Over My Dead Body

Melville Greg Melville

Description

A lively tour through the history of US cemeteries that explores how, where, and why we bury our dead The summer before his senior year in college, Greg Melville worked at the cemetery in his hometown, and thanks to hour upon hour of pushing a mower over the grassy acres, he came to realize what a rich story the place told of his town and its history. Thus was born Melville's lifelong curiosity with how, where, and why we bury and commemorate our dead. Melville's Over My Dead Body is a lively (pun intended) and wide-ranging history of cemeteries, places that have mirrored the passing eras in history but have also shaped it. Cemeteries have given birth to landscape architecture and famous parks, as well as influenced architectural styles. They've inspired and motivated some of our greatest poets and authors-Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson. They've been used as political tools to shift the country's discourse and as important symbols of the United States' ambition and reach. But they are changing and fading. Embalming and burial is incredibly toxic, and while cremations have just recently surpassed burials in popularity, they're not great for the environment either. Over My Dead Body explores everything-history, sustainability, land use, and more-and what it really means to memorialize. Locales visited in Over My Dead Body Shawsheen Cemetery - Bedford, Massachusetts The 1607 Burial Ground - Historic Jamestowne, Virginia Burial Hill - Plymouth, Massachusetts Colonial Jewish Burial Ground - Newport, Rhode Island Monticello's African American Graveyard - Charlottesville, Virginia Mount Auburn Cemetery - Cambridge, Massachusetts Green-Wood Cemetery - Brooklyn, New York Laurel Grove Cemetery - Savannah, Georgia Sleepy Hollow Cemetery - Concord, Massachusetts Central Park - New York, New York Gettysburg National Cemetery - Gettysburg, Pennsylvania Arlington National Cemetery - Arlington, Virginia Woodlawn Cemetery - Bronx, New York Boothill Graveyard - Tombhill, Arizona Forest Lawn Memorial-Park - Glenwood, California The Chapel of the Chimes - Oakland, California Hollywood Forever Cemetery - Los Angeles, California Nature's Sanctuary - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Sujets

• Histoire
• History of the Americas

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 04 octobre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781647003043
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Copyright 2022 Greg Melville
Photograph credits can be found on this page
Cover 2022 Abrams
Published in 2022 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022933716
ISBN: 978-1-4197-5485-2
eISBN: 978-1-64700-304-3
Abrams books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact [e-mail] or the address below.
Abrams Press is a registered trademark of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
ABRAMS The Art of Books 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007 abramsbooks.com
To Joan and Dave with love and gratitude
GRAVEDIGGER : Come, my spade. There is no ancient gentleman but gardeners, ditchers, and grave-makers.
They hold up Adam s profession.
- HAMLET , ACT 5 , SCENE I
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
1. CANNIBALS, A COFFIN, AND A CAPTAIN S STAFF Colonial Jamestown s original graves reveal America s distinctly uncivilized beginnings
2. PILGRIM S PROGRESS? To trace America s long, ongoing history of desecrating the Native dead, start at Plymouth Rock
3. . . . OR GIVE ME DEATH Jewish cemeteries are America s first and most enduring public expressions of religious liberty-which makes them targets for intolerance
4. WHERE THE BODIES ARE BURIED Southern plantation owners concealed the evidence of their moral crimes by hiding the bones of the enslaved
5. OUT OF THE CHURCHYARD, INTO THE WOODS Rural-style cemeteries transformed America s landscape, turning burial grounds into tree-filled tourist destinations
6. UNDERGROUND ART The Brooklyn cemetery that turned New York into America s cultural capital
7. DEATH COMES EQUALLY TO US ALL Racial segregation in American cemeteries is still very much alive
8. THE TONIC OF WILDNESS How Emerson and Thoreau turned a new cemetery into the country s first conservation project
9. A CEMETERY BY ANY OTHER NAME Central Park, built on burial grounds, has become Manhattan s most active repository for human remains
10. FOUR SCORE AND SEVENTY-NINE YEARS AGO The Civil War opened the gates to the capitalism of corpses-and death in America has never been the same
11. SWEET AND FITTING TO DIE FOR ONE S COUNTRY How Arlington National Cemetery s success as a monument to war made Americans too eager to fill it
12. KEEPING UP WITH THE CORPSES The way cemeteries set the mold for America s suburban subdivisions
13. LASTING IMPRESSIONS Tombstones in old boot hill graveyards keep alive the lost story of Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth-century American West
14. THE DISNEYLAND OF GRAVEYARDS How a Los Angeles cemetery corporatized mourning in America
15. WE DIDN T START THE FIRE Cremation now outnumbers burials in America and has surprisingly led some dying cemeteries to rise from the ashes
16. LEVERAGING BURIED ASSETS Facing an existential threat from Digital Immortality, cemeteries are staging a gritty fight for survival
17. BACK TO NATURE Green cemeteries return America s burial practices to the country s earliest days
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PROLOGUE
Shawsheen Cemetery
Bedford, Massachusetts
Established: 1849
The first time I put a body in the ground was on a clear June morning before my senior year of college. I was in my hometown of Bedford, Massachusetts, sitting behind the wheel of a pickup truck dressed in blue jeans, steel-toed work boots, and my favorite Aerosmith T-shirt. I generally saved the Journey T-shirt for nicer occasions.
From the truck, I watched the claw of a yellow, exhaust-belching backhoe tear a hole into a patch of grass about fifty feet away, between granite gravestones. To my right sat my nineteen-year-old coworker, Billy, leafing through the pages of an adult magazine. Above the backhoe s rumble, Billy gave me-unsolicited-the synopsis of a short story that caught his attention. Ever the literature lover, he was. Billy and I both worked as summer employees for the Bedford Department of Public Works, our main job being to mow the grass at the local Shawsheen Cemetery and help dig graves for the occasional funeral.
Gravediggers, as I know firsthand, get a raw deal. In return for doing society s dirty work, society looks down its nose at them. The job title equates in people s minds to low-wage, menial labor. Never mind the fact that just about all of us will hire one someday. Abraham Lincoln once worked as a gravedigger. So did rocker Tom Petty, who said he took the job because you didn t have to look too sharp. Amen. *
After the backhoe finished scooping out the Shawsheen Cemetery soil and depositing it onto a piece of plywood, Billy and I exited the truck, reached for our shovels, and dropped into the newly dug hole. Machines do much of the heavy work these days, except in hard-to-reach nooks where only a shovel can reach. The smell of fresh earth enveloped us as we shaved the grave shaft s sides and leveled the floor to the proper size-about eight feet long, three feet wide, and five feet in depth.
I was surprised to discover that Shawsheen s graves weren t six feet deep, as horror movies led me to believe. The six-foot rule likely originated during a plague outbreak in mid-fifteenth-century England, when London s mayor required all bodies to be placed at that depth in the vain hope of preventing the spread of disease-and to stop animals and grave robbers from unearthing the corpses.
But six feet also made the job much harder. It takes five or six hours for a skilled person to shovel out a single grave of that depth in ideal conditions, when the soil is relatively soft and rock free. Six-foot graves were also more prone to cave-ins, which eventually meant abandoning the rule. Now, most graves dug in American cemeteries are four to five feet deep, which leaves a layer of between one and two feet of soil above the casket or burial vault.
As I stood in the fresh grave, I couldn t help but feel a little claustrophobic. Or maybe I was just freaking out-a little-about the prospect of someday being deposited in a hole like this one for eternity, or at least a long time.
We completed our task and climbed out of the grave before a crane lowered a concrete vault into the space, to house the casket. Shawsheen required that all caskets be placed within a concrete vault, to prevent the ground from collapsing over time. This is a standard rule for many modern American cemeteries, and one enthusiastically backed by the opportunistic funeral industry; it adds anywhere from $1,000 to as much as $10,000-for the over-the-top, needlessly ornate models-in expenses piled onto a grieving family. Billy and I then unfurled rolls of artificial turf around the rectangular hole s edges to hide the bare ground and placed a polished aluminum casket holder above it. As far as graves go, it looked almost inviting.
Thirty minutes later, the ceremony went without a hitch, and after the last lingerers faded, Billy and I joined a couple of public works colleagues in lowering the casket into the ground and depositing dirt on top of it. That s about when we realized we had dug the grave in the wrong place. But that s a story for another time.
The grave digging that summer didn t spark my interest in cemeteries as much as the mowing. I spent hour upon countless, sweaty hour pushing a lawn mower between graves, the machine s wide blade cutting the grass down to two inches and mulching the clippings. During my first couple of days on the job, I mowed with energy and ambition, as if I wanted to cut all forty-four of the cemetery s acres single-handedly. In one day.
One of the year-round employees quickly set me straight. You get paid by the hour, not the square foot, he said. There s no rush.
The words came out more as a threat than a suggestion. The permanent guys who made their living from the job didn t need some summer kid setting new productivity records.
From that point onward, on every weekday morning, except the Fourth of July, I came to Shawsheen to mow deliberately. And my reasonable pace gave me time to consider the surroundings. The cemetery, established in 1849, reveals itself in chronological order. The oldest, most garden-like sections come first, just past the front entrance, residing on a hillside where the light is dulled beneath a canopy of mature hardwoods and white pines. The headstones there sprout from the ground like rows of crooked teeth, their etchings worn by the endless cycle of harsh New England winters. The family names on these surprisingly artful monuments often match the ones attached to the town s parks, schools, and historic homes. This area s overgrown landscape was modeled after the garden-like design of Mount Auburn Cemetery in nearby Cambridge, which opened to much fanfare more than a decade before Shawsheen.
As my lawn mower dipped and rose over the shallow depressions in front of these ancient graves, the town s past came alive. I learned who died rich and who died poor, who was blessed (or cursed, depending on how you look at it) with many children, who lived full lives and whose were cut short. I became familiar with the long-forgotten names of war heroes, and I contemplated the tiny, ornate monuments dedicated to infants who left their families too early. I imagined colorful stories for the May-September romances, and for the widows who lived for decades past their husbands.
Every gravestone seemed like a mystery waiting to be solved. The gravestones provided me with the first and last pages of a story. From there I was left to find clues to piece together information on who the person was. I considered information provided in the inscr