54th Massachusetts

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A Place Called Vietnam

When you mention the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington, D.C., most people think of the Wall. There was a lot of controversy concerning that memorial, so let me state that while I’m not showing it here, it is not because I dislike it. The Wall is powerful. But I’ve always been drawn to more literal depictions of things, rather than abstracts, so I wanted to take a moment to look at a second portion of the memorial – the statues of the three solders that stand near the etched roll of names.

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Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness

The name Guinness may be world-famous for brewing, but they played other roles in Irish history. Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness was the grandson of Arthur Guinness, founder of the brewery. Born in Dublin in 1798, Benjamin became Lord Mayor of Dublin, and in 1865, he was elected to the House of Commons to represent his native city. His statue sits outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral because he personally funded the restoration of the cathedral in the early 1860s. He was made a baronet in recognition of this philanthropy.

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Literary Parade

In St. Patrick’s Park in Dublin, Ireland, there is a long brick wall with what is called the Literary Parade. The wall has a series of niches, each of which houses a plaque of a famous Irish author.

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Jennie Wade House

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.

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Cross on the battlefield

There aren’t a lot of crosses in Gettysburg National Military Park. The 142nd Pennsylvania has this rough-hewn, rugged cross.

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So, do you send out forwarding address cards?

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.

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Doyle Wordless Wednesday

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Baptismal font

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.

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Remember me

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.

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