Gravely Speaking

Goodwill Cemetery, Loogootee, Indiana

Coopers are those artisans who made barrels, wine casks, buckets, and firkins out of wooden staves that are held together with hoops.  The containers they made were of four distinct types:

• “Dry” or “slack” containers which were made to hold and ship dry goods such as nails or tobacco.
• “Dry-tight” containers which were made to keep the materials inside the container dry and keep the moisture out.  This was important with flour and especially important with gunpowder!
• “White cooper” containers which were made to hold butter or liquids like milk or water for carrying but not for shipping.  These containers were usually tubs, bucket, or churns.  The staves in these containers were almost never curved.
• “Wet” or “tight” containers which were made to hold and transport liquids often for long periods of time like beer or wine.

Today, coopers, like wainwrights, have mostly become obsolete with the exception of barrels and casks made for the wine industry.

Over a hundred years ago, however, being a cooper was a trade at which a man could make a living.  The gravestone in the Goodwill Cemetery at Loogootee, Indiana, bears witness.  The limestone monument is carved to resemble two barrels stacked on one another with a cooper hand adze still resting on the top barrel almost as if Mr. Hyman left it there himself.

A cooper by trade

HENRY J. HYMAN

BORN

Dec. 3, 1819

DIED

July 1, 1898

The sun is the Source of all

animal and vegetable life.

Mt. Calvary Cemetery, Columbus, Ohio

The Victorian Era lasted from about 1832 until Queen Victoria’s death in 1903.  The era was an eclectic period in the decorative arts with several styles—Gothic, Tudor, Neoclassical—vying for dominance.  The period was marked by ornamentation.  This was true in architecture, furniture, and funerary arts.  In cemeteries gravestones became taller, ornamented, and sentimental.

In Victorian times, flowers took on significance as a way to send coded messages; this was known as floriography from the Latin combining flora—“goddess of flowers” and graphein—“writing”.  Each flower had a meaning that was conveyed to the viewer or receiver of the flower or bouquet of flowers—the lily of the valley represented humility, the coral rose represented desire and passion, the white lily represented purity, and so on.

To the Victorians the morning glory, twining around fence rows and trellises, their delicate tendrils gently clinging, holding up their fragile flowers to open up to the summer sun, represented love in vain.

But to the Christians, there was a different meaning.  Because of the morning glories ephemeral blooming during the early morning, unraveling its bloom directly to the sun and its blossom withering shut each night, the flower came to symbolize mortality and the brevity of life—a poet’s metaphor in the form of a flower. Also because of its attention to the sun, the morning glory represents the Resurrection.

Maria Anna Jaeger’s gravestone in the Mt. Calvary Cemetery, at Columbus, Ohio, was erected at nearly the height of the Victorian Era and displays the high ornamentation that characterized that time period.  Her gravestone is festooned with flowers, though, the white marble rounded-top tablet has eroded and much of the detail has been lost.  The circle inset, however, clearly displays a woman’s delicate hand holding a sprig of morning glories.

MARIA ANNA

JAEGER

BORN MAY 15,

1809

DIED APRIL 18,

1889

The McGavock Family Cemetery lies on the Carnton Plantation.  The cemetery is the resting place for many McGavock family members including Randall McGavock who built the family home.  After the battle of Franklin, Tennessee, the McGavocks set aside two acres of their land for the fallen Confederate soldiers from the battle.  Nearly 1500 Confederate soldiers were disinterred from their temporary graves after the battle and reinterred on the McGavock farm creating what is the largest private military cemetery in the United States.  For decades the McGavock family cared for the graves.

The McGavock Cemetery lies adjacent to the Confederate Cemetery.  John Randall McGavock’s grave is marked by a lamb resting atop his monument.

The lamb is the symbol of the Lord, the Good Shepherd. It also represents innocence, likely the reason why this motif usually adorns the tombstones of infants and young children. Most often the lamb is lying down, often asleep and sometimes with a cross behind the lamb.

JOHN RANDALL

Infant Son of

JOHN & CAROLINE

E. McCAVOCK

BORN June 5, 1854

DIED

Sept. 11, 1854

Clear Creek Church Christian Cemetery, Bloomington, Indiana

The Harold and Pauline Elgar monument in the Clear Creek Christian Church Cemetery at Bloomington, Indiana, features an example of a pieta.  Here The Virgin Mary tenderly holds the limp and dead body of Jesus Christ, clutching Him close, her head bowed in sorrow.  The white marble sculpture is reminiscent of the sculptures that were first popularized in Germany depicting the Lamentation.

In the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/2001.78 (October 2006)) a Bohemian Pieta on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is described in details that as easily could apply to the monument at Clear Creek, “Images of the Virgin with the dead Christ reflect late medieval developments in mysticism that encouraged a direct, emotional involvement in the biblical stories… The sculptor exploits the formal and psychological tensions inherent in the composition…Christ’s broken, emaciated body, naked except for the loincloth, offers a stark contrast to the Virgin’s youthful figure, clad in abundant folds.”

The sculptor, Harold Dugan Elgar, carved this statue in 1968, as it turns out for his own grave.  Elgar was far from the origin of this type of religious artwork but was schooled successfully in the art of stonecarving.

Calvary Cemetery, Nashville, Tennessee

The Pete and Annie Riley monument in the Calvary Cemetery at Nashville, Tennessee, features a white marble sculpture of the Virgin Mary and the dead body of Jesus Christ.

Works of art, usually sculptures, depicting this subject first began to appear in Germany in the 1300s and are referred to as “vesperbild” in German.

Images of Mary and the dead body of Jesus began to appear in Italy in the 1400s.  The most famous of these sculptures is Michelangelo’s pieta which he sculpted for St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, carved when he was only 24 years old.

Pieta is Italian for “pity.”