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GRAVEYARD TALES
Time-worn tombstones can tell us a lot about our past
By Debra Ann Yeo
[St. Catharines Standard, 16 July 1988]
In 1843, a British author writing about graveyards likened them to books-able to instruct in history, biography, architecture and sculpture, even good taste and morals.
The unusual military motif of a soldier resting on a reversed musket decorated a soldier's grave in St. Make's churchyard.
Glen Smith of Niagara-on-the Lake would agree that graveyards, and in particular tombstones, have something to say to those who view them
Six years ago, as exercise for a newly-healed broken leg, he visited 28 burial grounds in Niagara-on-the-Lake, ranging from tiny one-family pioneer plots to the first community burial place, St. Mark’s churchyard.
Today, some of the stones Mr. Smith admired and photographed are illegible, slowly being obliterated by airborne pollutants and weather. Others fall prey to vandals, falling branches or other accidents.
Mr. Smith, backed by the Niagara Foundation, has begun a quiet campaign to ensure that some of the older and more unusual specimens survive for future generations. .
In a town whose bread-and-butter is its history, Mr. Smith, a historical contractor, calls tombstones “one of the overlooked” facets of our heritage.
The broken stones piled against trees in the town’s churchyards give mute testimony to his words.
He told the town’s recreational committee last spring that a dozen of the town’s oldest and best stones should be removed, replaced with granite markers and stored in a safe place for future display in a museum.
The Ministry of Consumer and Commercial Relations has given permission for the stones to be removed, but it wants to know which markers are involved.
Through the foundation, which promotes the preservation, restoration and maintenance of historic sites, Mr. Smith has begun collecting stones from private and individuals. If the town agrees to salvage monuments from the nine abandoned graveyards, it manages, Mr. Smith then plans to approach the churches.
“People would be quite flattered that their gravestones 200 years later are such a focus of attention. And the people who made their living carving gravestones-their work is commemorated and their skills judged,” he said.
He considers the markers works of art, an opinion shared by Carole Hanks, author of Early Ontario Gravestones.
“Of all the early Canadian artifacts, tombstones are the ones most certainly created to endure,” she writes.
She said gravestones a century ago “were objects of pleasing form and decoration, meant to be enjoyed by the living and, as well, pay respect to the dead.”
Ironically our ancestors’ desire to beautify their memorials has hastened some stones demise.
Marble was the stone most used by the mid-1800s because its softness allowed detailed carvings by hand, yet that very quality also allows rapid weathering. The stone’s granular structure is loosened by water, causing it to fall away bit by bit, especially at the edges of the carving.
Sandstone and slate, also soft stones, were sometimes used and, in Niagara, harder and cruder limestone was available from the escarpment.
Yet even harder stone is vulnerable to pollution. On a tour of several graveyards, Mr. Smith pointed out many examples of what he believes to be acid rain, sulphides and other pollutants turning the surface of monuments into powder to be washed away by rain and snow.
Mr. Smith, whose work as a historical contractor includes research, restoration, collections management and public education, has visited about 200 Ontario cemeteries. He has never seen a stone older than that in the wall of the vestibule at St. Mark’s Church.
It reads: LEONARD BLANCK
DESEACED, 5TH
AUG. T. 1782
The earliest stones contained no decoration but the inscription.
The lettering was often crude, full of spelling letters with uneven spacing and words squeezed over the top of other words if the carver ran out of room.
An example of this early type, the gravestone for Archibald Cunningham, can be found in St. Mark’s churchyard. He died in 1804.
By 1815, decorated stones began to appear in Niagara-on-the-Lake cemeteries. The earliest were engraved symbols. Later, motifs were sculpted in relief as skilled professional monument carvers emerged in the 1820s and 1830s, some of them leaving their names and addresses on the stones.
The commonly-used symbols comprise five main categories, according to the Hinks book-classical revival (willows, urns, columns and obelisks). Flowers, hands (as in the hand of God), animals and angels.
They formed what Mr. Smith describes as a subtext of grief, each with its own meaning. The weeping willow tree, for instance, one of the most popular ones, represented mourning and the tree of eternal life, as well as the Gospel of Christ.
Two of the symbols, lambs and doves, were used almost exclusively on children’s stones, the lamb representing Christ, youth and innocence and the dove, purity and peace.
Undoubtedly, the most grim motif in Niagara can be found in St. Mark’s where a slithering snake and the words, “Upon thy belly shalt thou go,” appear on an 1839 tombstone.
Besides being decorative and commemorative, gravestone symbols could also reveal something of the religious beliefs of the deceased and the kin.
A broken chain, for example, is one motif that might be chosen by a person who believed “you’re just going to rot in the ground,” Mr. Smith said.
The trumpeting angel Gabriel, sometimes accompanied by the words “Arise ye dead,” is one of the more obvious symbols of resurrection. Yet, according to one book, this motif is rarely found on 19th century stones in either Canada or the United States.
However, a variation of the angel Gabriel can be seen in the Field burial ground on the Niagara Parkway where members of the Field, Brown and Vrooman families are buried. What makes it so unusual is that Gabriel, commonly thought of as a male angel, is portrayed as female.
The angel and a willow decorate the double headstone of Joseph Brown, who died in 1821, and his wife Rebecca Johnson who died in 1808.
It is part of what Mr. Smith calls “the three best stones in the entire Peninsula.” The latter two of the trio commemorate Rebecca Brown, a daughter who died in January 1808 and Nancy Vrooman, who died in April 1808.
Both monuments feature a symbol which is extremely rare in Ontario, the winged face of an angel, representing the soul in flight.
All three markers face east-another peculiarity of early gravestones-and the Joseph Brown marker contains a common, though sobering, epitaph:
Remember men when thou pass by
As you are now so once were we,
As we are now so thou must be,
Remember men that all must die.
Tombstones often reveal history, both of the textbook and the personal and the personal kind, said Mr. Smith.
“You can almost spot immediately when cholera was in the area,” he notes. He has seen stones in St. Catharines that tell of an entire family wiped out within a week.
“The odds were that a guy could get married two or three times. Chances were that the wife died at some point giving birth. The odds were that 50 per cent of the kids died before they were six years old,” he says.
“Her days on earth were few. She passed away like morning dew,” declares a tiny stone with a sculpted lamb for an 11-day girl named Korah in the Warner family cemetery.
War also claimed its victims. A stone just inside the main doors of St. Mark’s commemorates four soldiers who died the day the Americans took the town in the war of 1812.
A vault-like stone in the churchyard also attests to the insanities of war, not so much by its lettering (now illegible) as by the scars on its surface. It was used as a butcher’s block by the Americans occupying the town.
According to Janet Carnochan’s booklet, Inscriptions and Graves in the Niagara Peninsula, it commemorates Charles Morrison, who had lived in Michilimackinac and was on his way to Montreal, via Niagara when he died on Sept. 6, 1804, aged 65 years.