Hiawatha, Kansas

June 14, 2012March 17, 2016lsmoore 10 Comments

To say that the Davis memorial in Mount Hope Cemetery is off the beaten path doesn’t quite do its location justice.

Hiawatha, Kansas is in the heart of America’s farm country. Gorgeous, but remote.

John and Sarah Davis’s strange memorial was worth the drive. I’ve never seen anything like it. Thirteen marble statues plus urns, marble walls and roof depict every stage of the couple’s fifty year marriage.

John commissioned the work in 1930 when Sarah died. Sculptors in Carrara, Italy carved the stones until 1940.

According to legend, the townsfolk were pretty miffed that John would spend that kind of money, nearly all his family fortune, when times were so hard. 1930 was the middle of the Great Depression, but he had a point to make.

Sarah’s family hadn’t approved of their marriage. The couple was childless and John had no intention of his wife’s relatives getting a penny when he passed away.

The story makes sense. There’s waaaaay too much marble squashed onto one little burial plot. It looks like John kept trying to find more ways to spend away his money. That marble roof must weigh 50 tons! And it’s a b*#!@ to photograph! Somebody with a better camera than mine needs to make the trek to Hiawatha and do this monument justice.

To me, the site ends up being not only a monument to a man who loved his wife, but to human foibles as well.

Genoa, Nevada

May 27, 2012March 17, 2016lsmoore 3 Comments

I stumbled across Genoa, Nevada by accident.

The tiny town’s on state hwy 206 about an hour east of South Lake Tahoe and was the first settlement in the Nevada Territory back in 1850. It’s beautiful cemetery’s got to be one of the best collections of unique, handmade grave markers I’ve ever seen, all in one place.

Members of the grounds crew stopped me, not once, but three times to ask politely if they could help me find anyone in particular. My picture-taking frenzy made them think maybe I was a reporter.

They have one famous denizen, Snowshoe Thompson. A hero who skied through many seasons of harsh Sierra Nevada snow storms to deliver mail and supplies.

I loved all the ordinary cowboys and pioneers whose families thought enough of them to paint, sculpt, carve and decorate their graves then keep them tended, some for decades.

I gushed praise to the head caretaker when he stopped to ask if he could help me find someone. He was modest about how beautifully the cemetery was tended. He said he’d lived in Genoa his whole life. His ancestors were buried there. He’d met his wife when he was in the service. She was from North Carolina and swore she’d never spend her life in the Carson valley of Nevada. Thirty years later, there they were, and happy too.

If anybody knows of other cemeteries with this kind of folk craftsmanship in the stones, please make a comment. I’d love to see more! I’m sure others would too.

Solar Eclipse in a Graveyard!

May 23, 2012March 17, 2016lsmoore 4 Comments

I just had the most awesome cemetery afternoon ever!

I went to Virginia City, Nevada to check out a gorgeous old graveyard.

Had no idea there was about to be an annular solar eclipse until an excited group of folks with welders’ masks and funky glasses showed up and clued me in.

They loaned me their glasses so I wouldn’t burn out my retinas – think old style 3D glasses from the 50’s.

OMG! The view was so cool.

I paid back their kindness by showing them eclipse shadows on a couple of tombstones. These shadows are nature’s way of letting us see an eclipse safely. You could do the same thing with a pin hole projector.

The needles of a juniper tree provided the pin holes for me. I think any leafy tree would do.

The Sierra Nevada mountains… land of pioneers, gold mines and cowboys.

Faces on Tombstones

May 16, 2012March 19, 2016lsmoore 3 Comments

You meet a lot of people in graveyards. Every face tells a story.

Sometimes it’s just a story

of time passed.

Sometimes it’s a story of sorrow and loss.

Sometimes the sheer beauty of a face tells the sculptor’s story. I love those, don’t you?

Hey, thanks everybody who took my poll last week. Who knew there were so many of us taking our lunches to the grave?

Give me your best shots!

April 29, 2012March 19, 2016lsmoore 5 Comments

I wouldn’t say this is my best shot photographically speaking, but it’s one of my favorite tombstones. I wondered as I looked at it from several angles whether someone had pruned the bush into these massive black wings. There were no clues that I could see. Maybe in the summer glorious leafy wings sprout from the stone. Or maybe the illusion only works with bare branches. I’ll have to go back and see.