Finding Adelmor

A little family cemetery that I have passed thousands of times, it being one of those places you know so well you don't think about too much, finally got my notice after all. This plot sits next to a pretty green cornfield, on a typical central New York hill, and today, against a blue, blue sky. It is beautiful here.

I hate to say I took it for granted, but I stopped on a whim, without my good camera. I left my car running, expecting to be done quickly. Then, one stone that faced away, against the edge of the tree-line caught my eye. I peered around it and was surprised to see a very interesting marker. It had hands on it similar to the typical skyward pointing ones that were often used. But... there were three hands and they were not pointing. I read the inscription and knew something was different, but I didn't quite piece it together...yet.

The Ears of the Deaf Shall Be
Unstopped. Isaiah 35, Chap. 51

Selected by his Teacher

ADELMOR

Son of Wm. & L. Doty

Died at Washington Heights

N.Y. City October 15, 1864

In the 19th Year of His Age

We loved him.

Later, when posting it on my Facebook site. Jen, a distant cousin who works in deaf education, saw the photo and quickly posted "Hey, that's fingerspelling. It says God!" Revelation! This was a deaf person buried here. It made perfect sense and was the answer to the riddle I was trying to solve while studying it. The three hands were SIGNING!

And it gets better.. "Hey, there used to be a School for the deaf in washington Heights!" and "The New York Institution For The Instruction Of The Deaf And Dumb"

Within minutes Jen had answered all the riddles. Adelmor was a deaf student at the school where he died. His mother, Lucretia, it turns out was also a "deaf mute." Very unique to find this respect in a small rural area, from a time when they were called "deaf and dumb."

So, another day, another surprise. I find the best things when I am not looking.

Here are some links I found about them:

http://www.deafbiographies.com/showsnippet.php?id=6723
http://www.deafbiographies.com/pictures/doty_adelmor.php

http://books.google.com/books?id=PLoVAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA74&lpg=PA74&dq=Adelmar+doty&source=bl&ots=ZvXxsSeBqK&sig=NKcHs-c5FNaR1NoRmz4dfzyclQc&hl=en&ei=XbYxTq-9N5PqgQeNkqmcDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CDcQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=Adelmar%20doty&f=false

Crosman Cemetery: An accidental visit.

Well, actually there are quite a few of these on my roads traveled. I have, quite possibly, the worst sense of direction, but that lack of gift (or maybe it is the gift!) takes me to many unexpected and wonderful surprises.

While trying to get to one Meech Cemetery, I ended up on a beautiful, quiet rural road lined by huge maples and on this road sat one of those surprises I mentioned. Nestled next to a house and otherwise surrounded by miles of rolling farmland sat peaceful, quiet, little Crosman Cemetery - old and surprisingly well-kept. I was to find out why soon enough.

As my mini-me and I snapped photos, a man wandered from the house next door hollering "You gonna take all of them?" I laughed and replied "I'm going to try!" I explained to him what I do and he immediately relaxed and began talking.

 As my crafty mini-me surreptitiously took his photo, he told me stories. How when he moved here 40 years ago, he crawled hands and knees digging in the plot of weeds and high grasses next to his house, finding stones. How he and his sons repaired with cement, propped back up and cared for the them. (I saw cemented stones as the proof.)

He explained why, at the front of the yard, there, in a row of markers are a couple turned facing backwards from the road. A neighbor farmer had dumped the stones he had found somewhere on his own property at the cemetery, instead of preserving their original location. So, our guide, he uprighted them but turned them facing opposite the others because those people were not actually buried there.

He told me a story of a young man of 15 who died in 1933, how his classmates had raised money and had a huge procession for him to the cemetery ...yet there was no stone to be found. He was very interesting and I learned so much about the place from him... this self-appointed caretaker. He is moving in one month. And after 40 years, the place will once again have no one to care for it. He wondered aloud "Who will take care of this place after I go?" I dont know Mr. J. I don't know. But thank you for all the time you did it.

Art vs.History

I always want to shoot my photos with the artistic eye, but there are times when I go straight into preservation mode. I have to make a choice because of limited memory space and time. I feel that it is my job to make sure I get every single stone, clearly, head-on. Record it. Make sure it is not lost forever. Because, so many I see are falling to ruin. Who will do it if I don't?

If anyone ever wonders why I do this, my photos this week might help to explain..help them understand. If I don't do it...who will?

Photos taken at St. Patrick's Cemetery, Meech Cemetery, Cayuga County, NY

God's Acre, Charlotte & me.

When I was 7, there was a place at the end of the street and over a fence at the very back of a neighbor's yard. It was a place that the kids on my side of the fence went to meet the kids on the other side of the fence to play. That place was declared a park in 1974, and we used it as one. We played kick-the-can, red-light/green-light and basically ran all over this pretty little green space. This space was a cemetery.

God's Acre Cemetery with few stones left after many had been re-located to another local cemetery, was the place where my fascination began. And at this young age I was already trying to piece together the lives and deaths of the people who were in this place - that lived so long ago. I tried to comprehend what that long ago was like. Who were these people? What did they wear? How did they live? Imagination is a magical thing when you are a child and I had plenty. I was also confused and intrigued by the language used on the stones and read and re-read them, trying to understand why it was so different...eventually learning what it meant.

I remember reading inscriptions with friends. I remember us bringing big silver spoons to dig. I remember shining a flashlight into a crevice of one opening because we were sure we would see a body. I remember so many more stones.

Much of what was left has been taken back by nature. New, uniform, faceless, bland markers have been put in place in some effort to retain the people buried there. As I walked around I wanted to start digging with my silver spoon because I KNOW there are more there! Then came Charlotte...a little piece of slippery stone under my foot. I got down and dug with my hands, pulling grass away and moving sticky New York mud. And there she was...hiding under the grass. I painstakingly cleaned the fallen face with a hunk of grass and a stick. A worm squiggled across the stone and I could not help singing "The worms go in, the worms go out..." in my head and smiling. Charlotte would not be lost just yet.

"Why do all you people like graves?

Well... I am sure we have heard similar questions. Some think it's creepy and weird. Others know it's about the history, the lives and for me, especially, the art. I have been drawn to all of this from a very young age...in an Anthropological sense, before I even knew that was what I was doing. (I will be doing a post about that tale soon.)

I find such stories. Lives lived that were all blips in time summed up on a stone by the form and art chosen or the words chosen...or the lack of words. Some are such mysteries. Some are so heart-rending. And some are a bit creepy.

They are all beautiful to me because they had a story. Empathy is my gift to them in exchange for my photos. I walk around and feel the happiness-es, the pains, the accomplishments and the injustices. I understand. These were people like us all with all the things we have felt. They were and did. They lost. It is very peaceful to me to walk among them. And it is odd...calm wraps me tightly in these places. It is like a thousand souls are holding my hand.

I hope I honor them.

Tolomato Cemetery, St Augustine, FL.

Today, I hydroplaned my way to St. Augustine, FL through a series of bodacious little thunderstorms, all the while screaming at the sky, "CUT IT OUT! I HAVE SH*T TO DO!" I get a little worked up when something like weather threatens to mess up my photo shoots. But, I was doing it regardless, already eyeing the plastic grocery bag I use for trash in my car as a protector for my camera. Mother Nature generously took a time out just in time for my scheduled visit to...

Tolomato Cemetery
Tolomato, is the oldest planned cemetery in the State of Florida, with burials starting during the First Spanish Period (1565-1763). It was the site of a Franciscan mission built just outside of the old city walls as a home for Guale Indians from the Tolomato mission in Georgia. The mission chapel, circa 1726, was a simple wooden structure with a thatched roof and a remarkable four-story coquina bell-tower on the east façade. (ref http://www.tolomatocemetery.com/History.html)

It was closed in 1884 due to a misunderstanding of a Yellow Fever epidemic in St. Augustine at that time and the fear that the cemetery could somehow help to spread the illness. The cemetery is the property of the Cathedral-Basilica of St. Augustine.

Elizabeth
Much of this information was given to me by Elizabeth, a tiny, intelligent, gracious and amazing woman who met me at the gates and let me into her world of Tolomato. Her world, filled with this beautiful place she is helping to preserve, but also facts and knowledge of the cemetery, burials in general, and the city itself. If I knew a 10th of what she knew...

We sat in the tiny white chapel, while the heat of Florida summer blazed outside at 10:30 in the morning. She told me the preservation group had existed about one year only and that they had even done some geo-imaging around the chapel to see if they could find structural history. She told me the story of the St. Augustine Minorcans, a very important historical group who are buried primarily in Tolomato.

She told me that over 1000 burials had been recorded in the cemetery. But, that after it closed in 1884, some could not bear to be buried elsewhere, so fences were hopped, burials happened and city fines were paid.

She told me about a little door in an old visitors center in St. Augustine which was built atop a burial site. If you opened this little door you could see behind a glass window, skeletal remains. And that a popular bar was built on top of another subterranean burial place. That her sister, while with a prominent university, took photos years ago during an excavation of one of these burial places. She captured the remains being moved. She gave these slides to Elizabeth, who has these invaluable pieces of history in her own collection. I dared not ask to see them, though I was dying (graveyard junkie humor) of curiosity.

Elizabeth had so much to offer. Thank you to her for opening the doors to the interesting old Tolomato Cemetery, with its broken stones and crumbling encasements, that sits quietly on a side street very close to the mainstream Old St. Augustine tourist fervor, un-noticed unless at night when people are trying to see ghosts. This quiet old neighborhood cemetery sits in decay from years of going un-noticed. I am so glad to help it become noticed if I can to help the preservation effort and save this wonderful piece of history.

My photos will be posted soon. Visit Historic Cemeteries on Facebook to see more.

Patrick Memorial Gardens, Gainesville, FL

These places are not just places of the dead.
Today, I visited another small cemetery. Located on SR 222 in Gainesville, FL, it is very easy to miss, leaving me driving past it then turning around and driving past it once again! It is decorated with the usual canopy of oaks and Spanish moss that still has the power to leave me standing in awe of it after living under it for 11 years. The grounds are somewhat young, having been established in 1920, and it is an active burial place. The light was just beautiful today.

As are many of the cemeteries here in the greater Gainesville vicinity, it is overgrown with little grounds-keeping, being primarily a typical, less-than-wealthy Southern graveyard. There are no intricate carvings, flowery scripts or extra words used here. There are rows and rows of flat cement burials. This is something I am still getting used to about Southern cemteries. In the Northeast, where I grew up, there are monuments and there is really long history. People spent money on those places! Many here have simply and sometimes roughly carved names and dates and nothing more. But, even though there is little care for the grounds and less than elaborate monuments, I cannot say there is little care for it's inhabitants. Almost everyone here had mementos. Flowers, teddy bears, angels and so much more. These people, even those that have been here a while, are in someone's thoughts.

I'm Sorry, Dead People.
There were many new burials, which I try to stay away from, out of respect. In getting to some of the older ones, I found myself saying secret apologies to the very recent that I had to maneuver around. It is just how I work in the cemeteries I visit - with respect and empathy. But, I have to admit that I was entranced by a few and did take photos.

Patrick Memorial Gardens provided me some great imagery, with its trees, fake flowers, cement slabs and mounds where burials have pushed upward, seemingly not made deep enough to stay under. One thing I have realized after visiting here, is that I am becoming increasingly interested in the mementos; the gifts of love and sorrow and memory that these places contain. They are touching. They are real. They come from real emotion that belongs to real people. These places are not just places of the dead.

Well. Here it goes.

This is my first attempt at blogging about my graveyard obsession. It started young. That story will come soon. For now, bear with me as I build this site. Web sites tend to be my playground, much like the cemeteries I visit.  You will see things change and develop. I hope I can make it interesting.

Thanks for coming.

- Just one Graveyard Chick.