A Cemetery Walkin' MMP

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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This past October 3 was Thomas Wolfe’s 110th birthday. You might know Thomas Wolfe as a famous writer who’s mainly famous for ticking off 90% of his hometown of Hippy Hollow when his first book came out, inspiring the title of one of his later novels, You Can’t Go Home Again. Of course, when Look Homeward, Angel became a bestseller, everyone in town wanted him back and praised him to the stars when he did return to visit his mother like a good boy. And then he died of tuberculosis meningitis. The Wolfe Memorial does something special for his birthday each year and this time they had a historic cemetery tour of Riverside Cemetery. I really wanted to go and Culinary Boy loves cemetery walkin’ as much as I do so we were definitely going. Computer Boy decided he wanted to come along too since we told him how cool that place is. Here’s some highlights:

*Except for a teenage boy who rode in with his father on bicycles, The Boys and I were the only non-gray haired people on the tour. History geeks are a notably elderly bunch.

*Riverside Cemetery is 87 acres and contains almost 14,000 graves. It was founded in 1885 and there is still room for more graves. I saw one on the tour from May of this year.

*There is a grave containing 18 German sailors who were POWs in WWI. They died of typhoid during the war. In 1933, the German ambassador visited the grave to honor the dead. The visit was written up in the local papers and the German papers. The mother of one of the POWs had not heard from her son since before his capture and found out what happened to him from the article.

*The Look Homeward, Angel is in Hendersonville, not Asheville. While there are a few angels in Riverside, the one that’s described in the book is not there. Wolfe wrote a letter to his brother that was very clear on that point.

*There are several monuments in the cemetery that W.O. Wolfe, Thomas’s father, carved but not all of them are known. The Westall gravestone next to Thomas’s grave was one that W.O. carved and signed. The tour guide, who works at the Wolfe Memorial, showed us a letter that he had found while he was researching something entirely different that described an obelisk monument that someone had ordered for her husband who died in a fishing accident. He pointed it out to us on the tour. It was put up in 1895 and looks like it had been carved yesterday, it was that well preserved.

*Zebulon Baird Vance, a three-term governor of NC with a magnificent name, is buried in Riverside. His second wife is also buried there under a breathtaking Celtic Cross headstone. There was some controversy over his burial site. His children from his first wife wanted him buried in the Vance plot, but his wife wanted him buried next to her. First he was buried in his wife’s plot, but the children sued and had him moved to the family plot and then the wife sued and had him moved back to her plot. After she died, the children had him moved again back to the Vance plot. They should have just put wheels on the coffin to make it easier, no?

*O. Henry, aka William Sidney Porter, is also buried in Riverside. Now why is that, you ask? Because his wife was from Weaverville (just north of Hippy Hollow) and she wanted him buried next to her. His headstone is very plain. People leave coins on it. (Thomas Wolfe’s headstone is relatively elaborate as you’d expect for the son of a stonecutter. People leave stones on his grave.)

*There is a man named Benjamin Addison buried in Riverside. His grave is inscribed “killed by a desperado.” The desperado was a man named Will Harris who went on a shooting spree in Asheville back in 1906. Harris escaped the police (after killing two of them) and disappeared for a couple of days. A posse was formed and they tracked him down and killed him on a corner of the Biltmore Estate. There was no word on what the Vanderbilts thought of that.

*One of the policemen that Will Harris killed was the chief of police who took cover behind a telegraph pole near the Vance Monument (aka the obelisk in downtown Hippy Hollow. You may remember it from a few photos I took last year.) The bullet went through the pole and the police chief and allegedly hit the base of the monument. I checked it out one day when Culinary Boy went to the bank and I saw what could have been a chip on the N of VANCE on the side facing the bronze pigs and turkeys.

*I asked the tour guide if there was any truth to the rumors that the room where Thomas Wolfe’s brother Ben died of the 1918 flu was haunted. He said he didn’t know. I bet it is. I’ve been in that room and it felt creepy. That might have been because I know the history–Ben’s death is one of the most powerful parts of Let’s Tick Off the Neighbors … I mean Look Homeward, Angel.

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First in!
Cool! I’ll have to forward this, since the Booster Club Convention is doing a Biltmore tour, and some people are doing it on their own.

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Nice OP, Spaz!

I’m finally going to bed. zzzzzzzzzzzzz

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In Spain, cementeries got moved out of town by law during the 19th century, ostensibly as a health measure but actually as part of the whole “desamortización” movement, where land owned by the Catholic Church was taken over by the government and distributed among their pals.

Pamplona’s New Cementery is about 120 years old. The major of Pamplona is from out of town; she’s done an ok job in general but there are some things which just manage to slip by both her and her advisors. One of the most ill-will-causing moves was an attempt to review the property of plots, mausoleums and niches.

Originally, plots and mausoleums had been sold “in perpetuity” (the niches are newer and have short leases, you can get 10 years of 20 IIRC), meaning “forever” because back them people still hadn’t come up with such notions as “life without parole means 20 years, parolable at 13” or “in perpetuity means 100 years” - which is what she wanted to rewrite it as. While there may be some plots whose ownership has been lost, the majority have clearly-identifiable owners who, after boutades such as Philip V’s attempts to redefine who had the right to have Parliament with him (early 18th century), are very, very careful with their documents. People yelled, screamed, called their lawyers (when they weren’t lawyers themselves) and brought out the initial purchase documents plus every single step of the inheritance trail. In the end, things were left as they were, which means that if we don’t happen to die way too far, my brothers, SiL, the Kidlets, myself and Mom will get buried in the same mausoleum where Dad and the three previous generations of his ancestors were; Auntie M will get to be two graves over, with her husband’s family; we joke that our ghosts will be able to find each other easily. Our mausoleums aren’t the kind that’s a small building: they’re large graves, set against a wall. There is another one with more relatives set against the other side of the same wall, three places to the right: the two branches of the family will check out both graves for need of cleaning/repairs whenever we go visit ours.

There are two “monumental” graves, belonging to violin player and composer Pablo Sarasate and to operatic tenor Julián Gayarre, and an area set aside for people who died during the 1936-9 Civil War and who couldn’t be identified to send them home. These are from both sides; some graves have a bit of identification, but often the deceased had been completely unidentifiable except for date of death; the identification available may be something as barebones as “anarchist, +(dod)”. Some people have made tentative requests at having those exhumed and forensic analysis run to identify them, but given the burial techniques used the only thing to be found there should be bones; so far the decision has been to let those unknown soldiers rest in peace.

The town has grown a lot since the cementery was new; any bit of land which doesn’t have a building on is a vertical cliff (well, ok, there’s a few parks, several of which happen to contain vertical cliffs). Nowadays, a private sports center overlooks the cementery; because this is Navarra, and in Navarra something that isn’t political doesn’t exist, so even sports centers are political, it is known to attract mostly people who are pretty rabidly anti-Church. On All Saints’ and the two weeks prior, they spend the whole day blaring the noisiest music they can find at the maximum volume allowable by law. A couple of years ago, when I cleaned up our grave, it was reggaetón all the way.

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Very interesting OP, Spaz - and you know, I’d been wondering what town Hippie Hollow was! Thanks for the historical info too, as I’m fellow history geek. :slight_smile:

Up, caffeinating and ready to go in to work! Happy Monday all!

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Good Mornin’ Y’all! Up and caffienatin’!

Spaz fantastic OP. I love me some old cemetaries. There are graves dating back to the 1830s in the old city cemetary in my hometown which makes it historical by Amurrkin standards. I love those old ornate monuments and headstones.

Ok, da bear needs more caffiene and some brekkies.

Happy Monday Y’all!

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Up, caffeinated, off to irk.

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StrobeKitty ( :smiley: ), this has to be one of the coolest OPs I’ve seen. I adore walking through cemeteries. We have one real old one right up the street, called Odd Fellows Cemetery. It’s very small, but well kept, and the newest headstone is from 1958.

One of the best and mst memorable assignments in high school English involved the nearby cemetery. It was almost next door to the high school, so we all walked over. We were to find a headstone and write a story or poem about it. A pair of headstones caught my eye: obviously a married couple, and both headstones had a rose on them. I noticed the husband passed first, so my poem was from the wife’s POV: it described how he had given her a rose on every special occasion, and she gave him a final, eternal rose when he passed. The last line of the poem was, “Is there a rose left for me?”

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Up, caffeinated, at irk.

We used to walk the dog in the cemetery at home. It was a safe place to walk without any fast-moving cars. It was always a very peaceful place to walk. I don’t know much about the history though. It used to make Mom giggle every Memorial Day when they would read the same Memorial Day service every year and say a line about “these flowers will wilt and fade” as they put plastic flowers on the memorial stone.

I completely unexpectedly saw the President on Saturday. I was downtown at a friend’s house and driving home. Traffic was really backed up, and I didn’t know why. I made it to second in line at a light where a cop was directing traffic away from the route I wanted to take. He stopped the car in front of me, and we waited for a minute or so and then all of a sudden there was a line of police cars coming towards the intersection and I finally realized that we were waiting there because the motorcade was coming through. I actually did see Obama in one of the cars, waving at the people who’d gathered on the corner. Really pretty cool.

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Great OP! I love cemetery tours, walking cemeteries, and all of that. I’m in a great location near several large cemeteries and not too far from Allegheny National (current home of Stephen Foster and lots of other famous folks).
Now back to work, work, work. Work, work, work. Work, work, work. Hello boys, have a good night’s rest, I missed you.

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My love of cemeteries goes back a long time. I grew up across the street from a church with a very nice cemetery. I used to play in it with a friend from down the street until the church got nervous and told us to quit. We never did anything except look at the graves and run around, but the Little Old Church Ladies didn’t like that. There’s no fun in funeral!

You can download self-guided tour stuff at this here website here. If anyone does go, tell them to find the very large grave of the first WWI pilot from Asheville killed in action over France. It’s very large with inscriptions on all four sides. Being a combat pilot in 1918 was kind of a big deal.

Annie, do you have to be odd to be buried in the Odd Fellows Cemetery? I’d fit in just fine. :smiley:

herbs, yep Hippy Hollow is Asheville. It’s just a hollow in the mountains filled with trustafarians, fauxhemians, half-backs, leafers*, rednecks, and a few remaining hippies who’ve just been hangin’ out, man.

*Definitions:
Trustafarians: college kids who act like what they think hippies were like while living off their parent’s money.
Fauxhemians: rich people who pretend they’re saving the Earth while driving to the expensive organic grocery stores in their SUVs.
Half-Backs: Northerners who moved to Florida when they retired, decided they didn’t like Florida, and moved to NC (halfway back)
Leafers: People who drive hundreds of miles to watch leaves die each year. It rained today and knocked most of the leaves off the trees. Ha-HA!

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Ya know, it would surprise me if any of us who post in the MMP didn’t fit in just fine. :smiley:

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Yawn…

Coffee isn’t helping.

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I grew up across the street from an Odd Fellows cemetery. Throughout my childhood, there would be periodic “shhhhhh” ~es from my mother to quiet down if a funeral was going on across the street.

We also used to love hunting for the gravestones which had photographs on them. A wonderful way to personalize the dead … if you’re a kid.

I’ll also add that my first kiss was in the same cemetery in the fifth grade … with a “boy” who I just wished a happy 48th birthday via Facebook today! Memmmmmmmries… :slight_smile:

Also: I could never finish Look Homeward, Angel. I just couldn’t.

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I’m not a big cemetery person - it’s the whole going outside thing. :slight_smile: When we were young, my sister used to play in the cemetery. My dad was a pastor so we saw a lot of them. It was no big deal.

She loves cemeteries, but then my sister is a freak in oh so many ways. About ten years ago, she lived in an apartment across from one. When her pet rats died she buried them there.

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The first time I read it, I threw it across the room and stomped on it. When I moved to Asheville last year I decided to reread it. Hey, reading Dracula on the London Underground made it that much cooler, maybe living in Altamont would make LHA readable. I started laughing in the first chapter when W.O. Gant rides the train to Old Stockade. The actual name of the town is Old Fort. As I kept reading, I realized that the Altamont in the book is not very far off from the Asheville of today. I’m reading it again for the third time–my dad let me swipe the very nice copy that was filling in a hollow space in one of the many bookshelves at his house.

I will own those bookshelves one day.

Also, I keep hoping I’ll find mention of Irish Brother’s family in the book one day. His family has lived in this area since The Olden Days.

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Are there many Asheville Dopers about? I’m there a lot, or in Hendersonville.

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Back in 1988 or 89, bumbawife and I were wandering around, we used to do that, up in washington and we came across the little town of Roslyn, Washington. The town that subbed for the ficticious town of Cicely, Alaska in the TV series Northern Exposure.

Anyway, Roslyn has one of the most interesting cemetaries you’d ever want to see. Here I’ll quote from the Wikipedia article: The Roslyn Historical Cemetery, actually 25 separate but adjacent cemeteries, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. Clustered on 15 acres (61,000 m2) of woods and hills above the main street, the land was donated by or purchased from the Northern Pacific Company by fraternal, ethnic and civic organizations for burial of their deceased members. The Independent Order of Odd Fellows (IOOF); Knights of Pythias Lodge; Soloka Lodge; Wanapum Tribe 28, Improved Order of Redmen; Cacciatori D’Africa (literally Hunters of Africa – an Italian Lodge), Croatian Fraternal Union Lodge No. 56, SNF Lodge No. 79 (Croatian); Saint Barbara Lodge No. 39 (Greek Catholic); and Dr. David Starcevich Lodge No. 56 (Croatian) are among the organizations and ethnicities represented in this cemetery. At least 24 nationalities are represented within the nearly 5000 graves.
We spent almost an entire day wandering around that cemetary and speculating on it’s inhabitants.
:sigh: Good times.

Then, of course, the TV people found the place and we couldn’t go back for a while. And then we settled down to be old married people and quit wandering.
:Le sigh:

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For everyone who hasn’t been sending me cheese to go with my whine, I’ve been dealing with sciatica for close to a month, and it’s been a painfully slow recovery <snerk>. As I write this, I’m taking a combination of vicodin and naprosyn (Aleve) for it, which works most of the time. It doesn’t do much for sitting upright in a chair, and my office chair is the worst of them all.

Laying down helps, and standing upright and moving is the best. I take short walking breaks at work to get the kinks out of my ass and left leg whenever the charlie horses get to be too much to handle. Thus, I have the groundwork for my newest tale.

I was extremely disappointed this weekend that the chief ruled that taking vicodin left me unfit for duty Firday night. I was looking forward to catfish dinner and clowning around with first bud Tollie. Alas, I was home, flat on my back instead. We had a phone text conversation that went something like this:

Me: “Dude, if you get through this shift without a call, I’m gonna kick your ass.” We have a long running inside joke about our presence on Firday night shifts being a call magnet.

Tollie: “Don’t worry. Heavy-thumbed Harry already jinxed us.” Probably by mentioning the cursed phrase “quiet shift”.

Tollie, again: “You just lay there, and watch the purty lights.”

Me: “I’m already watching the purty lights, and hoping for a butt transplant.”

Tollie: “You can’t have mine.”

Me: “I wouldn’t want it. It’s been contaminated by bluegrass.” A tip of the hat to the tried and true Kentucky-Indiana rivalry.

Tollie: “It would reject you anyway, and the only reason it would stay on is because Indiana sucks so much.” I laughed for 2 minutes straight.

The rescue side of the house at the rescue station is ramping up a training program to get more Rescue Technicians certified, and they started with wilderness search. Searching is the very first certification I earned, even before getting my EMT shingle, and my original search training I had was where I met Tollie the first time. Saturday was the search exercise for the current class, and I went along for purposes of keeping my skills sharp.

When I arrived for the exercise briefing, the usual jokers started in with the jokes about using drugs. Claude held up one finger and asked, “Bo-ob, how many fingers am I holding up?”

I wasn’t going to play along, so I answered, “Blue.”

When I walked in to the meeting room for the exercise briefing, there sat Tollie. I knew I was going to have a good time. He pulled out a chair for me to sit next to him, but I declined in favor of standing.

Our briefing was that we were looking for a missing 15 year old girl last seen around 9 PM the night before by her mother. She was wearing dark clothes, had a medical history of asthma and seizures, and was unusually quiet after a fight with her boyfriend. Independent witnesses spotted an SUV with 2 occupants take a path into the local state park around midnight with 2 occupants, and it left shortly thereafter with just the driver.

Pictures of the girl were passed around. Our victim was one of the juniors whom most of us know as a rather bubbly personality in real life, so the picture taken showing her as a brooding and self-absorbed teen was almost cartoonishly funny. The picture of the “boyfriend”, passed as a joke, was of a sizable male with a baaaaaaaad hairstyle taken from a ‘what were they thinking?’ themed website.

We then went a half mile down the road to the fire road that enters the park, and a command post was set up. Teams were formed, and I purposefully stuck close to Tollie so we’d have a better chance of being teamed. I wasn’t disappointed; our third was a female firefighter from the Skeetertown station named Arluene who was new to this.

The first group in was the ‘hasty’ team. Their job was to scout for rough signs of passage, and mark items of interest for the search teams. Past a closed gate in the road, the hasty team started finding signs, mostly footprints, but a sock was also found. We found out later the sock wasn’t part of the exercise. Soon, the trail left the road and went into the woods.

My team was dispatched to follow the footprint trail, and another team went with us to walk a hiking trail that was nearby, basically a second hasty team. I was having a good time, and best of all, the time on my last dose of medication had run out, and my butt didn’t hurt.

We saw the track into the woods, and the first task was crossing a large, deep, and steeply banked drainage ditch that would have slowed me down if I was in top form. I found a spot away from the track that was marginally less steep, and crossed. Arluene had the roughest time of the three of us, but all made it.

We are taught to search by tracking. A person leaves 3000 clues to their presence for every mile they walk, so we look for the clues, not the person. We had a track of disturbed leaves, and if you know what to look for, it was pretty blatant, at least for a while. Moving slowly, we moved in for about 50 yards, then we lost the trail. After about 5 minutes of looking, we found a trail that could have been the victims, or a game track. Some other items also befuddled us, but then I spotted her unmistakable trail. Tollie found a couple of obviously planted cigarette butts and a candy wrapper, so we had something again. Followed that track for about 100 more feet, and lost it again. It was maddeningly frustrating.

Tollie started a circular scan to attempt to find the trail, then said, “There she is.” Our runaway was sitting, curled up in a little ball at the base of a fallen tree, not 50 feet from where we were standing. We had traveled just shy of a quarter mile off the fire trail altogether.

But wait, it gets better. Remember in the briefing the nugget that our runaway was despondent? In her left hand was a knife, and she announced that she had cut herself in multiple locations, and her ankle was broken. Well, Tollie did a damned fine job talking her into surrendering the knife, saving me from circling from behind and disarming her by force. We broke out our field kits and dressed her stage wounds, then sat down to wait while everyone else gathered to see the solution to the exercise.

We had some wrinkles to the exercise, which is normal. We did this in the state park because it was theoretically the one place in Cottonfield County that you can’t hunt. Yet, we had hunting dogs come across the fire road near the command post, and in a separate incident, Steve The Barber on the hasty team was nearly trampled by a doe being chased by other dogs. If Jenny had worn dark earth tones instead of black and blue, none of us would have seen her at all. We need to do something about radios, too, because the hasty team had outwalked the range of the channel we were using.

Best of all, by the time we wrapped up, I was 3 hours past the end of my meds, and my butt felt fine. As I type this now, sitting in an office chair, I’m squirming to find a position to sit in that doesn’t tie me my ass in knots.

Postscript: At 2 AM this morning, I had just gotten back to bed after a midnight potty run for the dogs when there was a page for a search team. :grumble: I got up, found some jeans, and was looking for an appropriate shirt, when the search was cancelled. Elapsed time was 90 seconds. Oh well, I was ready and confident.

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BBBobbio thank you for endurin’ <snerk> butt <snerk> pain to write that epic and interestin’ post. :smiley: Your tales are one of the things all of us look forward to bein’ as we are [del]nosy[/del] inquirin’ mumpers.

I have defilthyfied da cave and dindin will be grilled tilapia (really more poached on the grill as I’m doin’ it in foil and the fish is brushed with a little olive oil and lemon juice and seasoned with a little garlic powder, kosher salt and lemon pepper), wild (I like my rice untamed!) rice, green sallit and brown and serve rolls. Won’t take much time to do and sounds nummy! I’ve been trainin’ OYKW to like stuff like grilled/baked/poached fish. He and I are both right fond of tilapia.

Ok, off to make the sallit.

Later Y’all!