The Chesapeake Book of the Dead

Tombstones, Epitaphs, Histories, Reflections, and Oddments of the Region
Erscheinungsjahr 1999
ISBN: 978-0-8018-6041-6
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press

Buch, Englisch, 152 Seiten, Format (B × H): 211 mm x 263 mm, Gewicht: 662 g

From the author of The Oysterback Tales, a unique and haunting look at the region's past and its tales of love and tragedy, loss and remembrance.

For the many people who enjoy walking through old cemeteries, exploring forgotten and overgrown graveyards, and reading the names, dates, and epitaphs of the dead, the Chesapeake Bay region offers a rich assortment of final resting places, many dating back to the early 1600s. From Williamsburg to Havre de Grace, it is not uncommon to see a number of the living wandering among the markers of the dead. Some are genealogists and historians, others come in search of quietude and a tangible connection to the past.

In The Chesapeake Book of the Dead, Helen Chappell and photographer Starke Jett survey this rich legacy, from the vast and imposing Arlington National Cemetery to lone graves so modest as to have been lost almost as soon as they were dug. Chappell and Jett visit graveyards of the famous and the obscure, wander through cemeteries dotted with both elaborate funerary and simple, weather-beaten headstones, and discover epitaphs that range from the literary to the amusing to the poignant. As old grave sites disappear under developers' bulldozers, through neglect, and at the hands of unscrupulous headstone collectors, this remarkable book offers a unique and elegiac look at our past and its tales of love and tragedy.

Among the cemeteries explored are Southeast Washington's Congressional Cemetery (posthumous home to composer John Philip Sousa, FBI head J. Edgar Hoover, pioneering feminist and muckraking journalist Anne Royall, and Choctaw chief and notable military tactician Pushmataha); Baltimore's Green Mount Cemetery (built in the 1830s as Baltimore's first sylvan graveyard); and Westminster Burying Ground in downtown Baltimore. At Westminster lies the grave of Edgar Allan Poe, which a mysterious figure visits each year on Poe's birthday to leave roses and a bottle of brandy. The book also describes the final resting places for such celebrities as Dorothy Parker (Chappell located her ashes at the NAACP headquarters in Baltimore), F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (buried in Rockville at Scott's wish, because, he insisted, "I belong here," in Maryland, "where everything is civilized and gay and rotted and polite"), and cosmopolitan actress Tallulah Bankhead (interred in a plot her sister provided near Chestertown).

Included throughout this fascinating book are essays on mourning fashion and deathbed performances, graveyard ghost stories, discussions of efforts to save historic cemeteries, and notes from the diary of a nineteenth-century doctor who today is buried in Rising Sun Cemetery alongside many of his patients. Chappell's lively prose, accompanied by Jett's haunting black-and-white photographs, will delight all those drawn to the seclusion, peacefulness, and melancholy of old graveyards.

Jacket illustration: Lower Hooper's Island, Maryland

"There is a romantic, nostalgic, pleasantly melancholy feeling to old cemeteries that is hard to define but easy to experience. Perhaps it is because we can feel the direct link to our past that no history book, no movie, no historical fantasy can ever convey. These stones and these unkempt grounds are the hard evidence of lives that came before us. Once, these people lived and breathed, loved, worked, fought, hoped and despaired, and experienced their triumphs and failures just as we do today. And, although we seldom care to acknowledge it, we will inevitably go where they have gone."—from the Preface

Autoren/Hrsg.

Chappell, Helen

Weitere Mitwirkende

Jett, Starke

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Fotografie Besondere Themen und Arten der Fotografie
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Soziologie des Brauchtums und der Traditionen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. In The Midst Of Life, We Are In Death
Chapter 2. Parting Shot
Chapter 3. She Came Back From The Grave
Chapter 4. Tales From Tidewater Virginia
Chapter 5. Customary Woe
Chapter 6. Batwings
Chapter 7. Harriet Tubman Is Buried Away
Chapter 8. A Lonely Place To Lie
Chapter 9. The Last Word
Chapter 10. Congressional Cemetery
Chapter 11. Murdered By Cyrus Stack
Chapter 12. Death And The Doctor
Chapter 13. Green Mount, Baltimore
Chapter 14. Kids Just Know These Things
Chapter 15. Oat Hill And Rock Creek
Chapter 16. Scott And Zelda
Chapter 17. Floating Coffins
Chapter 18. Arlington National Cemetery
Chapter 19. One That Got Away
Chapter 20. Larger Than Death
Chapter 21. On Death And Burial
Chapter 22. Old St. Paul's Cemetery
Chapter 23. Arvel Johnson On His Native Soil
Chapter 24. Miss Olivia And Miss June
Chapter 25. Paying Our Respects To Mr. Poe
Chapter 26. Arts And Crafts
Chapter 27. A Tribute To The Graveyard Mind
Suggested Reading

Über Autor(innen)

Chappell, Helen
Helen Chappell has published more than twenty-five books, including The Chesapeake Book of the Dead, also available from Johns Hopkins. A journalist, teacher, and freelance, she lives on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where she covers the waterfront for several publications.

Writer Helen Chappell, a columnist for the Tidewater Times and frequent contributor to the Baltimore Sun and the Washington Post, is the author of numerous books, including The Oysterback Tales, also available from Johns Hopkins, and Oysterback Spoken Here, as well as the Sam Wescott-Hollis Ball mystery series, of which Give Up the Ghost is the most recent example. Chappell lives on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Starke Jett V has received numerous awards of excellence for his photographs, which have appeared in such publications as Chespeake Bay, Soundings, Wooden Boat, and Classic Boat. In 1991 and 1992, he worked on a project documenting the watermen of the Northern Neck of Virginia in association with the Reedville Fisherman's Museum and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy.