Cemetery tourism

This large, lovely cemetery is just a few blocks from the kids' house and I've had many walks through it during my stay in Portland. It's called Evergreen, and I'm sure that's what it is, given all the pines, hemlocks, and spruce throughout.

I've always been interested in cemeteries on my travels; it's so interesting to see how they differ from, and resemble, each other from one region of the country to the other. (I spent a lot of time in another cemetery, half a world away, that was near my flat in London.)

And the New England ones are particularly fascinating since you usually can find much older graves than in those in my neck of the woods.

Since I was able to spend so much time in Evergreen (and a lot of it walking slowly with a toddler—you notice SO much more this way!) I was able to notice all kinds of interesting features, which I will proceed to share with you now.

Indeed some of the graves are pretty old, although you can't always tell their age by how worn the headstones are. Some have obviously been refurbished or replaced, but I imagine the ones on the right above had not. They are in the older section of Evergreen, where we saw some birthdates in the late 1700's. (I saw some older ones in another cemetery that I'll briefly mention later on.)

What particularly caught my eye, however, was how both older and newer gravesites had almost all stand-up headstones instead of the flat ones that I'm used to seeing (see my parents' headstones at the bottom of this page).

Here's an example of this style on a newer family plot:

The older ones aren't always so regular and consistent in their styling...

...but some are...

Some of these individual headstones only had initials on them; it's assumed, I guess, that everyone who's interested will know who everyone is (although it's been my experience with family photos, that the names of and relationships among the older generations are often lost, no matter how familiar people were with this information long ago).

Others went a little further and had first names given, like the lovely stone on the left, commemorating a relative named Louise.

Some displayed what seemed like a rather inefficient method of giving birth and death dates—they would say the number of years, months, and days that a person had attained when they died on such and such a date, rather than just giving the two dates. Of course, information is not always complete, as I saw many headstones without birthdates on them. But if you know enough to do this calculation, why not just put the birthdate on the stone? Victorian over-elaborateness, perhaps?

Some other interesting features on offer at Evergreen:

bell from a Portland fire engine, in use 1879-80

sealed tombs that looked for all the world like locked-up hobbit holes!

The other cemetery I visited briefly while in Portland is the Western Cemetery over on the Western Promenade.

It's older than Evergreen; I saw a few birthdates there in the 1730's. A large percentage of the headstones were worn almost smooth or sadly in need of repair, but one category that had obviously been replaced and well-tended were those of military veterans. I was pretty impressed to find several veterans of the War of 1812 (!) buried here, as well as a large number of Civil War vets. Here are one of each:

I also saw this lovely stone, and the name of the person buried there seemed an apt admonition among so many sad reminders of young men dead in our wars...

Sad as such reminders are, I still find cemeteries to be such peaceful, restful places, and I love to include them in my tourism itineraries whenever possible.

Plus, they're great places to feel the grass between your toes, and, perhaps, ruminate a little upon the chains of memory that connect us all, from those long gone to those whose life journey is just beginning...