Mourning Dove

Indigenous to North and Central America, this member of the pigeon family is known for its mournfully plaintive call, “cooOOoo-coo-coo-coo” and the whistling of its wings as it takes flight. It’s interesting that this term came up in our keyword searches for cemetery-related items–I always thought it was morning dove!

In Christianity, the dove represents the Holy Spirit, but is has had many different cultural meanings throughout history. For instance in Jewish history, a dove was sometimes sacrificed for a mother’s purification after childbirth. In Slavic culture, the soul turns into a dove at the moment of death. In the John Prine song, Jesus, The Missing Years, Jesus takes out his guitar and writes a song called “The Dove of Love Fell off the Perch.”

Roadside Memorials

The mourning rituals practiced by today’s fast-moving society are quite novel. Though one rarely feels uplifted by the sad bouquet of soggy stuffed animals tied to the telephone pole, we should respect the fact that people are finding their own ways to deal with loss. Spontaneous memorials like this roadside cross seldom stir up images of a life well spent and a just reward. Rather, they indicate sudden, unexpected, and usually violent death. These are abrupt memorials marking an abrupt loss of life.

People take comfort in ritual. These spontaneous memorials honor the memory of the deceased and provide us with ritual closure. Their purpose is no different from a heavily orchestrated church memorial service, though they are much more informal and personal. While spontaneous memorials may be outside the bounds of social decorum, they are free and low-key )sort of like burying your relative’s ashes on the sly, next to the family grave marker).

Further Reading: A Lively Look at the History of Death

Urn -Vessel of the Soul

I would hazard to guess that urns were the most common sculptural symbol in Victorian-era cemeteries. A Greek symbol of mourning, the urn represents the body as a container of the soul. In ancient Greece, the urn was a repository for the ashes of the dead, so it has quite a literal and functional meaning in a cemetery.

Often the urn is draped with a pall (seen in background), a cloth sometimes used to drape a closed casket. A coffin or casket can also be called a pall, by the way (hence pallbearers). The practice of draping is not isolated to urns, as you can see from this image.

Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep – Further Exploration into the Symbolism of Death

The heading of this final section is the title of Mary Elizabeth Frye’s famous bereavement poem, reprinted below. As lives are concluded, we mourn the loss. Everywhere we look, we are reminded of the deceased, until time heals the wound. We feel it’s unfair to forget them, but we must get on with our lives. Quite possibly, the grave marker serves this purpose for many people. Subconsciously, at least, we officially mark their place on this earth so no one thinks us callous, and then we get on with our lives. Monuments and symbols become coping mechanisms, cemeteries become landscapes of memories. The world becomes a continual reminder of what once was.

Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep – by Mary Elizabeth Frye

Do not stand at my grave and weep. I am not there; I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow, I am the diamond glints on snow, I am the sun on ripened grain, I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you wake in the morning’s hush, I am the swift uplifting rush of quiet birds in circled flight. I am the soft stars that shine at night.

Do not stand at my grave and cry, I am not there; I did not die.

The verse has abundant symbolism, all related to the tension between letting go and holding on. While some cemetery symbols we’ve seen in this article can depict both the end as well as a beginning (e.g., the hourglass with wings), we’ve seen others that simply lament the fact that we are mortal. As we wrestle with our own interpretations of symbols, death, and the afterlife, it is best to consider what (the 17th Century English author) John Milton said:

“The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven.”

To read more about the psychology of mourning, you may want to read: Remembering Well: Rituals for Celebrating Life and Mourning Death (Hardcover)

by Sarah York

If you ever feel the need to feast on the lion’s share of funerary symbolism, visit Arlington Cemetery’s Mourning Arts Museum in Drexel Hill, PA (outside Philadelphia).

Wolf Tables – More than Markers of Burial Plots

While not so much a symbol as a practical device, wolf stones and wolf tables do remind us of the mortality of the flesh. These devices were used where thin soil and/or rocky terrain prevented the digging of deep graves. Here’s a photo of me sitting on a wolf table at a cemetery in Camden, NJ.

(Before this cemetery received an overhaul, it had a 4 x 8 sheet of plywood at the entrance, on which was painted the message: “No unauthorized burials permitted.”)

Stone slabs over graves offered some protection from scavenging wolves. Ben Franklin’s grave in Christ Church burial ground in Philadelphia is an example of a wolf stone. While it may seem a quaint practice to toss a penny onto his grave (“A penny saved is a penny earned”), the Christ Church Preservation Trust actually rakes up about $1800 a year, which helps defray the cost of site maintenance!

Cemetery Gate (Through which Souls Pass)

Another guardian of the grave is the cemetery gate. As you can see from the photo, cemetery gates can be just plain creepy, whether they be an entrance to a fenced family plot or a main gate. A gate or a barred entrance can symbolize the gates of Heaven; the entrance of the departed into the afterlife. This gate is that of the Baltimore National Cemetery.

In the late 1800s, people were just dying to get into Historic Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia. One of the entrance gates had to be equipped with a turnstile in order to control the flow of horse-drawn carriage visitors into the cemetery!

In the Victorian era (roughly 1837 to 1901), the cemetery was the place to spend a quiet afternoon, as there were no arboretums, parks or museums to provide bucolic getaways from the noisy cities. That is, until the time came that the huge number of visitors and tourists forced Laurel Hill to begin issuing gate passes to lot holders and restricting Sunday visits to family members! (Read more about Laurel Hill Cemetery.)

Read more: The Very Quiet Baltimoreans: A Guide to the Historic Cemeteries and Burial Sites of Baltimore

Women and the Art of Mourning

As men are not allowed to be wholly emotional beings in Western society, women appear to be the designated grievers. This is why there are so many more melancholy women than men depicted in symbolic cemetery memorials. Apart from the odd centurion or archangel, men are typically characterized as their successful earthly selves.

For more on this topic, please see the book Saving Graces: Images of Women European Cemeteries by David Robinson.

Babies, Children, and Cherubs

Another of the famous rural Victorian garden cemeteries (actually the first of its kind in the U.S.) is Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mount Auburn Cherub was photographed here. Babies, Children, and Cherubs typically represent the untimely death of a child. As such, the symbol can invoke only sadness and death.

Walking through old American cemeteries, it is not unusual to see many hundred-year-old tombstones of children who died before they were two years old-sometimes from the same family as we see in the photo to the left.

We don’t see this as much today since childhood mortality is much lower than it was in the 1800s–mainly due to better living conditions, prenatal care, and vaccinations. Mount Auburn Cemetery (est. 1831), just outside Boston on the Harvard campus, is the nation’s first landscaped or “garden” cemetery. The inception of these outdoor sculpture gardens became a catalyst as well as repository for symbolism new and old.

Read more about Mount Auburn Cemetery: Portsmouth Cemeteries (Images of America) by Glenn A. Knoblock

This is not surprising, as Western society appears to be much more fascinated with death than with the afterlife (a quick scan of popular music and literature should make this plainly evident). In one place we are presented with historical, religious, architectural, genealogical, demographical, and sociological manifestations of society’s desire to memorialize the dead.

We’re all familiar with such symbols as the Star of David, and variations of the cross, but what about broken trees and wolf tables, i.e., symbols of death rather than the afterlife? In this article we’ll have a look at some common and some not-so-common symbols, all associated with letting go. So let’s first look at Mortality, that’s the big one.

Father Time

Much like the Grim Reaper, Father Time is often depicted with a sickle or scythe. Will this mythical personification of time use the instrument to cut us down in our prime? No. Father Time had his origin as Saturn, the Roman Deity of Time and an ancient Italian Corn God known as the Sower (the Greeks referred to him as Cronus or Kronos). Male ruler of the Roman Gods before Jupiter, Saturn’s weapon was a scythe. The Roman holiday of Saturnalia was a celebration of the harvest, hence the scythe. It was not until the Middle Ages that the Grim Reaper depictions familiar to us came into being.Father Time’s old, bent body reminds us that time is the devourer of all things and that, like the sand in the hourglass, his physical vitality will eventually run out -as will ours.In the image “Father Time,” atop a Masonic monument in Queens, NY, the sculptor seems to have taken liberties with symbolism. Angel wings? Your guess is as good as mine. Letting the imagination soar is not an uncommon thing in funerary sculpture. It is the one place where sculptors and architects are not required to follow any one particular style.

Hourglass

As long as we’re on the subject of time, let’s look at one of its symbols–the hourglass. In addition to actually being used as a timekeeping device, the hourglass in the mourning arts conjures the notion of time’s passing and the inevitability of death. Again, time flies, as seen on this cemetery gate emblem (Woodlands Cemetery, Philadelphia). One of the most amazing funerary sculptures I’ve ever seen is on the rear gatehouse of Baltimore’s Louden Park Cemetery-a huge hundred-plus-year-old wooden carving depicting the hourglass with wings. An hourglass indicates the person’s time on earth ran out and suggests that we should embrace life because it, much like the flow of the sand in an hourglass, is finite and will eventually end. Other funerary symbols that essentially say the same thing are the cut tree and the broken pillar.

Human Bones

Another example of the hourglass is depicted above crossed bones, on this stone in an old Quaker churchyard cemetery in Philadelphia. Both symbols are of rudimentary design and therefore were easy to carve. Crossed bones remind us that our earthly bodies will someday die.

According to Wikipedia, actual skulls and bones were long used to mark the entrances to Spanish cemeteries. The practice, dating back to the 1700s, led to the symbol eventually becoming associated with the concept of death. It is interesting to note how the skull and crossbones (depicted on headstones in the 1700s) evolved into the cherub head with wings by the mid-1800s. The change is coincident with society’s changing (i.e., less terrifying) attitudes toward death.

Weeping Willow Tree

Most plants and trees in cemetery ornamentation symbolize the positive, goodness, the afterlife. My father used to refer to death as “pushing up daisies,” a happy notion. The willow, however, is one of the few plants that is plainly indicative of sorrow and mourning. “Nature’s lament,” is how the weeping willow is referred to in Rochester’s Glossary of Victorian Cemetery Symbolism, but why this association with death? Well, cemetery trees in general have a mystique about them. Edgar Lee Masters, in his “Spoon River Anthology” writes how people “…move into the soil and into the flesh of the tree, and into the living epitaphs…” As for the willow itself, Greek mythology has it that the sorceress Circe had a cemetery planted with willow trees dedicated to Hecate (perceived for the most part as the goddess of witchcraft or evil) and her magic. Here men’s corpses were left exposed in the tops of the trees for the birds and elements to devour. From this association with grief and death came the practice of placing willow branches inside coffins, and the planting of young saplings on graves of the departed.

According to the Wiccans, the ancient Celts believed that the spirit of the dead would rise up into the sapling planted above, which would grow and retain the essence of the departed person.

Truth be told, you don’t generally see the willow carved onto tombstones after the 1850s. Prior to that it appeared to be a fairly common symbol. This tattoo belongs to a member of the AGS, Association for Gravestone Studies.

Further reading: The Complete World of Greek Mythology by Richard Buxton

Artist Statement

“Cemetery and Penitentiary Photography” was the working title of this show. The actual title of the show became “Confinement in Solitude.” In this article I’m going to explain how I came up with that title. Here’s my Artist’s Statement for the show:

“Confinement in Solitude”

These words, used to describe Eastern State Penitentiary’s philosophy toward criminals, eerily parallel that of a cemetery. ESP’s original idea that freedom (from criminal behavior) could be achieved through confinement was less than successful. Isn’t everything about the tension between freedom and confinement? Cemetery angels vividly portray this–creatures of flight, frozen in stone.

I’d long been a fan of urban decay-beauty in detritus. Perhaps one reason I enjoy photographing old cemeteries and Eastern State Penitentiary is this oppressive attraction they both possess. But how to connect the two? Coming up with an Artist’s Statement is considerably more difficult than coming up with a title for an individual piece of artwork. I would rather eat bees than do either. Such contemplative writing requires more soul-searching, I believe, than the actual creation of the art itself. So much of the creative process is feeling, rather than overt planning. Like the artist N.C. Wyeth said, in order to create a successful piece of artwork, you must have an emotional connection with the subject. Agreed, but how do you put that into words?

I don’t particularly care for writing about my work because I feel I expose more of myself with words and I risk assigning specific meaning to my work. I’d rather leave it to individuals to find their own meaning in the art. For instance, if I took a picture of a pork chop, hung it in a gallery, and labeled it “Pork Chop,” most people wouldn’t look twice it at. They’d think, “Yep, that’s a pork chop alright.” On the other hand, if the same photograph were untitled, people might think that metaphorically, I’m commenting on the carnivorous nature of man, or space and the passage of time. Subconsciously, I might be. You get the idea.

So even though labels are for jelly jars, I am expected to come up with titles and Artist Statements. So how to make them relevant without giving away the farm? In analyzing the connection between angels and prisons, I gave up early on obvious titles, e.g. “Angels and Devils” (while there were angels in my photographs, the devils were only implied); “God’s Servants and Satan’s Minions” (a bit harsh on the shoplifters and other petty criminals who occupied Eastern State); or “Angels and Penitents.” That last one had promise.

Crime and Punishment in the Victorian Age

When the prison opened in 1829, its founders believed that solitude would “make the criminal regretful and penitent” (hence the new word Penitentiary added to our language). Legislation specifying “separate or solitary confinement at labor” was passed. This correctional theory, as practiced in Philadelphia, became known as the Pennsylvania System, and it became world-famous.

In 1913, The Pennsylvania System of confinement with solitude was abandoned at Eastern State. The system had actually broken down decades earlier, prompted by Charles Dickens’ criticism of the philosophy. He visited the United States in 1842 to see Niagara Falls and Eastern State Penitentiary–two wonders of the Victorian world. He later wrote, “The System is rigid, strict and hopeless solitary confinement, and I believe it, in its effects, to be cruel and wrong…”

So Eastern State’s original concept of freedom (from criminal behavior) through confinement, failed. Stone walls, like stone wings, fail to ascend the arc to freedom.

Death and Mourning in the Victorian Age

Founded in the Victorian 1830s, both Eastern State Penitentiary and the great garden cemeteries like Laurel Hill (Philadelphia) speak volumes about American societal beliefs and norms at the time. Both are examples of our attempt to come to terms with the undesirable realities of death and crime–we confine them both in solitude. We reward them with burial and imprisonment, respectively –”interment” vs. “internment.” Both Eastern State and Laurel Hill were architectural wonders created in a rural setting–Philadelphia had not yet grown to reach them. Penitence and mourning practices both reached stellar proportions in that era (when a family member died, the official mourning period usually lasted a year, during which time ritualistic wearing of black clothing was observed), as did the epic flourish of angels and other ornate cemetery statuary.

Funny how the words interment and internment get confused. Interment is burial; internment is simply imprisonment. If you had asked the inmates at Eastern State to compare their confinement in solitude with that of those interred at Laurel Hill, they may not have thought the difference appreciable. They may have felt like the stone angels–or as T.E. Lawrence would say, “the living knew themselves just sentient puppets on God’s stage.” To me, cemetery angels vividly portray the tension between freedom and confinement that inmates at Eastern State must have felt. This tension between freedom and confinement–isn’t that what life is all about?

Getting approval was the easy part. How to actually move the bodies is proving more difficult. Cemetery officials have hired surveyors and contractors to figure out the best way to move the graves, but they are concerned that the drop off is so unstable, that it may give way if people try to unearth the bodies.

Source: LiveScience

Stoneangels: As far as actually getting to Laurel Hill, you can see it from Roosevelt Boulevard, but you have no idea how to get in!

Ross Mitchell: Yes, thousands drive by every day on Kelly Drive, but the entrance is on Ridge Avenue. The neighborhood was not inviting in years gone by, although there’s definitely a change happening. The part of the cemetery that most people see is the Kelly Drive and Hunting Park intersection, but you can’t enter there-and you can only see a little sliver of the cemetery. You have no idea what’s above on the cliffs [overlooking the Schuylkill River]. The cemetery was built up here for the scenic vistas-the rural garden cemetery movement usually called for a lake-we have a river.
Stoneangels: Is there any plan to change the entrance to make it more accessible?

Ross Mitchell: We plan to improve the signage. The East Falls Economic Development Corporation has a grant for signage so hopefully we will be able to get listed on their signage on Kelly Drive. We are working on making East Falls a more desirable destination in general. We look at ourselves as the “Gateway to East Falls.”

Stoneangels: I see the new condos going up down the street.

Ross Mitchell: Hopefully they will bring a few thousand more people to the community. And with the Sherman Mills project up and running, East Falls will be a vibrant location with Laurel Hill as a cultural and ecological center uniting the community. In addition to increasing our signage on Kelly Drive, we want to reopen our Hunting Park gate and encourage joggers, bikers, and strollers who are going up Kelly Drive to make a little detour into the cemetery.

Stoneangels: I read in the “Stone in America” article that one of your first efforts to make Laurel Hill more accessible was to have it open on weekends. Personally, that was terrific for me! It was so hard for me to get in here; I really appreciated it.

Ross Mitchell: It was so hard to get in! Everybody works during the week and it was only open until noon on Saturday.

Stoneangels: Have you any parting words, Ross?

Ross Mitchell: People really need to come here and see Laurel Hill for themselves. They need to overcome their inhibition of ‘why would I want to visit a cemetery’ and realize that not all cemeteries are very depressing places. In fact I think this one is really a celebration of life. And you talk about, well, isn’t it disrespectful? If you look at the monuments and the sculpture in Laurel Hill you know these people wanted these monuments to be seen. They wouldn’t have spent thousands of dollars, in fact the largest mausoleum we have–the Disston mausoleum-in 1886 it cost $60,000 to build! A small modest mausoleum can easily cost $600,000 to a million dollars to build today.

Stoneangels: Why is it that people don’t build monuments and mausoleums anymore?

Ross Mitchell: People are building mausoleums today…at our sister cemetery, West Laurel Hill in Bala Cynwyd, there were three or four mausoleums built last year. But many people are not as rooted as they once were, with the mobility we have, people move all the time. We have large lots that are owned by families, but the family has spread out over the country. And many people are cremating nowadays, they’re not as rooted to the city, they’re not as rooted to the earth.

Stoneangels: Let me ask you about Sylvester Stallone and shooting the opening scenes of [the upcoming movie] “Rocky VI,” at Laurel Hill. Tell me about that.

Ross Mitchell: I wasn’t here. I was on vacation! (laughs). I did meet him when he came here before the shoot. He lived in Philadelphia for a number of years, and he loves Laurel Hill, so they shot here. He is on our Honorary Committee for our Gravedigger’s Ball.

Stoneangels: Does that mean he might come?

Ross Mitchell: I hope he comes and what I’d like to get him to do is autograph a pair of boxing gloves that we can auction off in our silent auction. How great would that be?! They had a stone made for Adrian, and they donated it to the cemetery. We have it mounted; if you go right around the corner (Adrian.jpg), right around the other side of the [gatehouse] building, it’s there all on its own.

Stoneangels: Where did they do the shooting?

Ross Mitchell: It was over on the south side, right across from Pemberton [John, Lieutenant General in the Confederate Army]; they got some good river views.

Stoneangels: Frank [Rausch, Laurel Hill staff member] told me the stone was engraved incorrectly?

Ross Mitchell: Yeah, Bill [Doran, Laurel Hill's Superintendent] had to get it re-done at the last minute.

Stoneangels: Old Mortality-type work.

Ross Mitchell: And we’re also going to be involved with the Fringe Festival. We are going to have a program here, have you ever heard of the Spoon River Anthology? You need to read this! By Edgar Lee Masters. It is a series of epitaphs, people speaking from the grave and gossiping about one another. And it’s so interesting; it’s really quite a good read. It’s everybody lamenting their losses and what they didn’t do in life, or bragging. It’s everybody from a made-up Mid-western town speaking from the grave, talking about themselves, and what they accomplished or didn’t accomplish and talking about each other! So we’re going to have group of poets and actors reading from Spoon River in the cemetery at dusk.

Stoneangels: Life after death–hiding behind the tombstones?

Ross Mitchell: We are working out the details – people will be invited to bring their chairs and blankets, and then we’re going to have an art show and reception next door, with some relevant art.

Stoneangels: That’s in September, right?

Ross Mitchell: Right after Labor Day, September 9th.

Next: Visiting Laurel Hill: Why The Cemetery Is A Celebration of Life

Stoneangels: You have an artifact exhibit in the building next door-I remember seeing things when we were over there taking donated items down to the Gravedigger’s Ball auction.

Ross Mitchell: Actually it is a museum, an exhibit. We have incredible archives going all the way back to 1836. We have everything-we have all the obituaries, letters, we have maps, blueprints, glass plates, we have photographs going back as far as… photography goes back! We have the copper plates for all the ads going way back, we have journals. We have a Mitchell’s International Almanac from 1850 with maps of Philadelphia and New York. New York City stops at Houston Street near the [Greenwich] Village.

Stoneangels: So what was below Houston Street?

Ross Mitchell: That was the city! The city was below Houston! There was nothing above it! There was no Midtown Manhattan! I saw another old Philadelphia map. You know why it’s called Robin Hood Dell? This was the old Ridge Road [in front of Laurel Hill], and there was an old tavern called the Robin Hood Tavern right next to the cemetery. They named the Robin Hood Dell for the Robin Hood Tavern. We’d love to display more of our collection, if we had the time and manpower.

Stoneangels: I’d be happy to volunteer to help. I’ve been locked in the safe a couple times and have seen your rooms of artifacts and records. Years ago I needed to open my camera back to un-jam a roll of film, so I asked Leo, the person working at the front desk, if he thought the vault was light tight. He offered to lock me in and it worked great! Sometimes you just have to trust people…

Stoneangels: Let me ask you about Tiffany stained glass in the mausoleums. Do you know if there is any?

Ross Mitchell: There were! There were seven Tiffany stained glass windows and in the 1970s an article came out identifying where all the Tiffany stained glass windows were across the country in cemeteries. Within a number of years, they were all stolen. But apparently Tiffany keeps very detailed records and photos of all of their products. We are in the process of contacting them to get copies of those images that I will post on the Stolen Art Network. Who knows? Maybe we’ll get them back and maybe not.

Stoneangels: In 1999 a Tiffany stained glass window worth $660,000 was stolen from a mausoleum in Brooklyn.

Ross Mitchell: Wow. All of our missing windows have been replaced with glass block. Nothing is less romantic.

Stoneangels: At least you didn’t do what they did in West Philly where they replaced them with cinder block!

Ross Mitchell: That could be less romantic. When you look into a mausoleum and the sun is coming through the stained glass it really is a very special event.

“…not all cemeteries are very depressing places. In fact I think this one is really a celebration of life.”

Stoneangels: I only recently started appreciating the subtler things in cemeteries like the stained glass.

Ross Mitchell: One of the tours we’ve been talking about doing is having our superintendent Bill Doran, who is this great Irish stonemason give a “Behind the Scenes” tour of the cemetery. He’s got all of these great stories about working here. Like the time he was working in one of the mausoleums. One of the crypt covers had fallen off so he was doing some repair work in it and it was totally dark in there and the door closed and he heard this noise behind him! He just ran out of there! Apparently it was a fox or opossum that had gotten into the crypt. He said he was never so scared in his whole life!

Stoneangels: I can’t picture anything scaring Bill!

Ross Mitchell: Neither could I. He has these great stories about the logistics of working in the cemetery. The “Behind the Scenes Tour with the Superintendent” is not on the schedule yet but we’re working on it.

Next: Ghost Stories and the Filming of Rocky VI

Stoneangels: You said death was more common in the 1800s?

Ross Mitchell: The life span was much shorter back then. And before there were antibiotics, people lost children all the time. We have one lot here where [a family] lost eight children in ten years, all under the age of ten.

Stoneangel: They weren’t all stillborn babies?

Ross Mitchell: No, colds would come around, infections would happen and there were no antibiotics. So people died [earlier]. People were laid out in the parlor. In fact I believe that’s one of the reasons they started calling it the “living” room instead of the parlor because the parlor waxs associated with where you would lay out the body when you had a death in the family. So “living” room…

Stoneangels: As opposed to the funeral “parlor.” I brought my daughter here when she was about fifteen-we used to come here together to take photographs. She was surprised to see so many tombstones of children who had died before they were 6 months old. She couldn’t understand why so many children had died that young. It was a great history lesson for her. Hanging around here, I think in some way helped me prepare myself for my father’s death. I have a small family and I was not used to grief and death. But I knew it was inevitable. So I appreciate Laurel Hill from that respect.

Ross Mitchell: One of the programs we’re developing here is in conjunction with St. Joseph’s University [Philadelphia], an Urban Mourning Rituals Program-that’s the working title now. It’s an outreach program into the local community. Unfortunately, with all the shootings that we’re having in Philadelphia–a lot of youth-on-youth murder–everybody in the city knows somebody who’s been shot. So we’re working on developing a program that’s based on the spontaneous memorials–spontaneous roadside memorials that happen, and the Rest In Peace memorials at murder sites, the spray-painted memorial on the back windows of cars, Rest In Peace spray-painted memorial t-shirts, sort of graffitied, modern urban rituals. These are a natural outgrowth of loss and of people trying to deal with loss.

So with Professor Berndt, from St. Joseph’s University, we’re developing a program to go out into the community to help children understand what these mourning rituals are, what they’re for and to help children deal with their loss. We’ll come to Laurel Hill as part of the program–we have 170 years of mourning rituals here and can help kids understand and work through their unfortunate losses.

Next: Behind the Scenes: Historical Archives at Laurel Hill

Stoneangels: You mentioned admission tickets–the cemetery charged admission?

Ross Mitchell: Actually it was just the opposite. Laurel Hill was founded in 1836 (before railroads). Because of the Panic of 1837, this big economic downturn, things didn’t start well. It really took another couple of years to get the operation going. They re-interred some notable people here like Charles Thompson, Secretary of the Continental Congress [1774 to 1781], Hugh Mercer [Revolutionary War hero], David Rittenhouse [astronomer and instrument maker]. They wanted to bring some people who gave it a little more oomph.Before Laurel Hill, everyone was buried in their church burial yard and if you were not affiliated with a church-which almost everyone was-then you were buried in a Potter’s Field. And with the rapid expansion of the city all through the 1800s-the population was doubling roughly every 20 years – the churches would sell their property because of it’s increased value. Laurel Hill was intended to be a place far enough outside the city and non-denominational, where you would have family lots in perpetuity.

Stoneangels: Non-denominational…

Ross Mitchell: Right. It was very much intended as that. That’s why we have all these lots with coping around them, the dynasty lots with the stones being the same for the whole family. Laurel Hill began to have such cachet that it was almost too popular! In 1848, 30,000 people visited here within a 9-month period! They would come up on the steam ferry from Fairmount. I saw a sign on the pier in an old photograph that said “Ferry Rides to Laurel Hill.”

Stoneangels: What pier?

Ross Mitchell: Down at the Fairmount Water Works! There were ferry boats that would take people up to Laurel Hill. It was a popular destination. In the [early] 1800s, [Philadelphia] was not a pretty city. People were very afraid of disease, hygiene was not–

Stoneangels: Oh! The yellow fever business…!

Ross Mitchell: The yellow fever business, right. Death was a very common everyday thing. So people would leave the city in the summer and they would also come out to Laurel Hill for picnics–before there was Fairmount Park, before there was the Art Museum, there was Laurel Hill!

Vintage 1800s photo of main entrance to Laurel Hill Cemetery, showing its signature “Old Mortality” monument. Photo courtesy of Laurel Hill Cemetery.

They had public sculpture-”Old Mortality” [Laurel Hill's signature gatehouse monument, designed in the 1830s by Scottish sculptor James Thom]-and it was landscaped, it was a park, a real garden cemetery. As a garden, John Jay Smith planted seven or eight hundred plants and shrub varieties that would thrive in this climate from all around the world. So it was very much intended to be a place that people wanted to come to, but so many people came that they had to limit how many people came! They started issuing lot holder passes.

Stoneangels: Do you think that’s because people were trashing the cemetery?

Ross Mitchell: No. It’s just that it was a little too crowded for the lot holders. It became too successful. One of my goals is to make it that successful again. My goal is to have another 30,000 people here in one year.

Stoneangels: I think the idea of having horse drawn carriage rides through here is phenomenal. You wouldn’t use old funerary carriages, would you?

Ross Mitchell: No I’m thinking more like the carriage rides like they have around Old City.

Next: Mourning Rituals: How Urban Youth Cope With Death and Grief