Posted in Somewhere other than a cemetery, tagged battle of gettysburg, cenotaphs, civil war, gettysburg, history, pennsylvania on March 2, 2013 | Leave a Comment »
As a follow-up to the previous post, these are photos of the Jennie Wade House, which of course was never known by that name during her life. Jennie was born and lived elsewhere, but she died in this house during the Battle of Gettysburg, and so it is the place most associated with her.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cenotaph, cenotaphs, civil war, cross, gettysburg, gettysburg national military park, grave art, pennsylvania, sculpture on December 17, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
There aren’t a lot of crosses in Gettysburg National Military Park. The 142nd Pennsylvania has this rough-hewn, rugged cross.
Posted in Cemetery mysteries, tagged cenotaph, cenotaphs, cleveland, east cleveland, east cleveland township, east cleveland township cemetery, names, woodland cemetery on December 7, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
So, in East Cleveland Cemetery, I’ve already posted photos of this obelisk.
I started out trying to find out if this obelisk in Woodland Cemetery was for descendants of the original family in East Cleveland.
Then I realized that the names and death years matched on one panel. It appears that at some point, the Edwards’ descendants erected a monument for them in Woodland Cemetery, and possibly moved the remains from East Cleveland. Then they continued adding other family members to the new monument and buried them in the family plot at Woodland Cemetery.
Posted in Dead Men Do Tell Tales, tagged buffalo, cenotaph, cenotaphs, new york, occupation, trinity church, wordless wednesday on November 21, 2012 | 1 Comment »
Posted in Graveless memorials, tagged babies, buffalo, cenotaph, cenotaphs, child, children, new york, trinity church on November 18, 2012 | 1 Comment »
Nearly everything in Trinity Church had a memorial plaque or inscription on it. Unsurprisingly, the baptismal font is dedicated to a little girl who died young. I wonder what it felt like for the parents of Mary Rochester to watch babies be baptized in the font with their daughter’s name on it.
Posted in In the church..., tagged grave art, cenotaphs, stained glass, buffalo, trinity church on November 15, 2012 | 2 Comments »
Earlier this summer we took a trip to Buffalo, New York, and stopped by the Allentown Arts Festival. In conjunction with the festival, Trinity Church was opened up for the public to walk through, and I of course went in with my camera. The walls and windows were covered in memorials that I wanted to show.
I took a number of photos of stained glass windows with dedications, and luckily it was an overcast enough day that my photos were not all overexposed. Memorials like those in stained glass represent a kind of common cenotaph in our culture – we may be interred in a cemetery or churchyard (or even have our ashes scattered to the winds or the sea) but those we love put our names somewhere else that more people visit – on the bench at our favorite park, in stained glass at our church, in a memorial brick at our alma mater. People we knew who spent time in those places see our names and remember us, and those who never knew us read our names to themselves and wonder who we were and what we were like.
Usually the stained glass containing names is at the bottom in its own panel – sometimes I could get the whole window, but sometimes the light wasn’t quite right.
Posted in Dead Men Do Tell Tales, tagged cenotaph, cenotaphs, clergy, cleveland, lakeview cemetery on November 9, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
These cenotaphs are both in the same small section of Lake View Cemetery. There’s something sweet and sad about the desire to erect a monument to a family member who is buried in another cemetery.
Posted in Somewhere other than a cemetery, tagged battle of gettysburg, cause of death, cenotaphs, civil war, gettysburg, pennsylvania, soldier, veteran on July 1, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
During the Battle of Gettysburg, this church was, like almost every public building in Gettysburg, used as a hospital. Chaplain Horatio Howell of the 90th Pennsylvania was visiting the wounded in the hospital in full uniform, including his sword. On the first day of the battle, Union soldiers retreated through the town with Confederates in pursuit, and Howell was unfortunate enough to be caught in the chaos. Tradition states that one of these Confederate soldiers ordered the chaplain to surrender his weapon,and shot Howell on the steps of the church.
Posted in Dead Men Do Tell Tales, tagged buffalo, cause of death, cenotaphs, epitaphs, forest lawn cemetery, new york, occupation, soldier, tombstone tales, wordless wednesday, world war ii, wwii on June 20, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Posted in Somewhere other than a cemetery, tagged cenotaphs, cleveland, cleveland botanical gardens, graveless memorials, ohio on June 17, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
My best friend visited with her fiance and children this weekend, and we took them to the Cleveland Botanical Gardens. Even though most of my photos are of plants, butterflies and children, I did find a few memorials of sorts. The more you walk around parks or gardens or zoos, the more you realize that little tiny memorial plaques dedicating objects to people are everywhere. This one was on a bridge between the Japanese garden and the woodland garden.
There was a also a birdbath with a dedication nearby.
The last one I photographed (because walking around a garden with children who are 2, 6, and 9 does not leave a lot of time for such pictures) was on a bench in the Hershey Children’s Garden.
These kinds of plaques are all around us. They are on benches, under trees, on sculptures, on bricks, and many other places. For many people they are probably more familiar than tombstones because not everyone walks around in graveyards. What does it mean? For a culture where death has evolved from a common part of everyday life to something compartmentalized and very separate, they hint that some people crave more immortalization than a traditional burial or cremation offer.
