Cemetery List
I love walking around cemeteries. Some may view it as a creepy place of grief and death where only relatives should go to visit those they have lost, but I see it as a serene, peaceful, quiet place to take a nice walk. I see it as a field of art: stones carved for each individual. Many are standard and templated, picked from a list of shapes and fonts, but most of them are interesting. A grave marker captures someone's entire life, a piece of history and time that is gone forever. There are entire stories attributed to graves, if you look for them.
It's true I self-identify as "goth at heart," and it's true that when I was a teenager I went to graveyards because of my love for spooky things. Now, though, it's less about the ghosts and more about the people. It's less about the past, and more about my present moment sitting in the grass enjoying a blue-sky day where the air is still and birds chirp happily.
I used the words interchangeably just now, but there is a difference between a graveyard and a cemetery.
- graveyard : a burial ground usually associated with a church, usually smaller than a cemetery. Graves are added as people die and there is usually no planning or structuring around where they are buried.
- cemetery : a burial ground not necessarily associated with a church. Often a large plot of land is purchased to use as a burial ground, whereas a graveyard is often a small patch of graves on land existing for other reasons. In cemeteries, grave plots are usually planned on grid layouts with other landscaping and people can reserve spaces before death.
I don't think anyone gets very upset if you use them wrong, though.
By definition, I don't often go to graveyards. It feels more like an imposition to walk around someone's religious building than it does to enter a cemetery that's open to the public.
Read about the history of cemeteries:
- A brief history of the cemetery in America
- Our first public parks: The forgotten history of cemeteries
- The origins of cemeteries as public parks
- Cemetery pictures and burial practices from around the world
To Go (incomplete list)
I will go to any cemetery but I add cemeteries to this list when I learn about them and they catch my interest.
- Columbia Gardens Cemetery (Arlington, VA)
- Wilkes St Cemetery (Alexandria, VA)
- Oak Hill Cemetery (Washington, DC)
- Union-Rice Cemetery (Union, KY)
Gone
- Ivy Hill Cemetery (Alexandria, VA)
- Glenwood Cemetery (Washington, DC)
- Antietam National Cemetery (Sharpsburg, MD)
- Wunder's Cemetery (Chicago, IL)
- Graceland Cemetery (Chicago, IL)
- St. Mary's Cemetery (Alexandria, VA)
- Harrison Township Cemetery (Ashville, OH)
As I go through my digital photo archive (since 2004), I will add to this list and include pictures.
Mt. Hope Cemetery (Rochester, NY)
Photos taken by me on 6/26/24. It was very rainy, super muddy, rush hour, and we had places to be, so we didn't find Frederick Douglass' grave. GPS took us to a dead end and it became clear we'd have to walk and wander, so we went to get birthday snacks and rejoin our family instead.
Daniel Anthony
Susan B. Anthony
Mary S. Anthony
Madge Osborn Anthony
Many voters place their "I Voted!" stickers on Susan B. Anthony's grave, but I went there in June. People put coins on graves as a way to pay respects and rocks to signify remembrance and the permanence of memory. Trinkets are often left as a way to indicate someone has visited and connected with a gravesite.
Robert Henry Butts
John DeWitt Butts
Katherine Cooke Butts
