live in Kalamazoo, so they didn't have a family plot in the cemetery, and they were angry at Katherine and Horace (who were eventually buried elsewhere in the cemetery), so they didn't want Chas buried near them. Or perhaps there was no room in the Chandler family plot for Chas, and the family didn't want Chas to be buried alone, so they buried his protector Uncle Guy next to him. Or perhaps it was something else entirely.

Every grave has a story.

It's not unusual for a tombstone to have a hollow space inside it. You put mementos of the dead in the hollow space, which is then sealed up. However, tombstones are far from permanent. They quickly become weathered. The earth beneath them shifts and they tip over (which is why you sometimes see tombstones on the ground facing up--and getting slowly covered over by grass). Sometimes they're vandalized. And if the family isn't around to ensure they're repaired, the graves fall into disrepair. It happens a lot, really. A city-run graveyard doesn't have the money to maintain the markers--they just mow and trim.

Anyway, when Darwin and I were at the graveyard, we found another oddity. I noticed it when I took this photo:

You can see it peeking out at the bottom of the spire.

What the heck?

( Read more... )

At the Mount Hope Cemetery, Darwin and I encountered some weirdo oddities. For example, this marker puzzled us mightily:

I forget what famly plot they were buried in, so I don't have a last name. Neither of these women were married. (A married woman would be buried with her husband and have her husband's last name.) Their deaths were separated by 20 years. Their births were separated by 11 years. What was their relationship? If they were sisters, why did they have such similar names? They were alive at the same time, and it doesn't seem likely someone would name one daughter Mary and eleven years later, name a second daughter Maria. (Perhaps Maria was adopted?) Why do they share a marker? Mary died in 1847. Did she not have a marker until Maria's death 20 years later in 1867? Or was Mary's marker damaged and someone decided to combine their markers?

We couldn't think of a scenario that made sense, No doubt it's something simple--Occam's Razor--but nothing simple comes to mind!