South Bend City Cemetery

Posted on April 28, 2022 by admin

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.

Fort Pulaski National Monument

Posted on March 17, 2022 by admin

Today turned out to be an pleasant early spring day. There will be more winterish days to come, of course, and the nights are still chilly, but I’ll enjoy the warmth as much as I can. Had a very civilized lunch on the deck today, including casarecce and mussels, Greek olives and mineral water.

American schoolchildren learn, or at least used to learn, the story of the early 1862 battle between the Monitor and the Virginia (a.k.a., the Merrimack, which does have a euphonious ring when paired with the Monitor). That incident demonstrated the vulnerability of wooden hulls to armored ships, and the navies of the world took note. That was my takeaway about the Battle of Hampton Roads.

I don’t remember ever being taught about Fort Pulaski, which is on Cockspur Island in the Savannah River, and whose short siege, only about a month after Hampton Roads, revolutionized warfare in its own way. If I ever learned that before, I’d forgotten. So I relearned it by visiting Fort Pulaski National Monument outside Savannah on the morning of March 7.

“On April 10 [1862], after the Confederates refused [Union Capt. Quincy] Gillmore’s formal demand to surrender, the Federals opened fire,” the NPS Fort Pulaski leaflet says. “The Confederates were not particularly alarmed; the Union guns were a mile away, more than twice the effective range for heavy ordnance of that day.

“But what the fort’s garrison did not know was that the Federal armament included 10 new experimental rifled cannons, whose projectiles began to bore through Pulaski’s walls with shattering effect.”

Before long, within about a day, explosive shells were hitting near the fort’s main powder magazine, and the Confederate commander, Col. Charles Olmstead, surrendered. Though state-of-the-art when constructed in the 1830s and ’40s, the brick fort proved in 1862 to be as obsolete as wooden-hulled ships. Armies of the world took note.

Whatever its role in the history of warfare, Fort Pulaski is a cool relic here in the 21st century. Built of an estimated 25 million bricks, the NPS says, and restored in the 20th century by none other than the energetic lads of the CCC. We arrived via the causeway that crosses to Cockspur Is. and soon approached the fort. Which has a moat.

And a drawbridge.

How often do you get to say you’ve crossed a moat on a drawbridge?

Though vulnerable to new cannon tech in the 1860s, the fort’s thick walls are impressive all the same.

On one of the ceilings, some Union garrison soldiers — who had little to do, since the Confederacy never tried to take the fort back — left some patriotic graffiti.

It’s a little hard to read, but includes a star and says THE UNION NOW AND FOREVER.

This is the entrance to the powder magazine that was in danger of blowing up real good during the bombardment.

The five walls enclose a sizable bit of ground.

Most of the monument’s exhibits are inside the walls, including ones about ordinary soldiers’ quarters, the commanding officer’s quarters (definitely better), the infirmary, the chapel, how the garrison entertained itself (considering that leave in Savannah was out of the question) and more.

A good many cannons still stand at the fort, ready to greet the tourists who show up.

A plate on the cannon below indicated that it was made by the Ames Manufacturing Co. of Chicopee, Mass., a major maker of side arms, swords, light artillery and heavy ordnance for the Union.

This cannon is perched atop the upper level of the walls (the terreplein), which surprised me by being accessible to tourists. There are no guardrails, so you take your chances.

We enjoyed good views of the surrounding territory, Cockspur Island that is, from up there. That kind of view would seem to be an important feature in a fort. I expect most of the flora now seen wasn’t there when Pulaski was an active fort.

Near the entrance of the fort is a small cemetery.

It includes mostly unmarked individual graves, though there is a small stone honoring a man named Robert Rowan. It says:

In Memory of ROBT. ROWAN of No.
Carolina, Lieut in 1st Regimt of Artilrst &
Engirs of the U. States Troops who died
March 3d 1800, Aged 25 Years.

Obviously not involved in the Civil War, he was stationed at Ft. Pulaski’s predecessor, Ft. Greene. I’m a little amazed that the stone still stands, and even the location of Rowan’s resting place is known, considering that a hurricane destroyed that fort only four years after he died.

Also buried in the cemetery are 13 of the Immortal Six Hundred, Confederate POWs held at Ft. Pulaski in 1864 and ’65. A much newer stone at the end of a sidewalk — erected in 2012 by the George Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans — honors these men.

A number of short walking paths lead away from the fort. We took a walk on one.

Skies were clear and temps warm, about 80 F. Luckily, it seemed to be a little too early in the spring for many bugs to be around. I expect bugs were a major nuisance (and danger, considering the likes of malaria) for the fort’s garrison in those pre-DEET days.

The path we walked eventually led, by way of the aforementioned John Wesley memorial, to the Savannah River, near where it empties into the Atlantic. Across the way is South Carolina.

Signs marked the beach closed, so we didn’t venture on to it. Still, frame it right, and it looks like you’re at a beach resort.

At least, that’s what Ann claimed as she sent pictures to her friends.

Two Savannah Cemeteries, One Featuring Button Gwinnett

Posted on March 16, 2022 by admin

Both of the Savannah cemeteries I visited last week were unusual in one way. Not that one was a burial ground dating back to colonial times and other was founded by Victorians who believed that cemeteries should be beautiful places of respite; I’ve encountered both in other cemeteries.

Not the weathered stones and crumbling bricks of the colonial cemetery, nor the enormous trees and bushes and flowers of the 19th-century cemetery, nor the interesting funerary art, nor even the fact that 21st-century burials continue in the latter cemetery. I’ve seen all that, in one way or another, at burial grounds in places as varied as Austin, Boston, Buffalo, Charleston, Chicago, Dayton, Fairbanks, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New York, Richmond, San Antonio and more.

Rather, living people — besides me and the occasional jogger or groundsman — populated both Colonial Park Cemetery in downtown Savannah and Bonaventure Cemetery on the eastern edge of the city. With such notable exceptions as Arlington National Cemetery or Koyasan in Japan, which are destinations in their own right, cemeteries tend to be mostly devoid of living people.

As the name implies, Colonial Park functions as a downtown park, with people crossing it in some numbers, and a few looking around (though my pictures don’t really reflect that). As for Bonaventure, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil seems to have put it on the tourist map. When I was there, not only did I see people alone and in pairs wandering around, but also a few guided-tour groups (again, I didn’t take many pictures of them).

The six-acre Colonial Park has been a cemetery since 1750 and no one new has been buried there since 1853.

Plenty of weather-worn stones.

The cemetery also sports a number of brick tombs, the sort you sometimes see in 18th- and 19th-century grounds.

A number of stones were embedded in a brick wall marking one of the boundaries of the grounds, which you don’t see that often.

I went looking for only one specific memorial, and I found it by looking it up on Google Images and then wandering around, looking for it in person.

Button Gwinnett. Button and I go back a ways. My 8th grade history teacher, the one-armed Mr. Robinson, tasked us to write a report on one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence — but not a famous one like John Hancock — and I picked Gwinnett, maybe for his curious name. Very little information on him was available in those pre-Internet days, but I made the best of it. I think.

The memorial’s plaque, put there in 1964, says that Gwinnett’s remains are “believed to lie entombed hereunder.” So his whereabouts aren’t quite known. Close enough, I figure.

More recently, Gwinnett had his 15 minutes of posthumous fame in the form of a late-night TV gag.

The man who shot Gwinnett to death in a 1777 duel, Lachlan McIntosh (d. 1806), is also buried at Colonial Park, but I didn’t look for him. McIntosh was, incidentally, acquitted of murdering Gwinnett. Tough luck, Button.

I arrived at Bonaventure about an hour before it closed for the day, so I saw it illuminated by the afternoon sun.

I recognized the paths that cross the cemetery as former thoroughfares for horse-drawn carriages, either hearses or otherwise.

As the second image illustrates, azaleas were in full bloom across the grounds, which was also populated by Southern live oaks, palms and much other flora. In its lushness, and Spanish moss, the cemetery reminded me of Magnolia Cemetery in Charleston, but without the water features or alligators.

The 160-acre Bonaventure, formerly the site of a plantation of the same name, became a cemetery in 1868, with the city acquiring it in 1907. It’s still an active cemetery.

There aren’t many mausoleums, though there are some sizable memorials and a little funerary art.

I didn’t go looking for notable permanent residents. Who, after all, could compare with Button Gwinnett? But I did see some intriguing stones.

There’s a story in that stone, turns out. More than one. For his part, William Boardman Estill was a veteran of the Revolution, as noted on the back of his stone.

He was also the father and grandfather of some notables, who are listed on the stone, which looks like a fairly recent replacement (erected by the Sons of the American Revolution, would be my guess). William Estill was editor of the Charleston Daily Advertiser, while John Holbrook Estill was editor of the Savannah Morning News, besides being wounded at First Manassas.

Somehow William B. Estill got caught at sea in the great hurricane of 1804, a storm I’d never heard of till now. Bad luck for him, since “the hurricane of 1804 was the first since 1752 to strike Georgia with such strength. Damage to ships was considerable, especially offshore Georgia,” says Wiki, citing a book called Early American hurricanes, 1492–1870 (1963).

Damage to coastal Georgia and South Carolina was also considerable, including the destruction of Ft. Greene on Cockspur Island, later the site of Ft. Pulaski.

“Once the Revolutionary War ended, the new United States would build a fort on the site of Fort George in 1794-95,” the National Park Service says. “This new fort was constructed very much like Fort George (earth and log) and would be named for the Revolutionary War hero, General Nathaniel [sic] Greene. The life of Fort Greene would be short and tragic. In September 1804, a hurricane swept across the island, washing away all vestiges of the Fort.”

The Presidio

Posted on November 17, 2021 by admin

From Crissy Field on San Francisco Bay, a convenient walking path leads to one of the formal entrances of the Presidio, on Girard Road, and some nearby green space.

Actually Crissy Field is part of the 1,491-acre former fort, which is part of Golden Gate National Recreation Area and sprawls across the northwestern part of the San Francisco Peninsula. These days, the Presidio includes many former military structures, museums, restaurants, lodging, recreational spots, art installations, trails and lawns, but also residential and commercial properties, including Lucasfilms headquarters.

Too much to see, even in a series of days. Still, I saw a fine slice. I spent most of the afternoon of October 30 at the Presidio, taking a look at some of the large stock of former military properties.

A former band barracks.

I didn’t know that band members ever had their own barracks, but apparently they did at the Presidio. The building could accommodate 37 musical soldiers.

“The Presidio of San Francisco represents one of the finest collections of military architecture in the country and reflects over 200 years of development under three different nations,” says the NPS.

“Today, the Presidio boasts more than 790 buildings, of which 473 are historic and contribute to the Presidio’s status as a National Historic Landmark District. The building types range from elegant officers’ quarters and barracks to large, industrial warehouses, administrative headquarters, air hangars, major medical facilities, and stables.”

Who says the military isn’t concerned with aesthetics in its buildings? Was concerned, anyway.

The Main Parade Ground.

Food was available.

I had some excellent Korean food from the Bobcha food truck. It seemed like a better bet than Viva Vegan, at least to my tastes. Had a nice view while eating, too. I was at the next table down.

Not far from the parade ground is San Francisco National Cemetery.

A picturesque hillside cemetery with towering trees.

At about 28 acres, there are more than 30,000 service members interred there. It was the first national cemetery on the West Coast.

A memorial to an incident that doesn’t have that many memorials: the Boxer Rebellion.

In this case, memorializing four marines from the USS Oregon who died on the Tartar Wall defending the Legations in the summer of 1900.

As I sometimes do, I picked out an ordinary soldier to look up later.

Motor Machinist Mate First Class (MOMMI) Clayton Lloyd Landon of St. Louis, a submariner who went down with the USS Tullibee in 1944. It seems that the vessel was a victim of one of its own torpedoes, as happened sometimes.

Gunner’s Mate C.W. Kuykendall, on watch up top at the time, was the only survivor of the Tullibee sinking, having been knocked into the water by the explosion and later picked up by a Japanese ship, to spend the rest of the war as a POW. Remarkably, he tells his story in a recent video.

“I just feel like I’m lucky.” Well put.

Forest Home Cemetery & Arboretum, Milwaukee

Posted on September 29, 2021 by admin

A touch of fall in southern Wisconsin.

A touch more every day, for sure, but this is how the foliage appeared on Saturday at Forest Home Cemetery & Arboretum, Milwaukee, which is mostly still green.

The cemetery’s chapel was part of Open Doors Milwaukee over the weekend. It is a handsome structure, completed in 1892.

“With an exterior of gracefully aged reddish-brown Lake Superior sandstone, the interior features stately buttresses, fine leaded-glass windows and spacious conservatories containing lush tropical foliage,” the cemetery web site notes, a little heavy on the adjectives. “Many of the tropical plants are decades-old and provide a comforting ambiance that truly sets the Chapel apart from others built before, or since.”

The conservatory elements are on either side of the main nave-like room. I put it that way because, according to a docent on site, no denomination has ever consecrated the space.

As for the cemetery proper, some 118,000 people reside there.

The nonprofit that runs the cemetery publishes a wonderful, 20-page full-color guidebook and was giving them away for Open Doors Milwaukee. Maybe they’re always given away, but anyway I got one and used it liberally during my visit.

“Forest Home Cemetery was established in 1850 by St. Paul’s Episcopal Church as a cemetery for the city,” the guide says. “As Milwaukee expanded, the cemetery became the final resting place for 26 mayors, more than 1,000 Civil War veterans and countless prominent people who left their marks on Milwaukee’s history… the property was one of the first landscaped sites in Milwaukee offering a natural respite. Designed by Increase A. Lapham, known as Wisconsin’s first naturalist, it is considered one of the finest examples of a rural garden cemetery in the Upper Midwest.”

Increase Lapham. Makes me smile. Name your babies Increase, hipsters. You could do a lot worse, considering the distinction of this particular Increase.

“A self-educated engineer and naturalist, Increase Lapham [1811-1875] was Wisconsin’s first scientist and one of its foremost citizens,” the Wisconsin Historical Society notes. “He wrote the first book published in Wisconsin, made the first accurate maps of the state, investigated Wisconsin’s effigy mounds, native trees and grasses, climatic patterns and geology, and helped found many of the schools, colleges and other cultural institutions that still enrich the state today.”

More important than the text, the guidebook includes a detailed map and a color-coded key to the notable burials at Forest Home.

Yellow: Beer Barons; Pink: [Other] Industrialists & Business Magnates; Brown: Pioneers, Inventors & Publishers; Orange: Mayors & Founders; Aqua: Notable Women; Red: Black Leaders & Abolitionists; Purple: Entertainers, Artists & Art Collectors; Deep Blue: Military Heroes; Green: Tragic and Distinctive Burials, such as the memorial to the victims of the 1883 Newhall House Hotel Fire, which General and Mrs. Tom Thumb survived, the grave of John “Babbacombe” Lee, and five victims of the 1903 Iroquois Theatre Fire in Chicago.

All together, the guide lists 65 notable burials. Far too many to see during our hour jaunt through the property, but I managed to find a few, which as always is enough. I was especially interested in finding beer barons. A whole category for beer barons; that’s Milwaukee for you.

Valentin Blatz (1826-94).

Frederick Pabst (1836-1901).

The cenotaph of Joseph Schlitz (1831-75).

If I knew it, I’d forgotten that Schlitz died in the sinking of the SS Schiller off the Isles of Scilly on May 7, 1875. The ship is carved on the cenotaph.

Those three were among the largest memorials in the cemetery, but hardly the only striking ones.

I chanced across the stone memorializing company founder A.O. Smith.

As an industrial concern, A.O. Smith has experienced an interesting trajectory. Over the years, it has made bicycle parts, steel vehicle frames, bomb casings and other munitions for the World Wars, brewery tanks, water heaters, air conditioning components, boilers and more. It’s still headquartered in Milwaukee.

We noticed that the statue on top of the memorial of one Emil Schneider had toppled to the ground at some point recently.

The head and hands are missing. Go figure.

Toward the end of our walk, we noticed George Marshall Clark (1837-61), whose spanking new stone was dedicated only a few weeks ago, on the 160th anniversary of his lynching.

As I said, there was only time to see a small fraction of the notable burials. Among the others listed, I’d heard of a few that we didn’t see, such sausage king Fred Usinger, Gen. Billy Mitchell and insurance executive Edmund Fitzgerald, who lent his name to the ore carrier that famously sunk in Lake Superior in 1975.

Many more stones memorialize interesting people I’d never heard of, including Increase Lapham, see above. The world is full of such. That’s one reason to visit cemeteries, or at least those with useful guidebooks.

A selection, including slightly edited text provided by the guide:

Harrison C. Hobart (1815-1902). Union Gen. Hobart was captured at Chickamauga. Along with two other officers, he devised a plan to dig an escape tunnel, working in secret for months until 109 prisoners crawled to freedom.

Christopher L. Sholes (1819-90). Inventor of the QWERTY keyboard typewriter.

Georgia Green Stebbins (1846-1921). Stebbins was the keeper of the North Point Lighthouse for 33 years. Her father, Daniel Green, initially held the job, but was in ill health, so Stebbins unofficially performed his duties for seven years before being appointed to the position.

Xay Dang Xiong (1943-2018). Xiong was a Hmong veteran from Laos who risked his life in secrecy working with the CIA during the Vietnam War. He spent 16 years in the Royal Lao Army fighting in numerous battles while commanding 4,500 troops… Col. Xiong received a full military burial.

Carl Zeidler (1908-42). Elected mayor of Milwaukee in 1940, Zeidler requested a leave from his duties in 1942 to fight in WWII. He died six months later when his ship, the USS LaSalle, was torpedoed and everyone on board perished. Because his remains were never recovered, he was memorialized with a cenotaph. (His brother Frank Zeidler (1912-2006), three-term socialist mayor of the city, is also in the cemetery.)

Doors Open Milwaukee ’21

Posted on September 26, 2021 by admin

Warmish weekend, good for walking around. We did that in Milwaukee yesterday, because the Doors Open Milwaukee event has returned after last year’s cancellation. We drove up in mid-morning and returned not too long after dark, as we did in 2019 and 2018 and 2017. One difference this year was that a few — not all — places required a mask.

Another wrinkle this time is that we took the dog. Leaving her at home alone for more than a few hours is just asking for a mess to clean up upon return. So that meant for most of the places we went, we took turns, as one of us stayed with the dog, either in the car or walking her around.

First we went to the Bay View neighborhood south of downtown, a place that got its start as a 19th-century company town. In our time it seems pretty lively. There we sought out St. Lucas Evangelical Lutheran Church and St. Augustine of Hippo Catholic Church, both late 19th-century/early 20th-century edifices themselves, distinctly built of cream brick.

In the Burnham Park neighborhood of Milwaukee, southwest of downtown, you can find the Burnham Block. In fact, an organization called Frank Lloyd Wright’s Burnham Block, which is part of Wisconsin’s Frank Lloyd Wright Trail, very much wants you to come see the six small houses on that block, designed by The Genius.

Who are we to resist the call of FLW? We went there next. So did a fair number of people late that morning, more than at any other place we saw yesterday. This was part of the line to get in.

Taking turns looking at FLW’s work took up a fair amount of time. Afterward we repaired to a park for a drive-through-obtained lunch. Then we went to Forest Home Cemetery. Usually, I can’t persuade Yuriko to visit cemeteries, but the Doors Open feature was its chapel, which she was willing to visit.

Then, to my complete surprise, she wanted to walk the dog through the cemetery as I stopped here and there among its many stones and funerary art. Forest Home is an historic rural cemetery movement cemetery, as fine an example as I’ve seen anywhere.

We had time enough after the cemetery for two more churches in East Town — or maybe the Lower East Side, hard to tell — St. Paul’s Episcopal Church and St. Rita’s Catholic Church.

By the time we’d finished those, it was 5 pm and Doors Open was done for the day. But I didn’t quite want to head home. I wanted to find a place to see the Milwaukee skyline, something I’d never done in all the years I’ve been coming to that city.

It didn’t take long.

That’s the view from Veterans Park on Lake Michigan, and it illustrates one of the advantages of the Milwaukee MSA (pop. 1.57 million) compared with the Chicago MSA (pop. 9.6 million).

The logistics of getting to that view of Milwaukee were exactly this: drive to Veterans Park, park on the road for free, and walk about two minutes. To reach a similar vantage to see the vastly larger Chicago skyline, I shouldn’t have to point out, is much more complicated, and free doesn’t enter into it.

Veterans Park in Milwaukee also has some nice amenities, such as a place called Kites.

At Kites, you can buy kites, as well as snacks. We got some nachos.

People were out flying kites. The wind was up but it wasn’t too cold, so it was a good afternoon for it. If we’d gotten there earlier, we might have as well.

We walked the dog again, this time a little ways along the lake.

It was a good afternoon for that, too.

Allouez Catholic Cemetery

Posted on September 15, 2021 by admin

The village of Allouez, Wisconsin, which counts as a suburb of Green Bay, was named after missionary Claude-Jean Allouez, S.J.

The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913): “Allouez, Claude, one of the most famous of the early Jesuit missionaries and explorers of what is now the western part of the United States, b. in France in 1620; d. in 1689, near the St. John’s River, in the present State of Indiana. Shea calls Allouez, ‘the founder of Catholicity in the West’… Allouez laboured among the Indians for thirty-two years. He was sixty-nine years old when he died, worn out by his heroic labours. He preached the Gospel to twenty different tribes, and is said to have baptized 10,000 neophytes with his own hand.”

Besides the village, the Allouez Catholic Cemetery and Chapel Mausoleum has his name. The missionary isn’t buried there, however, but in Michigan.

I visited on the morning of Labor Day. The cemetery is on a long slope between two major streets in the area, Riverside Dr. and Webster Ave. Nearly two centuries old, it still has a lot of room to grow.

In the developed area, so to speak, the stones are fairly dense.

According to the cemetery web site, there are a number of Green Bay bishops in on the grounds, but I wasn’t looking for anyone in particular.

The cemetery is home to only a handful of individual mausoleums, such as this one.

An intriguing stone. People get around, until they aren’t able to any more.

As always, some stones reflect unalterable sadness. This stone silently speaks of a terrible recent incident: a boy run over by a man in a truck.

He says accident, the DA says homicide by negligent operation of a vehicle.

Arlington National Cemetery, 2011

Posted on August 22, 2021 by admin

Ten years ago this month we went to Washington, DC, which was the entire focus of the week-long trip. That had some advantages, especially since DC has a decent network of subway lines. We went everywhere by subway, including Arlington National Cemetery. Once there, shuttle buses run a loop around the grounds. Good thing, since the cemetery covers 639 acres.

President Kennedy drew a crowd.

Robert Kennedy isn’t far away, marked with a small stone and a cross.

President Taft, the other U.S. chief executive buried in the cemetery, did not draw a crowd.

The memorial to the crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia. An elegant design.

The memorial to the crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger. Not an elegant design.

Mainly because of the faces. The more you look at them, the worse they become.

Remember the Maine.

Audie Murphy. I hadn’t remembered that he died that young; airplane crash.

Other noteworthy stones we happened across. Ones I did, anyway. Not sure anyone else noticed as I took pictures.

Army brass. Among others, Gen. Alexander “I’m in control” Haig in the foreground, and Gen. Omar Bradley, with his five stars, not far away.

The Tomb of the Unknown Solider.

Here are the girls, goofing around at the nearby amphitheater.

Hope the trip made some kind of impression.

Two Fairbanks Cemeteries

Posted on August 11, 2021 by admin

Bound to miss the Perseids again tonight. A thunderstorm is supposed to roll through tonight — third night in a row here — and besides, metro Chicago is no place to see celestial phenomena very well, except maybe a bright moon or planet.

I visited two major Fairbanks cemeteries during my late July visit, in reverse chronological order. First I went to Birch Hill Cemetery, founded in 1938 as an alternative to Clay Street Cemetery closer to downtown, which was founded simultaneously with the settlement itself in 1903.

As the name implies, Birch Hill is on a hill. In our time, the hill overlooks the Steese Highway, where it meets the Johansen Expressway. At that particular junction are such major retailers as Home Depot, Costco, Fred Meyer, REI and Walgreen’s, so the traffic is relatively heavy and the cemetery relatively noisy. You get used to that.

Though they aren’t on this interesting list, I imagine that those Home Depot and Costco locations are the northernmost of the respective chains.

I tromped around Birch Hill for a good half hour.

The cemetery included a number of special sections, such as Pioneers Plot 1.

In that section, there (unsurprisingly) are old stones.

And newer markers for people who came to Fairbanks in its pioneer years, such as one Joseph Landers, who died “About 80” in 1936. He might have come when he was about 50 already; couldn’t have been too much earlier. Must have been a tough old bird.

The memorial, which is obviously newer than 1936, says it was put there by Igloo No. 4. Eh? I looked it up. That’s the Fairbanks lodge of the the Pioneers of Alaska.

The Pioneers’ web site says: “[The organization was] first organized in Nome on February 14, 1907, with the mission:

To preserve the names of Alaska’s pioneers on its rolls;
To collect and preserve the literature and incidents of Alaska’s history;
And to promote the best interests of Alaska.”

That seems to include fixing plaques to Alaska pioneer graves, presumably unmarked or whose markers had been ravaged by the northern climate. There were others besides Mr. Landers in Pioneer Plot 1.

Loyal Order of Moose are on the hill, too.

Along with unusual gravesites whose honorees may or may not have belonged to a fraternal organization, such as A.A. Zimmerman, whom the plaque says donated the land for the cemetery.

A few days later, I made my way to the Clay Street Cemetery, which is tucked away in a residential neighborhood near downtown Fairbanks.

It’s a flat parcel, but not without its charms.

Igloo No. 4 put in a few memorials here, too.

Other individual graves. Pioneer women, in these cases.

This plaque, dedicated in 2002, lists 89 men, mostly buried in the cemetery, who died in gold mining accidents near Fairbanks from 1905 to 1918.

“Underground mining was dangerous during this pioneer era,” the plaque says. “Most died from cave-ins, falling down shafts, being struck by material while in a shaft, and gas asphyxiation. The miners were often young, single, foreign-born ‘pick and shovel’ laborers. They were far from home.”

Further Considerations About Sock Monkeys (And Long Grove Community Church & Cemetery)

Posted on July 8, 2021 by admin

Rockford, Illinois, is generally credited with creating the modern sock monkey, and more recently fiberglass sock monkeys were put on display there. There are even sock monkeys at the Midway Village Museum in Rockford.

So how is it Long Grove is getting a sock monkey museum? I’ve only done cursory research, the kind the subject deserves, and I haven’t found a connection. I like to think the Long Grove museum will be run by a breakaway sock monkey faction, rivals of the sock monkey orthodoxy in Rockford, but that’s just me amusing myself.

A short distance from Long Grove’s historic downtown is Long Grove Community Church, which is historic in its own right, built by Evangelical German immigrants in the 1840s.

“With a new century, came many changes,” the church’s web site says, referring to the 20th century. “The church widened her circle of ministry to include local people who were not German-speaking. Two denominational mergers took the church away from her Evangelical roots.

“By 1950, the church had grown so small that the denomination recommended the doors be closed. But God gave the people a vision. Instead of closing their doors, they built Sunday School rooms for children. As people migrated from the city to the suburbs, the area grew and so did the church. By the late 1960s, we had transitioned from a small rural church into a suburban church.”

The Long Grove Cemetery is next to the church.

There isn’t much information on line about this cemetery, despite its clear historic aspects.

But I don’t need a web site to tell me it’s another of the many cemeteries in the Chicago area with immigrant German stones, many dating from the 19th century.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Tag Archives: cemeteries