Gravely Speaking

Greene County Chapel Cemetery, rural Greene County, Indiana

Even though, they are considered rare, I have come across more squirrels displayed on gravestones, since I first wrote about the image as a funerary symbol.  The carving in the photo above is found in a rural cemetery in Greene County, Indiana.  The squirrel is a delicately-carved, shallow bas-relief on a limestone marker.  Some sources say that if the squirrel is holding a nut, it is a sign of religious meditation and spirtual striving. Clearly this little squirrel is in that prayerful position.

Crown Hill Cemetery, Indianapolis, Indiana

The clover is the symbol of Ireland because legend has it that St. Patrick, the country’s patron saint, brought it to the emerald isle.  The three leaves of the clover represent the Trinity–the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

Beech Grove Cemetery, Bedford, Indiana

The four-leaf clover is not a commonly seen gravestone symbol.  The four-leaf clover is universally recognized as a symbol of good luck.

The craving above has the clover tucked inside a horshoe.  To a superstitious person, a horseshoe with the ends pointing up, is viewed as good luck.  These can ususally be found tacked up above a doorway and kept as a talisman.  The claim is that the luck stays in the horseshoe and is bestowed on the owner.  Conversely, some believe that if the horseshoe has the ends pointing down, the good luck will drain from the shoe and be bestowed on those around it.  In gravestone art, however, the horseshoe is a symbol that wards off evil, not as a good luck charm.

Beech Grove Cemetery, Bedford, Indiana

Warren Dean Jones, August 10, 1931—December 27, 1948

At first, the carved limestone basketball at Bedford’s Beech Grove Cemetery looks like a fan’s tribute to Indiana’s state sport—Hoosier basketball. As most know who follow sports, basketball is as popular in Indiana as football is in Odessa, Texas, or hockey in Minneapolis, Minnesota. But, the life size limestone basketball actually commemorates the poignant story of 17-year old, Warren Dean Jones.

It sounds almost cliché but Bedford which is known for limestone quarries and high-quality precision stonecutters named their high school basketball team Cutters just like the team in the movie Breaking Away about Bloomington’s famed bicycle race. During the 1948 season of his senior year, Jones, an honor roll student and popular athlete, was the star center leading the Bedford High School Cutters on scoring. After practice one afternoon, Jones went home complaining of not feeling well. When he didn’t start feeling better, his parents, Elmer and Eva, called the family doctor to come and examine him, but Warren Dean died of an apparent heart attack before the doctor arrived.

The community rallied around the family to pay respects to the fallen high school senior. The Cutters were to be in a tournament but the principal asked a team from Columbus, Indiana to take their place. The basketball players on Warren Dean’s team served as his pallbearers. And as a final tribute, the high school was to have a dance on the following night which was canceled. More than 40 high school girls donated the flowers from the corsages they were going to wear to form a floral blanket to drape over his casket.

The limestone basketball not only represents the sport that Warren Dean Jones loved but the community that loved him.

White Oak Cemetery, Bloomington, Indiana

The swan is familiar to us all from Hans Christian Anderson’s story.  In the tale the poor duckling, mocked and ridiculed for being so ugly, magically transforms into an elegant and graceful adult swan–thereby becoming a symbol of transformation.  The swan in funerary art could possibly represent the metamorphosis from one form into the next.  Because the swan often pair for life, the swan is also a symbol of love.

In the monument above, the epitaph reads:

COME TO THE EDGE, HE SAID.

THEY SAID, WE ARE AFRAID.

COME TO THE EDGE, HE SAID.

THEY CAME.

HE PUSHED THEM…AND THEY FLEW.

King's Chapel Cemetery, Boston, Massachusetts

Many organizations were founded in the later part of the 19th Century that required the prospective members demonstrate that their ancestors had been in the United States before a certain date or that their ancestors had served in a war.  Examples of these organizations are Sons of the American Revolution (1889), The Daughters of the American Revolution (1890), The Daughters of the War of 1812 (1892), The Order of the Founders and Patriots of America (1896), The National Society, Colonial Daughters of the Seventeenth Century (1896), The Mayflower Society (1897), and The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America XVII (1915).

The National Society, Colonial Daughters of the Seventeeth Century was founded by Mrs. Harlan P. Halsey in 1896 in Brooklyn, New York.  The Society admits women of good moral character over the ages of eighteen who can prove they are descended from an ancestor who rendered service in one of the American Colonies from 1607 to 1699.

The organization is still active with twenty-one chapters supporting the Society’s aims through their providing  scholarships at Lincoln Memorial University; granting  awards to honor graduates at military academies; maintaining historical displays; has restoring and preserving important Colonial papers and documents; and establishing a publishing program.