Maybe they just leave more room between the graves in Pennsylvania, but when my grandfather died, he was buried in the middle of an established cemetery, and the hole was dug by a backhoe-like device. That was in the early autumn, but I can’t imagine that the cold would make it all that much harder to get the backhoe in.
There are some pretty small backhoes these days , they could probably use a small one if the space is tight.
Interesting. Probably related to the “green Christmas, full graveyard” wisdom of Vermont pastors.
A nearby cemetery moves all the grave stones away from the new grave site.
The backhoe bucket is called a frost bucket, much smaller.
I dug many graves when in my teen’s by hand and we had to warm the ground for a couple days in some cases. It realy depends on how much snow cover. With heavy snow there might not be any frost at all, then it can be 3+ feet another time.
Like I posted in the other thread, some holes are not too deep:o
Never dug a grave, but had an uncle die in New Brunswick, Canada during February a couple of years ago. They didn’t plug him until May.
No, my dad died on New Year’s Eve and was buried a few days later. I don’t recall it being particularly warm.
I was a pallbearer for my Grandmothers funeral, in late winter in Minnesota. There was no graveside service, just us pallbearers who took the casket to the cemetery, and put it into a little vault building. There were 9 spaces in the building, 4 were already filled with caskets.
The actual burial took place a few months later, with various nearby family members present.
It was in a small town in western Minnesota, and they said they just did not dig graves in the winter. With backhoes, etc. they certainly could have. But they didn’t want to spend the money, and worry about disturbing other graves. (Grandma was to be buried right next to Grandpa, under a common monument.) And there was no real need to do the burial during the winter, waiting until spring was easier for everyone.
I’m in the lower midwest, so the ground doesn’t freeze too deeply most winters. I remember my grandfather (whose father was a gravedigger in the pre-backhoe days) mentioning more than once that when so-and-so died, they had to build a fire over the grave area to thaw the ground enough to be able to dig. The big problem, according to him, was when someone died in the spring after 10-inch rainfalls and the hearse couldn’t get through the mud. As late as the 1950’s the coffin of one of my grandfather’s cousins had to be taken by horse and wagon from the main road to the gravesite.
Rosehill Cemetery in Chicago is my nature preserve 2 blocks away. Wildlife, flora, and meditation right down the street. Some beautiful monuments too.
During the winter, they pile bags of charcoal on the ground, set them alight. and cover them with a 55 gallon drum sliced in half, with a 3 inch diameter chimney stuck on the side to heat the ground. I don’t know how long they heat the ground, probably 2 or 3 days, then dig a grave with a backhoe.
As a kid I recall my father helping to hand dig graves in winter (rural Saskatchewan - the frost goes down ~6’). It would be a largish group effort using picks and I believe sometimes fires to thaw the ground. These days it’s just backhoes.
My mother died last March, when the ground was still on the hard side in western New York. Apparently, it was a mild winter, and a small backhoe was used to dig her grave.
So much for wildlife, flora and meditation, then.
They talked about “holding vaults” a lot in the earlier thread. Now that I’ve heard of them, I think there’s one in an old cemetery nearby. It’s a small stone building, I guess maybe big enough for six or eight coffins (two wide and three or four high). It’s the only thing in the cemetery that’s not a regular grave. I’ve always thought it was a family vault, but now I think it’s probably the holding vault.
I saw one of these contraptions running at a cemetary near me.
It looked like it was made out of a couple of steel barrels cut in half. They had a small propane tank running to it and you could see the heat/steam rising from it.
I used to work at a cemetery in MA when I was a teen. We had one of those propane powered half cylinders to heat the ground and a small backhoe to do the bulk of the digging. We would jump into the hole to square off the sides and bottom by shovel. I was amazed to learn how much warmer it was in the hole compared to outside.
Around here they’re also called “receiving vaults.” The one in the link looks like the one behind and below Lincoln’s Tomb in Springfield, Ill. - am I right? His remains were kept there while the tomb was under construction.
You are correct; I found that by Googling ‘holding vault’.
In the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, which was set in Alabama, there’s a bit concerning this. I don’t have my copy handy, but it was when Calpurnia took Scout and Jem to her church, and the narrator noted that occasionally coffins were covered with chunks of ice until such time as a grave could be dug. Due to the hardness of the ground in that area, though, not to cold.
In Tibet, where the ground is almost always rock hard and there is hardly any wood, the bodies are left out on the ground to be picked clean by the vultures; the ceremony is called in English “sky burial.”