"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
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
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