Cathedral windows

While visiting Lake View recently, I was visiting one of the newest sections and noticed a new variety of grave art I hadn’t seen before. The carvings on the monuments are not reminiscent of the kind of windows that might be found in a church or cathedral.

There is another style of monument out there that actually has stained glass incorporated into it, but this is a different take altogether.

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More exedra

This time last week, we looked at bench style monuments called exedra. Let’s look at a few more of these from Lake View.

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Lake View Celtic crosses

Luckily, I’ve made it to Lake View again and am able to return us to my favorite kind of crosses for our Friday regular feature (up until this coming month, where I’m going to work on creepy stuff and probably leave the crosses alone for a while).

The Breens have a lovely cross carved into their marker.

The Wilson-Lenihan cross is a little more subtle in its Celtic-ness, with the strong lines of the arms of the cross and then a lightly textured swirling pattern on the ring.

The Fritzsche cross stands above a family plot blanketed in ivy.

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Mourning in style

The more I walk around cemeteries, the more amazed I am at how cemeteries defy our expectations. Grief, we are told, is an individual process – everyone experiences it differently. Particularly in modern American culture, the individual is prized – embrace what makes you different from everyone else. And so the legacy we leave in our tombstones is often assumed to be unique. But in fact, our memorials and our mourning follow particular patterns – we do things the way other people around us do them. One of the ways this becomes truly evident is when the same marker is used in two different sections of the same cemetery.

Well over a year ago, I found this marker for Flora.

Then a few weeks ago I was walking through Lake View again and found an almost identical marker.

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Exedra

A while back, I posted a photograph of this monument, and someone commented jokingly how nice it was of the family to provide a bench for people to rest. (I’ve actually never seen anyone sitting on one of these convenient benches.) This monument style is ancient, according to Stories in Stone. Called an exedra, the bench monument dates back to the ancient Greeks.

Greek customs dictated that the family returned over the years to the burial site of their relative to perform rituals and leave offerings. Thus was born the custom of having stone benches as part of a memorial, often followed by a stone table. I haven’t found any exedra in the ancient Greek style, with curved benches and a table tomb, but there are a number of families in Lake View whose monuments take the ancient form of the bench.

Some are more modest, with only the bench itself as a marker, while others incorporate the bench into a much larger architectural masterpiece.

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Woodland Cemetery Crosses

As a whole, Woodland Cemetery does not have the elaborate family monuments that Lake View Cemetery has, but there are still a number of gorgeous crosses inside the gates.

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A visit to Wade Chapel

Lake View Cemetery is known for its gorgeous views, but one of its crowning glories is the Wade Chapel. The Chapel, dedicated to the memory of Western Union telegraph founder and philanthropist Jeptha Wade, serves as a location for events including both funerals and weddings. The interior was designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany and is themed “voyage of life.”

The theme is expressed through mosaics and stained glass. The most challenging part about photographing the interior is that it is a huge mass of light and highly reflective surfaces.

Barring special events, Wade Chapel is open April through October, and there has always been a docent on hand to answer questions when I have stopped in.

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The Old Rugged Cross

Sometimes in cemeteries you will find a weather-beaten simple wooden cross, usually over an otherwise empty grave-size plot. These crosses always seem particularly sad to me. I could be wrong, but I have to guess that one reason to place a wooden cross over the grave of a loved one is that there is not enough money to erect a stone monument. And odds are, the wooden cross is going to deteriorate and disappear many years before most stones.

The title of this post just popped into my head. I don’t know very much of the hymn of the same title. I just remember my Great Aunts Loretta and Patricia singing it for their role as the Salvation Army ladies during our family’s one and only homemade Western movie.

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Linked rings

The three linked rings on these tombstones probably represent the men’s membership in a fraternal organization. According to Stories in Stone, the most likely candidate is the International Order of the Odd Fellows (IOOF), sometimes nicknamed the “three link fraternity.” The “three links” are friendship, love, and truth.

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Treestones

According to Stories in Stone, treestones emerged from the Victorian rusticity movement, that emphasized art and architecture derived from nature. Treestones are stone representations of tree stumps or trunks engraved with information about the deceased (and sometimes other symbols of their interests and activities). The stumps in particular are often considered to symbolize a life cut off short. Most of them date from the last two decades of the 19th century or the first decade of the 20th.

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