Ditto

From Riverview Cemetery, Baldwinsville, NY:

Three children of Roy & Elizabeth Mo...(?). They all seem to have died in January 1812, and the engraver saved some time ditto-marking the repeated phrases. It gets a little meta with the three headstones engraved in front of a pair of willow trees at the top of the marker.

Man's best friend

From Savannah's Catholic Cemetery:

Large but otherwise normal. Except to the right of the cross...

...an added monument to Prince, "He loved his master." Aw.

Look even closer -- someone left a baseball behind for Prince!

It's curtains

From Oakwood Cemetery, Syracuse, NY:

(Which I somehow apparently have not posted before; that, or I completely failed at my tagging system both here and in Picasa)

From Metairie Cemetery, New Orleans, LA:

An interesting detail to note on this one is that the death year for the husband is added on with a little red plate that matches the brick of the mausoleum and completely fails to match the rest of the epitaph.


Related post: Matched Set 1

Fire!

I was going back over all my old photos and found one for which I somehow had not tagged an awesome "cause of death" epitaph! Shame on/kudos to me.

Unfortunately it's a bit blurry. Taken in Walnut Grove Cemetery (the non-Jamesville one), and between the cloudy sky, heavy tree cover, and the aging camera I had at the time, the low lighting was too much for a crisp shot. Sigh. And now I have no chance to re-take it. Anyhoo:

This is the headstone for Jennie Hutchinson, wife of Wm. S. Stewart, aged 36 years, who was Killed at the burning of the Southern Hotel, St. Louis, MO...

According to this, she was specifically "killed by the breaking of an improvised rope while being lowered by her husband from a fifth-story window." Yikes. This page has a NYT dispatch about the fire and a few images of the hotel.


Also, from Greenwood Cemetery, New Orleans, LA, another couple deaths by fire:

The overall monument

Close-up of the left panel:

To the Memory
of
Daniel S. Woodruff
Born November 9th, 1797
and
William McLeod
Born January 6th, 1800.

Close-up of the right panel:

Who were Killed while in the
active discharge of their duty
at the fire corner of Magazine
and Natchez Streets.
March 17th 1854.

Stormy

There was a huge thunderstorm over New Orleans as I approached the city from Slidell, which was very entertaining to watch on the horizon as I crossed Lake Pontchartrain. It took a while to taper off, though, unfortunately for would-be cemetery explorers. Eventually it quit without cutting into my schedule too much, and I got to wander Greenwood and Metairie Cemeteries.

This is a photo from Greenwood at the end of the storm and the first peek of blue sky I got. (Though it did not actually mark the end of rain. I knew I should have kept my rain boots in my car.)

An excellent epitaph

I applaud the man and/or his family, whoever was responsible for the simple but unique

Returned to cosmos for repairs

From the Catholic Cemetery, Savannah, GA.

Watching You

All the disembodied little faces watching you pass...

In Greenwood Cemetery, NOLA:

A pair of these sit at the corners of the Swiss Society mausoleum. Full view:

From Metairie Cemetery, NOLA:

 I do like the effect of the wings framing the little cherubs' faces, though they also emphasize the disembodiment of the heads.

A pair of bearded faces at the bottom of the handles of a decorative vase. Will be posting images of the rest of the monument at a later date.


And from the Catholic Cemetery in Savannah, GA:

Related post: Faces

Artfully broken

From Metairie Cemetery in New Orleans, LA:

I'm not even sure how functional this one can be, but it's definitely very lovely and attention-grabbing, a mausoleum made to look like a gothic cathedral fallen into disrepair (me being a WW2 "fan," I tend to think "bombed-out"). Another view from the front:

Room for Three More

From Saint Mary's Cemetery in Fayetteville, NY:

You'd think at least one name would have been etched in before the stone went up.

Rock piles

From Mt. Hope Cemetery, Rochester, NY:

From Fairview Cemetery in... Sheldrake? Seneca County, NY, at least.

Vaguely reminiscent of a snowman but with boulders.

Warnings

From Jamesville Walnut Grove Cemetery:

Death conquers all the sons of man:

Few reach their threescore years and ten. 

Though here and there you one may trace, 

Let none presume twill be their case.

From Liverpool Cemetery, Liverpool, NY: 

A classic (and here's some history on the verse). Also, I am open to suggestions as to what that very first word might be.

[?]er remember as you pass by

As you are now so once was I

As I am now so you must be

Prepare for death and follow me

A Civil War obelisk

Found in Oakwood Cemetery, Syracuse, NY:

 Capt. Wm. J. Hunt

Died at Chesapeake

Hospital Va.

of wounds rec'd.

before Petersburgh

July 30, 1864.

Ae. 22 y'rs & 4 mo. 

I found a scant amount more of information about him from here: Captain William J. Hunt, Co. D, 117th NYSV. Joined July, 1862 at Utica as 1st Lt., age 21; Captain Dec., 1863; WIA June 28, 1864 at Petersburg, VA; died July 31, 1864 at U.S. General Hospital. The death date differs by a day and the hospitals are identified differently.

What's in a misspelled name

From South Onondaga Cemetery, Syracuse, NY-area:

I can buy "Dorthy" as an alternate spelling of "Dorothy," but I suspect Judge Palmet's wife was named Chloe, not "Chole."
_____________________________________________

Administrative note/ Excuses:
I'm in my last month of the semester (more or less) and, indeed, of my degree program in general. I have numerous projects to complete over the course of the next 3 weeks and I still don't have a job lined up. This blog has dropped quite low in my list of priorities for the time being. It hasn't helped that Syracuse has been experiencing a prolonged winter which discourages outdoor activities (like, you know, photographing headstones in cemeteries). Expect the lack of updates to continue. My apologies.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

A few Celtic-motifed headstones for the holiday.

From Mt. Hope Cemetery in Rochester, NY:

Frank Gannett founded the Gannett media corporation, and has an awesome Celtic knot and laser-etched paperboy marking his plot.

Previously posted:

The epitaph reads, "I gconai agus go brach" ("I gcónaí agus go brách" if you want the proper accents) and apparently means "Always and forever."


From Forest Hill Cemetery, Utica, NY:

Epitaph extravaganza

100th post, right here.

From Liverpool Cemetery, Liverpool, NY:

Loves last token

From South Onondaga Cemetery, Syracuse, NY area:

 Arthur S. 1885-1908

A precious one from
us has gone
The voice beloved
is stilled
A place is vacant
in our home
which never can
be filled.

Of life the tiresom [sic] journey's past.
We drop into the tomb at last:
Great Inn; where all our sorrows cease
And kings & peasants rest in peace.

Afflictions so
Long time I bore
Physicians were in vain
Till God was pleas'd
To give me ease,
And free me from
my pain.








From Oakland Cemetery, Atlanta, GA:

Annie Lowry Porter
Born Feb. 13, 1873; Died Nov. 15, 1874


Fannie Lowry Porter
Born Nov. 5, 1877; Died May 11, 1879

They were little sunbeams
That shone upon our way;
And cheered us but a moment
Ere they passed away.

Samuel Davis Haslett McDaniel

May 15, 1896

Sept. 14, 1983

A lover of people. A fighter to the end. God be with him til we meet again.

From Mt. Hope Cemetery, Rochester, NY:

 


George W. Aldridge
Born December 28, 1856
Died while serving the United States
as Collector of the Port of New York
June 13, 1922






On the reverse:
An expression of sorrow and farewell
to a great leader and a true friend

From Rome Cemetery, Rome, NY:

 

Detail:
"Even for the dead I will not bind
My soul to grief, death cannot long divide,
For is it not as if the rose that climbed
My garden wall had bloomed the other side?"

A nifty tree

From Gibson Chapel Rural Cemetery in Cortland, NY, comes this neat tree that reminded me of a candelabra with the way the branches kind of go out and then up:

Another mishmash

From Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta, GA:

A funky and lovely mausoleum using three or four kinds/colors of stone topped off with a pyramid.

Take heart

From Granary Burial Ground, Boston, MA:

Like a gothy Valentine, the classic winged skull memento mori resting over a heart with some abstract swirls.

Happy I-restored-my-Picasa-tags Day.

Mishmash of shapes

From Gibson Chapel Rural Cemetery, Cortland, NY:

All kinds of shapes happening on this monument...rounded columns, square posts, little onion domes, the raised bit on top...

Victory over laptop

Computer is functioning again; next step is to get all my Picasa tags back, because otherwise I'll have the huge task of going back over all my photos and tagging them + noting which have already been posted. Jeeze.


In the meantime, here's a gorgeous mosaic headstone (looks like a stylized menorah) from a small Jewish cemetery just outside downtown Houston:

Apologies

The hiatus will continue until my laptop can stop shitting itself. I don't know if it's a Windows 7 thing, a user thing, or an ASUS thing, but it's obnoxious, especially since the laptop is barely a year old.

Edit, 1/22/2010: Shortly after posting the above message, the laptop finished itself off and now will no longer boot. I honestly wasn't even touching it when it went down for the final count: it was doing a virus scan, froze, then died. It took me over 6 months to find a laptop that met all my criteria (hi, I'm picky), and so far as I can tell, I didn't even do anything to hasten this premature demise, so I feel ASUS and Microsoft need to get together and give me a new laptop. Great, great, great, great. Absolutely wonderful.

Computery

Chuang, 26, from Chongqing, south west China, was so potty about computers his family had a headstone carved for him in the shape of a monitor giving his dates of birth and death.

Stonemasons also included a keyboard, mouse and a camera with a picture of tragic Chuang to complete the tombstone tribute.

- i-Bod: Logging Off




Regular updates to resume soon-ish. You'd think I'd be more productive on this blog when I didn't have schoolwork to fuss over.