Oddly enough, our microtrip to South Bend last weekend wasn’t much of a trip to South Bend. Our motel was in the city, near the airport, and we drove through town a few times, but mostly we were in Norte Dame — which is a town besides being a university of that name — and Mishawaka.
Still, we had a few South Bend moments.
Also, on Sunday morning, I went by myself to the South Bend City Cemetery, because of course I did. On the way I took a short look at St. Paul’s Memorial Church (Episcopal), because of course I did.
With John 12:17 over one of the doors.
The cemetery is a few blocks away. Founded in 1832, with about 14,800 permanent residents, mostly from the 19th century, though I spotted a scattering of 20th-century burials.
An aside: I read this week that Kane Tanaka, regarded as the oldest living person, died at 119. Born in 1903. Though it’s clearly been true for a while, I just realized that means that no one who lived any time at all in the 19th century is still alive. No one whose age is verifiable, anyway.
Except in the sense that we still remember, personally, people who lived at least a little while in that century, such as my grandmother. Is someone not well and truly dead until everyone who remembers him or her is too?
South Bend City Cemetery, the entrance.
The cemetery office, I assume. Handsome little structure.
Not too many large memorials or much funerary art, but well populated by a variety of weathered standing stones. As usual, I was the only living person around. Not even groundskeepers on Sunday.
As I said, the cemetery’s pretty near St. Paul’s, which is in this image.
A handful of mausoleums. No name on this one.
A boarded-up mausoleum. Not something you see much. I like to believe that the cast-iron door that probably hung there went to a scrap drive and did its tiny part to defeat Hitler. But I also suspect that it might have been stolen one night instead.
Large to the small.
The worn, broken stone of Peter Roof, the first recorded burial. Roof, I understand, was a veteran of the Revolution.
There’s a poignancy in time eating away at memorials as surely as it did those memorialized. Worn lettering, old-time symbols, dark smudges of pollution and dirt.
Rust, too. Such is the condition of the GAR stars I saw. This is the kind of cemetery that would have them. Rusty, but they endure as a faint echo of the camaraderie of men who fought and won the day for the Union.
As you’d expect, at least one Studebaker has a sizable memorial. South Bend was their town.
The memorial has lasted much longer than the company of that name.
I didn’t come looking for the car-making family. I had someone else in mind: Schuyler Colfax.
Good old Vice President Colfax of Grant’s first term, famed in — well, neither song nor story. Still, his contemporaries thought highly of him. They must have. Not only did he get the main stone, he got this.
And this — close to our time, in 1978.
Order of Rebekah? Now you know.
Leaving the cemetery, I was glad to see that it’s on Colfax Ave. It’s a more modest street than Colfax Ave. in Denver, but South Bend is a more modest town.
