I was reading a novel set in pre US Civil War period and they have the local undertaker in a small town estimating the number of people in the town that are going to die. He does this so he can dig the graves before the ground gets too hard in the winter. The novel is set in Minnesota.
Then he says “It was a shame the winter of the big flu epidemic where we had 20 more bodies than graves and we had to stack them up till the spring thaw.”
I didn’t think much of this until yesterday I was reading another novel by a different author and it was in the 1930s in Maine and the local undertaker was doing the same thing.
Was this an actual practice in the old times? Or is it just dramatic license. Both novels were written in the 1990s.
I realize that today with machines it’s nothing to dig graves in frozen earth but it seems odd the earth would be THAT froze in Maine or Minnesota if it is indeed true?
Not just old timey. My great-grandfather died in 1977 which was a year with a particularly hard winter. He died in January, but wasn’t actually buried until a thaw in March.
Backhoe owner here.No,never dug a grave,but 'round these parts frostline can get to 42",and I ain’t in Minnesota or Maine.Seems it would be more effort than it’s worth.
I dug graves by hand in the winter in Wisconsin (couldn’t use the backhoe when the damn wives had outlived their husbands by so many years that their plot was barricaded by more recent tombstones).
Even though the soil there was thick clay, tough in any weather, we still hacked it out with picks. What was truly impossible was when we intially probed the area to dig the grave. Things tend to shift around down there over the years, so before we dug the graves, we’d push a long steel pin into the ground to feel for obstructions. That was impossible to do in frozen ground.
I lost a house cat a few years ago during a particularly cold winter. When I tried to dig a grave, the pickaxe just bounced off the ground. It was like whacking a steel plate, and just about as profitable. Ten or fifteen blows later and I’d knocked a few splinters of frozen dirt out of the ground, had a hole less than a centimeter deep, and my hands were killing me. The cat spent a couple of months in the freezer until the ground thawed. So…yeah, it might be possible, with enough perseverance to dig a human-sized grave, but it’s about a hundred times easier to do it when the ground is soft.
…and I’m not saying you CAN’T dig in frozen earth with equipment,but excavators I know digging graves get paid by the hole,not by the time.Further,neat work is virtually impossible since frozen dirt usually comes out in plates.
The plot of H.P. Lovecraft’s somewhat cheesy “In the Vault”, written in 1925, set in 1881, is also based on the practice of saving bodies in a “receiving tomb” until the ground thaws.
I had the same experience trying to bury my canary, who died in January in Saskatchewan. Peter spent three months in the freezer, in a nice little box that had originally held chocolates, but was perfect size for a canary coffin.
Don’t know if anyone opened it looking for chocolates during that time…
How in the world did soldiers dig foxholes in wintertime? The Battle of the Bulge (for one) must have been really tough; it was a really cold winter. Likewise for all the gazillions of miles of trenches in WWI.
I have a friend who was a veteran of the Frozen Chosin in the Korean conflict. He said they made breastworks out of the frozen corpses of their dead comrades.
Almost all of our cemeteries here in Maine still have their holding vaults. Little stone houses where the corpse could sit out the wintah and wait for the spring thaw. Most of them now use backhoes and will throw a tarp over the grave with a propane heater if necessary, if they need to thaw the surface so it’s not one giant slab of earth when they lift it.
I can’t really speak for WWII, but I’ve spent a good deal of time in just that area of Europe (German\French border near luxembourg) and I have to say that I don’t think the ground freezes that much in that part of Europe. Winters are generally quite mild. It might snow a couple of times… etc. I remember it being more muddy and rainy than anything else.
I want to hear more about the Russian method. It sounds pretty smart, actually. I know it’s not environmentally kosher, but it only happens once in your life, compared to all the fossil fuels you are responsible for your entire life. It seems like you could just melt the ground somehow…
An old local (Wichita) cemetery has a crypt dug into the side of a hill that they used to use to store bodies 'til things thawed. I’m under the impression that such things were rather common.
Second that notion. Most of the cemeteries I remember seeing in New England and upstate New York had (have) holding vaults. I seem to remember them in older cemeteries in New Jersey too.
I don’t what they did if they had an extended January thaw.
When my Grandmother died, I was a pallbearer. It was winter in Minnesota. We took her coffin to the cemetery, and placed it in a small stone house to wait for Spring, when they would dig the grave (next to Grandpa’s) and bury her. There was room for 9 coffins in that small house, and 3 of them were already filled.
I suppose they could have tried to thaw the ground enough to actually dig the grave right then, but why bother? Grandma was in no hurry. And it was much more pleasant for her family to come to the internment in the springtime, rather than a Minnesota winter.
