Graveyard Tours – Macabre, Moving, or Appealing?
Walk on the unusual side – take a tour of a historic cemetery, graveyard or burying ground. Macabre, moving, or appealing, these silent cities have fascinating stories to tell. Beneath fieldstone, granite, marble and bronze, lie superstition and belief, tragedy and triumph, romance and scandal, humor and sadness, politics and war.
Burying ground, graveyard or cemetery - all are time frozen, part history, part folklore. There is a certain stillness about them - reverence mixed with intrigue. In them, gravestones, simple or ornate, provide clues that fuel the imagination. Through artistic symbolism and fascinating phraseology, gravestones tell the stories of a generations, one person at a time. They reflect the historic quirks, artistic taste and architecture of a moment in time. They lay bare prejudices and honor heroes. They tell of prince and pauper; the known and unknown.
Some silent cities, moss-covered, ancient-feeling places like Boston’s historic burying grounds, tell America’s early story through those buried there. Others, like Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, are serenely quiet green spaces with magnificent grounds and remarkable statuary. Some make unique architectural statements, like those in New Orleans, so dryly observed by Mark Twain: ”There is no architecture in New Orleans, except in the cemeteries.” Yet others, like Arlington National Cemetery in Washington D.C., in their sheer simplicity, have the power to move.
Boston is home to some of America’s oldest burying grounds. It is in King’s Chapel, Copp’s Hill, and the Granary, that legendary figures of America’s founding, those we learn about in history class – Paul Revere, John Hancock, Samuel Adams, victims of the Boston Massacre - are interred. These sites are of such historic value that Boston’s Freedom Trail runs by them, and all are highlights of the stops on Old Town Trolley Tours of Boston‘s tour route. For the more sinister, Old Town Trolley Tours of Boston’s entertaining Ghosts & Gravestones tour offers a different prospective on night walks through Copp’s Hill and Granary Burying Grounds. In nearby Plymouth, on the interesting Historic Plymouth Cemetery Tour, the meaning behind some of some of the gravestone iconography is explained.
In other colonial cities, look for early graveyards alongside historic churches, testaments to the religious beginnings of some colonies. Benjamin Franklin and four other signers of the Declaration of Independence are buried in the Christ Church Burial Ground, two beautiful acres in the heart of the historic “Old City” of Philadelphia. Other signers of the Declaration of Independence are buried in graveyards of St. Michael’s and St. Philip’s Churches, the early churches of Charleston, S. C.
As populations outgrew small burying grounds and church graveyards, the large, park-like ”rural” cemeteries of the mid-1800s provided final resting places. They, too, offer interesting perspectives on history and are great places to walk. All contain unusual elements, beautiful and bizzare. Some have spectacular grounds; others, elaborate monuments. All have an atmosphere more uplifting than the burying grounds of the somber colonial era. Noticeably absent is the ”death’s head,” common on colonial gravestones, which gave way to the more hopeful winged cherubs, reflective of the more romantic thinking of the Victorian era.
Spend an awesome morning or afternoon walking through Savannah‘s Bonaventure Cemetery, a fine example of America’s rural cemeteries, revealed to the world in the book, “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” Here, under canopies of live oak, surrounded by an array of elegant statuary and impressive monuments, the silence is serene. While you won’t see the famous Bird Girl there anymore (she’s been moved to Savannah’s Telfair Museum of Art for viewing), there is so much else to see and photograph.
Big and diverse, Manhattan should have equally interesting cemeteries, but all it has are remnant cemeteries! Forbidden by ordinance as available land became scarce, graves were relocated to the other boroughs, displaced by glass and concrete towers. What’s left are remnants: the tiny, tucked away Marble Cemeteries in the Lower East side. And, in San Francisco, similarly land-limited, nothing is forever - at least one’s final resting place is not! The city has moved its dead time and time again, each time to a “newer” spot, further and further off the peninsula, and there are amazing stories of those left behind, only to be discovered during later ground excavation! Today, there are only two cemeteries left within city limits, the graveyard at historic Mission Dolores Church and the San Francisco National Cemetery in the Presidio, and two columbariums, one inside the famous Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill.
While each historic burying place is unique, it’s hard to top the visual impact of the above-ground vaults of New Orleans’ “Cities of the Dead,” miniature cities of elaborate tombs built like small houses laid out along streets. Lafayette Cemetery No. 1, in the historic Garden District is significant for its history, location and architecture. In St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, just outside the French Quarter, offerings are left for Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau. Elaborate marble tombs and larger-than-life statuary in Metairie Cemetery are dramatic statements of “new” wealth and prestige of the city’s intriguing, ethnically diverse residents. For safety reasons, as well as for a memorable time, take one of New Orleans’ Cemetery Tours.
Bigger isn’t necessarily better. Another sea-level city, albeit small, with an above-ground cemetery is the island of Key West. As haphazard and colorful as the island itself, and true to the character for this quirky place, the small-scaled cemetery, located in the dead center of town, as locals are amused to say, is not grandiose. Eye-level, whitewashed tombs are close-quartered, and giant gumbo limbo tree roots pushing up against the ground, causing cracked gravemarkers and lopsided statuary, leave a lingering sense that the tropical elements are about to take over. It’s a great place to take in the oddities of the inscriptions on some of the gravestones: “I told you I was sick” reads the gravemarker of a well-known hypochondriac!
Wherever your travels take you, tour a historic cemetery. Bring your camera; bring paper for gravestone rubbings…and most of all, bring your imagination!