On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
Elma
Lately, I have been watching Hollywood Graveyards on YouTube, as a way to avoid serious content. I realized that I have visited many graveyards in my travels, so I went through my pictures and here are a few.
This is an Etruscan tomb, pre-Roman, so perhaps 700BCE. It was originally covered with a mound of earth, but some 18th century antiquarian decided to excavate it.
One day we were supposed to visit yet another church in Moscow. But there was some sort of security scare, so our group was diverted into this cemetery, which was much more interesting.
The marker of a noted heart surgeon
Nikita Khrushchev
Boris Yeltsin
People were very fastidious about maintaining the graves at this cemetery in Cusco, Peru. Not that everyone did it personally. At the entrance to the cemetery there were groups of kids waiting to be hired to do the maintenance. That they were here in the middle of a weekday when they should have been in school was pretty offensive to the teachers in our tour group.
Our guide bought a bunch of flowers and hired a couple of the kids to demonstrate how they took care of a grave.
The final resting place of Eva Peron
Apparently, she moved around quite a bit
Looking at you own tomb stone is strange experience. Jim’s parents bought enough space in the Westby/Coon Prairie Cemetery for everybody. So far only they and he are there. After he passed in 2019 I had his ashes interred in the plot right behind his parents. I thought about having his info carved on the back of their monument, but the Sexton kept bugging me to get him a proper headstone. I think she gets a commission. Since there is room for me in the same plot, eventually, I had them put Jim on one side and me on the other. I wanted the stone located in the middle of the plot, but it had to be at the head, for ease of mowing. Who knew there were so many rules?
scribbler
I love graveyards too! So much history, and often such beautiful spaces to explore. But being able to check out and take a picture of your own tombstone… that’s pretty freaky!
Prescott Cactus
Those pictures from Russia are wonderful !
Eric Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money has a reoccurring story “Eric visits an American Grave, Part . . .” His latest is #1671. My interest in graveyards extends to wanting to avoid one. Cremation and then… somewhere..
Thankfully when you view your own headstone, you aren’t looking up !
eclare
Those graves in Moscow certainly have personality.
OzarkHillbilly
I love spending time in graveyards. Take a lot of pics of them too.
Mai Naem mobile
I tell you BJ really is a multi-service blog. I wasn’t expecting a grave tour! It’s pretty interesting.
sab
We have gravemarkers already, but they aren’t out of storage yet. We bought them when we bought graves and a funeral plan to save the kids the hassle. Another thoughtfulness my own parents did for us.
kalakal
I love wandering around graveyards, England has many beautiful ones in small country villages
Cues Grey’s Elegy
Geo Wilcox
Here in the US some of the biggest and oldest trees can be found in old church cemeteries. Whenever we drive by (we always wave and say hi) we look for those old trees.
HinTN
@OzarkHillbilly: I, too, love cemeteries. They can be beautiful spaces and often contain an historical record of the settling of an area. And then there’s the absolute wonder of some of the inscriptions.
OzarkHillbilly
@HinTN: I came across one grave deep in the Shannon County hollers that was a real heart breaker. A young girl (16) who died in child birth. Her “husband” (they often did not have benefit of clergy back then but folks took such marriages just as serious) was bereft and wrote a poem for her. I took pictures of her stone but have lost them. I should go back.
Interesting tidbit: It is called the Williams Cemetery on the topo map but the only Williams buried there is outside the fenced perimeter of the cemetery. I have read that it was common practice to bury societal misfits outside of the cemeteries.
Jeffg166
Some really old ones in Philadelphia. One near me is tucked away on a side street. Very small it is surrounded by houses. Someone in the neighborhood has taken it upon themselves to maintain it. The church it was attached too closed long ago. The newest head stone is from 1948. This oldest I could see from the sidewalk was 1818. Most of the marble headstones are now so weathered they are hard to read.
Eyeroller
@OzarkHillbilly: My family is from Arkansas and as a child I was dragged to several of those backwoods cemeteries on “Decoration Day.” Most were very small and not terribly well maintained, in my dim recollection. Some were churchyards of the local “bush Baptist” church, which in my family didn’t mean “fictional religion,” it meant “fire and brimstone semi-literate preacher and a very rural congregation.”
OzarkHillbilly
@Eyeroller: I know of one where every Memorial day the various families descendants (who all now live in towns) spend the day cleaning everything up and have a potluck and barbecue in the evening.
@Jeffg166: I have found that it is a fairly common practice for people to “adopt” a graveyard.
Argiope
My local cemetary is my go-to dog-walking and bird-watching space. These days, we often encounter deer who give us bold and curious looks. I see a new stone every time I go even though we’re there 3 or 4 times a week; the light and shadows play off different ones to bring them to my notice. The oldest are from the early 1800s; it’s really a history of the town in one peaceful spot with bonus woodpeckers and bluebirds. Last night I saw a hawk bringing food to its babies in the adjacent golf course.
About 15 years ago I lived in Appalachia in a holler. The fantastic custom-built dream house with the big patio and jacuzzi tub I was renting had a cemetery in the side yard; a big one by holler standards. One family had lost one infant every year for 3 years in the 1940s; my guess was Rh incompatibility took one baby after another.
Eyeroller
@OzarkHillbilly: Well you were a Yankee state. Decoration Day seems to have been officially turned into Memorial Day but some (white) people in Confederate states continued to refuse to call it that for a long time.
I don’t know what might have happened to those tiny cemeteries reached by dirt roads; most were small and I suspect the number of descendants living in the area has shrunk a lot.
OzarkHillbilly
@Eyeroller: Heh. Chances are pretty fair that these folks’ ancestors were Rebs or at the least sympathetic to the cause. In my journeys I have come across many long forgotten family plots, some had once been fairly grand, but more than a few had little more than a dry laid stone wall around it and the graves were marked with stones or maybe stalagmites.
Spanish Moss
I love this theme! Some of those Russian tombs are really art, thanks for sharing.
stinger
What a wonderful set of photos — from Etruscan to Krushchev to Eva Peron to… our hostess! (Cue eerie music.) Thank you so much!
Elma
Thank you all for your comments. I was not sure, when I put it together, that it was a good idea. But it seems to have been a good distraction from the turmoil of the past few days.
opiejeanne
@Eyeroller: In 2005 (?) we visited some very distant relatives from Peculiar, MO, met them at the fried pie place in Macks Creek along with a few other people I knew from an online family genealogy forum. I think one guy showed up just to confirm his suspicion that I was the devil’s concubine. The Ozarks are fun that way.
Anyway, I learned from the forum that there are many family graveyards in farmers’ fields, and if the farmer won’t give you access you go to the local sheriff’s office and they will help you enter and ensure your safety. They would climb the fence or cut the chains for you. I don’t know if they are still that helpful these days.
There was just one of those I was interested in on a road with no name marker, in fact the whole area was like that, entirely lacking signs identifying the roads. I had googled Warren Cemetery and was rewarded with an aerial photo map that someone in the government had done of cemeteries in the Missouri Ozarks. The roads were noted on that map. I couldn’t find a detailed map of the area anywhere at the time, so I downloaded a dozen pages from Map Quest, taped them together and sort of followed our noses until we thought we were in the right place. I later bought a specialty map book from Rand McNally that showed the area in more detail.
We drove down several unmarked roads until we came to a place that looked like what I had seen in the aerial survey, and there was a cattle gate. The cemetery was off to the right of that gate, in a small oasis of trees among the sparse tall dry grass. We didn’t see any cattle, but evidence that they had been there not long before. My husband had long pants on, I was wearing shorts (dummy, but it was very hot and miserably humid), so I stayed with the rental car to keep a lookout for the owner or a bull, and mr opiejeanne took the camera to get the photos that I wanted.
We got away without incident, and I have the photo of Zebulon and Elizabeth’s headstones, the ones I wanted and the only ones still legible in that tiny patch of trees.
opiejeanne
@Elma: This is a very interesting collection of photos. Thank you so much for sharing with us, especially since most of us will never get to visit those places. Those photos of the Russian graves are great.
AnnaN
Such wonderful photos.
I moved to California from Rhode Island 3 years ago and miss it so much that I am working to move back within the next year. One of my favorite things to do was biking around trails and in New England, there are so many old graveyards which pop up all over the place. some large, some medium-sized, and many, many tiny family ones which pop up in the midst of commercial/industrial/residential areas.