Restland, Vermont: Where Generations Sleep

Restland Cemetery located behind the Wilmington Congregational Church on Route 9, Wilmington, Vermont.

This side of town appeared to have been spared much of the wrath of Hurricane Irene, but businesses along Main Street are busy with repairs. On Route 9 from Brattleboro we passed several road crews working on utility lines and installing new rails between road and river. In places, new asphalt obviously replaced portions wiped out by flooding.

Tombstone Tuesday - More Pix of the Gravestone Girls

Ooops. I knew I had these photos somewhere of Brenda Sullivan, Gravestone Girl, at the NERGC booth. The pictures were taken with the camera in my new iPad2 and are fairly grainy. The camera does much better in bright light, rather than indoors under artificial lighting.

As you can see, the company also produces iconic t-shirts bearing cemetery art.

Time Flies is one of the original castings by the Gravestone Girls available
for purchase. The gray finish gives a good impression of New England slate,
but the entire piece is much lighter in weight.

Cemetery Art Lives On with the Gravestone Girls

Putting the 'Rave' Back in Grave! is the motto of three Massachusetts women who have made it their mission to "entertain and educate on the historical perspective of old cemeteries by documenting and preserving the beautiful art they contain."

I met GG Brenda Sullivan of The Gravestone Girls at the recent New England Regional Genealogical Conference in Springfield, Massachusetts and learned more about their work.

With a background in art history, the Gravestone Girls research cemetery and mortuary art and give educational presentations at schools and organizations. They specialize in recreating gravestone iconography using a casting technique that replicates the stone's art and images without damage to the original surface. The three-dimensional plaques are hand formed and finished in a process they perfected.

Initially, the Gravestone Girls focused on creating a variety of artistic items, from jewelry to wall wallhangings to magnets. Since their "discovery" by genealogists, they have also replicated ancestral headstones for clients and made small surname magnets for family reunion fundraisers. Their work is frequently sought by historic associations and societies to be used as a fundraising activity.

Time Flies.
An hourglass tells you time is passing.
One with wings reminds you it is passing swiftly.
This graceful glass adorns the gravestone of William Field who died April 10, 1772
and is buried in St. John's Cemetery, Providence, Rhode Island.

You can read more about The Gravestone Girls at their website, www.gravestonegirls.com.

The Tale of "Poor George"

Graveyard Rabbits and others interested in headstone iconography will enjoy the latest edition of Common-place, The Interactive Journal of Early American Life. In Object Lessons, Digging Up History, Edward E. Andrews describes "how Photo-Flo and elbow grease are saving New England's historic cemeteries."

"Poor George," we grunted as we looked down to survey the damage. George was hurting. His face was flat on the ground and, while ants and shoots of uncut grass explored ways to migrate around his heavy, white body, layers of mold and errant pine needles concentrated in the decaying crevices on his back. . . As my colleague and I stood over George, contemplating the best way to clean him up, it occurred to us that we were using the word him to describe what was really an it."George" was not an actual person, but a gravestone that memorialized a person's life and mourned his death.

The article describes cemetery preservation projects along with a brief discussion of headstone materials and restoration practices. Andrews goes on to describe a web project documenting Newport Rhode Island's black burial ground, "God's Little Acre, and the relationships between gravestone art and society, the ways that gravestones "reveal larger attitudes about the meaning of death itself." He brings the discussion back to "Poor George" by analyzing the marker and inscription as "a commentary on the perils of westward migration and family disruption."

When my high school English students read The Scarlet Letter, I introduced a special unit on Puritan gravestones and cemeteries. Students were required to analyze the symbolic meaning of the engraved stones, mostly the traditional urns, willows, death's head, hourglass, and angels. We didn't do too much with the inscription itself. Andrews' interpretation of the brief lines on George McIntire's headstone take iconography a step further.

Without knowing the cause of his death in September 1865 in Cinncinnati, Ohio, Andrew offers the idea that the marker notes McIntire's death as a "bad death," one where the deceased was in social isolation from his family. McIntire is buried in the First Congregational Church cemetery in Wellesley, Massachusetts, some distance from Cinncinnati. The inscription reads

No mother stood beside his couch,
To cheer his dying bed;
No sister there with kindly hand,
To bathe his aching head

Andrews reads this as a cautionary tale for other young men, "In the end, the stone is not really about McIntire, but about the anxieties and fears that migration might cause for all members of a family."

I find this a fascinating approach to studying gravestones, and encourage you to visit Common-Place and read the entire article. I am going back to look at the photos of my ancestors' gravestones with a new ear to what they may be saying.

Common-Place is an online newletter sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society and The University of Oklahoma features scholarly articles on a wide variety of subjects related to Early American life.