Today’s update is a particularly sad one.  The destruction of St. Johannes Cemetery has been ordered, though the owners fought valiantly for years to save it.

Monday, a DuPage County Judge ordered that title of the land be transferred to the City of Chicago so that O’Hare Airport – which is just beyond the fence at the rear of this photo – can have additional runways built.  Within weeks, city workers will begin the obscene task of dismantling this cemetery.  Bodies will be relocated to other cemeteries chosen by surviving family members.

With the entire corrupt Illinois political machine against them, St. John’s United Church of Christ faced a difficult struggle to save the cemetery.  The state legislature even changed the law to favour the city (frightfully reminiscent of a bill of attainder).

Today’s featured stone is the H.F. Volberding monument at St. Johannes.  The style is known as a “pedestal tomb”.   Atop a concrete base (on which the Volberding name can still be clearly read), a tall block of marble stands.  The front is inscribed with an intricate floral design surrounding the name and biographical details – in a fancy German script – of the persons buried here.  The soft marble has weathered to such an extent that only the surname, in large lettering, is still readable; the other details have been lost.

What will happen to this monument, and the hundreds of others here, when the city completes its foul task?  Will it be thrown onto a pile of rubble?  If they attempt a proper removal and reconstruction at a new location, will this monument survive?  Or will it crumble under the rough hands of city thugs who care nothing for the history they destroy?

For more on St. Johannes Cemetery, read here.

tombstone tuesday

Fox Monument, Capron Cemetery

Adopting a custom of other bloggers in the Graveyard Rabbits network, I shall be posting “Tombstone Tuesdays” – a brief article highlighting an interesting stone, each Tuesday.

The first entry is the Fox monument at Capron Cemetery, Capron, Boone County Illinois.  The monument is carved to include two horizontal logs, with the texture of the bark clearly visible.  The lettering, also, resembles the natural forms of wood.

W.I. Fox, 1830-1924;  S.L. Woodruff Fox, 1825-1905.

tombstone tuesday

Everyone in Chicago is now aware of the situation at Burr Oak Cemetery.  The manager, Carolyn Towns, and three gravediggers are accused of digging up old burials and dumping the bones and shattered coffins in a disused area of the cemetery, in order to resell graves for cash – which they would then pocket, off the books.  An estimated 300 graves were violated; and, because of what appear to be deliberate attempts to obfuscate the record books, potentially thousands of other graves may now be unidentifiable.

I visited Burr Oak only once, in 2003, at the invitation of a previous manager (the suspect’s predecessor, who has not been connected to these events in any way).  She and her husband showed me the historic graves, such as Emmett Till, Dinah Washington, Otis Spann, Drew Ali…   They were very proud of their cemetery and its history, in stark contrast to the vile profiteers who desecrated it a few years later.  In 2003, the cemetery was in good condition, though there was a bit of flooding in the western portion.  Mamie Till (Emmett’s mother) had recently been entombed there, in the cemetery’s only above-ground vault, and there were plans for a museum to be built on site.

But, in spite of its history, I did not revisit Burr Oak, and I have only a handful of photos – mostly close-ups of individual markers of the famous interments.  I regret, now, that I had not obtained more landscape shots, before the cemetery became nefarious.   My preference is for Victorian architecture and monument styles, and I just don’t find flat-marker cemeteries visually appealing; and as I had only recently switched to a digital camera (Nikon D100) I was not yet in the habit of shooting everything in sight, and getting plenty of wide shots.

So Burr Oak is lost to us.  I have only a minimal record of what it looked like before the atrocity; and now it is forever tainted; once a place of history and culture, now it will be mentioned alongside the Tri-State Crematory as a horrific incident of betrayal of a sacred trust.

news

Roland Burris, nominated to the U.S. Senate by corrupt governor Blagojevich, has lately been taking some flak from bloggers and news commentators for having a large monument at Oak Woods.

Burris’s monument – or mausoleum – is a grey granite structure featuring twin crypts, a small roof, and a wall with the state seal of Illinois and a list of Burris’s accomplishments and offices.   By the standards of the beautiful and historic Oak Woods, it’s not particularly spectacular.

Nevertheless, the Senator presumptive has been mocked for it – blogger “Wonkette” calls it a “terrifying death chamber”.  In the eyes of these people, Burris has committed a cardinal sin, violating the “less is more” wisdom received from Ludwig Mies.  These people apparently think that no one should aspire to stand out from a crowd, to have a monument that displays character, accomplishment, vision and artistic flair; they seem to want everyone to lie under the standard-issue granite rectangles.

This author salutes Senator Burris for having the courage to express himself, and to give the gift of a unique monument to future generations.  Though it lacks the beauty of the Victorian Gothic monuments that can also be seen at Oak Woods, it stands head and shoulders above the endless grid of anonymous grey rectangles that fill most modern cemeteries. Whatever one thinks of the Senate appointment, Burris is a man of significant accomplishments – Attorney General, Comptroller – and these deserve to be remembered.

Thank you, Senator Burris, for breaking free of the straightjacket of “less is more”, and for refusing to have merely an ordinary, unremarkable granite slab.

We are not all alike in life, why should we be alike in death?

update: Thanks to Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune for asking my opinion, and linking here from his column.

update ii: please note that this is a not a political web site – it’s a graveyard site.  Please don’t post random political arguments here.

news chicago, politics

I set up a blog on blogspot.com in 2005, intending to write about my graveyard excursions.  But after a few months, I became busy with other things; there were few updates to graveyards.com, and I wrote little on the old blog.

I’ve now set up a new one, hosted here on my own server, and more integrated into the rest of the site – as I’m actively working on graveyards.com regularly again, I hope to have more to report.

The site has grown tremendously in the past year.  My focus has shifted from the “featured sites” section to the “cemetery list” section.

At the end of December 2007 the site contained 3209 photos.

Today, one year later, it has 6211 photos.

Early in 2008, I invited others to contribute photos of graveyards I had not yet been to, so that each record in the “cemetery list” database might be illustrated.  Many responded to the call!  Volunteers throughout Illinois have covered entire counties, some submitting multiple photos of each of dozens of graveyards.

I’d like to think the most prolific contributors:  Angie Johnson, Al and Carole Martin, David Habben, Joan Blood, Carol Slingo, and all the others who have sent photographs of Illinois graveyards.

sitenews

This morning, I was searching ebay for “Mausoleum” (looking for photos or books) when I found a card game by that name. I immediately recognized the mausoleum used for the cover art: the Lehmann mausoleum at Forest Home (the very large, but empty, mausoleum with columns surrounding an open area, and lions flanking the front steps).

The game has existed since 2000 but this is the first I had seen it… and looking more closely, I had another surprise. The drawing exactly matches the angle of one of the two photos of the mausoleum that had been on my site since 1996.

I’m flattered that my photo inspired a game design – but they should have at least told me about it back then; I’d have ordered several copies.

Compare the photo and drawing here

personal

I’ve returned from a “Dead Presidents Tour”.

I wanted to visit some friends in Ohio; and as that state has more dead presidents than any other, I planned my route accordingly.

Friday, I drove through Indiana, stopping in Indianapolis for about five hours to see Crown Hill Cemetery, which includes President Benjamin Harrison; three Vice Presidents (and one failed candidate for that post); John Dillinger; and poet James Whitcomb Riley. A fine Victorian cemetery, I rate it at 4.5 stars (equal to Chicago’s Forest Home or Mt. Carmel).

After staying the night at a friend’s house in western Ohio, I visited the grave of Warren G. Harding in Marion. He is generally considered a poor president, but because he died in office has a magnificent monument – a circular structure about one hundred feet across, surrounded by columns fifty feet high, with his grave and that of his wife in a courtyard in the middle. The cemetery across the street has the receiving vault where the president’s body was temporarily stored.

All day Sunday I was in Cleveland. Lakeview Cemetery is magnificent, and I toured it the whole day, longer than I had planned. President Garfield’s monument dominates – it is a 160-foot brown stone tower, with a statue of the president on the main floor, and the burial chamber below. Surprisingly, the president and first lady’s coffins were exposed – not sealed behind or under any stone, the bronze coffins sat on pedestals in the open air, with only iron bars to keep the tourists from touching them. Lakeview is a “5-star” cemetery, my highest rating.

Monday I journeyed home, stopping first in Canton to see President McKinley – who has a large domed mausoleum on top of a hill – and explore the graveyard next door, with its wonderful hillside vaults.

I then drove most of the way across Ohio, stopping in the small town of Fremont to visit the Rutherford B. Hayes presidential center; the president’s estate, now converted into a library and museum. The president and his wife, their son and his wife are in a small graveyard on the grounds, with a comparitively humble monument.

I drove home on I-90 across northern Indiana. As I passed the town of Gary, a long stretch of chemical factories came into view – and at that same moment, the song “Black God” by My Dying Bride began on the CD player… that song is just about the bleakest, most mournful piece of music I know, and was perfect for the view out the window.

The total score: 1,980 photos.

(this post was copied from my previous blog, December 2008)

expeditions