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By: Amy Wold
awold@theadvocate.com
Baton Rouge Advocate
April 20, 2003
How communities bury the dead can be used as introduction to the values, lifestyles and culture held by that community.
For a group of visitors to Baton Rouge, that's just one of the attractions of studying old cemeteries.
About 25 people from around the country took a field trip to five Baton Rouge cemeteries Thursday as a part of the American Culture Association conference in New Orleans.
Local stops included Sweet Olive, Jewish, Catholic, Highland and Magnolia cemeteries.
"Cemeteries are a good lead-in to a culture," said Dr. Thomas Graves, a professor of folklore and literature at Alvernia College in Reading, Pa. "They're our original open-air museum."
The American Culture Association is a national academic organization, and many of the tour participants were professors with backgrounds in folklore, history and literature.
However, for some, the study of cemeteries, and what they can say about a community's past, is a personal interest and hobby.
Bob Pierce, a retired teacher and counselor from the San Francisco School District, spends his summers driving the back roads of the country in search of cemeteries.
"I like to visit them because I like folk art," he said.
He said he especially likes visiting historically black cemeteries because they contain a wealth of folk art.
A grave marker find that stands out in his mind is one he found in Arkansas a while ago. Someone had inscribed three words into a handmade concrete brick: "George is died."
"That's all that was on it, and it just blew me away. How folksy can you get?" he said.
The cemeteries were interesting to others on the tour for different reasons, but most agreed that burial places contain a good record of society.
"A cemetery is an acropolis. It's a city of dead," said Dr. Jacqueline Thursby, a professor of folklore and mythology at Brigham Young University. "How people treat their dead very often represent how they treat the living."
Others had an interest in what cemeteries tell about a community's past, culture and values.
"You can get insights to a culture through how they handle death," Graves said.
Part of his interest is in tracing the attitude towards death over the years, he said. For example, in the 1700s, people would include skulls and crossbones and "here lie the remains of" on grave markers.
Into the 1800s, those statements softened to "here sleeps" or "here rests" showing a distancing from death, he said.
"Some people just like to look at the art because the motifs change (over time)," Graves said.
June Hobbs, professor of English at Gardner-Webb University in Boiling Springs, N.C., stopped at gravesites with inscriptions and wrote them in her notebook.
"One of the things I'm interested in is the connection between what is on gravestones and literature," Hobbs said.
She walked through the cemeteries; writing down the sayings that were inscribed on the grave markers like, "Let the Gates of eternal happiness be widely opened to thy returning home."
Gates, she said, were a common theme at one time because of a series of books in the 1800s that used gates as a theme.
Ericka and Ryan Seidemann of Baton Rouge organized the tour, with help from the Mid City Historic Cemetery Coalition.
The Seidemanns participated in this year's conference where they presented their findings from the study of Holt Cemetery in New Orleans. Both have master's degrees in anthropology, but Ericka Seidemann works as a embryologist at Woman's Hospital and Ryan Seidemann is in law school at LSU.
However, they share an interest in cemeteries and were hooked once they visited the historically black Holt Cemetery.
"It was unlike anything we'd ever seen," said Ericka Seidemann.
For tour participants, Baton Rouge offered a few new things as well.
Pierce said he saw a grave marker at Sweet Olive that was new to him: a carved picture of a finger pointing sideways.
"Usually, the finger is pointing to heaven or down," he said.
Although he didn't know what the sideways pointing finger meant, he said it would give him something to look into.
"If I see something I haven't seen before, that makes my day," he said |
