Cemeteries are inherently about history, filled with names and dates folks thought would never be forgotten – or so it says on the stones.
For generations, those places were integrated into community life. People seemingly stayed closer to where they were from, establishing bonds that, today, aren’t quite the same as folks move away. In recent times, aging volunteer boards often oversee cemeteries’ existence, and many are struggling for donations to help cover the cost of mowing and maintenance.
On the flip side, the internet has opened a whole new world of interest in the topic. Websites such as Find a Grave allow instant access to information for research in ways never before possible, and social media influencers share stories of people they “meet” in cemeteries by cleaning their stones.
“There is kind of a split, because the people who are excited about cemeteries aren’t really excited about a struggling rural one where many of the stones aren’t carved,” noted Abby Burnett, an authority on Arkansas cemeteries who has written two books on the topic. “They want the carvings, the statues, the angels, the things of the story behind them, and some of the rural ones are a lot harder to get that information.”
Does that shift matter? Spoiler alert: I don’t know. This essay does not present any answers, but rather perspectives on how those seemingly countless rural cemeteries have lived their own legacies – or died, in cases where they lie overgrown and forgotten.
Bonds of the Past Give Way to the Present
In rural areas, I often drive by those fenced gardens of memories and think about the lives of people we will never meet, of a world that is much different from our own. They are everywhere here in the Ozarks, a reality probably similar in other rural parts of the country, too.
But they often struggle for resources – people and money – to keep them up.
That was never more clear than a couple of weeks ago, when I was in rural Arkansas to meet with a caretaker of a cemetery for this column. The very same day, I received an email from someone else regarding another Ozarks cemetery in need of support.
“Country cemeteries, both large and small, are becoming more and more difficult to maintain as the caretakers are aging and dying without having younger persons in the wings to take over,” he wrote to me of an example in rural Missouri.
Copening Church is located in rural Webster County, Missouri. The congregation no longer meets, but its cemetery remains a responsibility for those who oversee its care. (Photo by Kaitlyn McConnell)
In my mind, the change is based on evolving local connections.
Just a few generations ago, death care was largely done in the home. Friends and family would gather at the home of the deceased, where they would sit up overnight with the body and lay it out after a person passed, following a series of superstitions (from stopping clocks to keeping cats away). They built the coffin and dug the grave. Tombstones were sometimes hand-made, but other times were ordered from far-off vendors or local engravers.
Given those bonds, it made sense that connections carried through to cemeteries. It was often seen during Decoration Day – what has evolved today into Memorial Day – when friends and family gathered at cemeteries for reunion-like events with food and focus on those who’d gone before.
Historically, Decoration Day – held on May 30 – was a time of gathering at cemeteries across the Ozarks. Attendees brought live and paper flowers to decorate graves, and food was often enjoyed together. This image is from that gathering in rural Ozark County, Missouri, around 1912. (Courtesy of the Donna Walker Collection)
That means the general maintenance such as mowing (and its associated expense), but also caring for overseeing stones that may be falling over or deteriorating. Rural migration has also disrupted long-held connections wherein when people remained close to the communities where they were rooted and raised. And it’s my sense that the diminishing care for rural cemeteries is compounded by the rise of cremation, which may mean fewer connections with gravesites overall going forward.
So rural patterns are changing. Most cemeteries no longer have a dinner on the grounds or collaborative clean-up days, leaving their care to groups of aging people who are left responsible for what was once a community endeavor.
“I will be 73 years coming up pretty quickly, and I’m one of the younger ones on the board,” Randy Ridgway, chairman of the Huntsville Cemetery Association in northwestern Arkansas, recently told me. “Finding somebody younger that’s interested and willing to do something seems to be on the decline.”
I met Ridgway at the cemetery where he began cleaning stones several years ago, and then he eventually got into their repair. He’s a retired dentist, and said the skill sets have distinct similarities. Working with the instruments, fitting pieces together and applying epoxies feels “perfectly normal,” he said, but “it’s on a different scale, of course.”
Ridgway didn’t grow up in Huntsville – he’s from farther south in Arkansas – but he has become invested in the community since he moved there decades ago. He’s frequently there caring for stones, or managing the details that come with overseeing an active cemetery. Those tasks include maintenance, where and how new graves are dug amid other tasks ,like at this time of year, when flags are placed near veterans’ stones for Memorial Day.
“The bottom line to it is, Memorial Day weekend is our big money-maker of the year,” Ridgway said. “We set up down here, people come through, and we take donations for the care of the cemetery. You can track it year by year – the donations are dropping, they’re dropping, they’re dropping. Most people just basically say it’s a general decline in interest from the younger people that, you know, couldn’t care less anymore.”
That perspective tracks with other rural cemetery leaders with whom I’ve spoken. Yet it doesn’t mean that interest in cemeteries is gone.
Just ask Jessica Leroy, who lives near Dora, a tiny rural Missouri community about 135 miles east of where I spoke with Ridgway. She is the creator of “Headstone History,” a social media entity with nearly 182,000 followers on the video platform TikTok. Leroy says she was inspired by Lady Taphos, another content creator focused on cemeteries, which led her to share her grave-cleaning work and history of those people.
“I think my followers are a balance of people who enjoy listening to the stories, and those who want to learn how to clean stones and research their own genealogy,” Leroy wrote to me. “My hope is that people will see my videos and it will inspire them to take action, the same way I felt after seeing Lady Taphos.”
Jessica Leroy of “Headstone History” creates videos sharing how to clean gravestones, as well as the history behind the people buried by the markers. (Screenshot from TikTok)
Leroy shared that her interest in cemeteries started with her mom – who is a fellow Ozarks researcher – and then grew through researching her husband’s family tree.
That took her to “Find a Grave,” where she began uploading information, and also to cleaning stones. And that led to her creating social media content, where she shares stories of the stones and the history of the people who are buried there.
“Sometimes I clean stones that I know have an interesting story, or I know there are many photos of the family available online,” she shared. “Many times I choose random stones I find interesting or feel drawn to. When I choose random graves, I usually find myself picking either forgotten children’s graves, or the graves of young mothers. These random graves usually end up telling the best stories.
“Several times when picking random graves to clean, I find out later I was the one who added their information and photo to ‘Find A Grave’ many years ago. This is a sign to me I was meant to tell their story.”
Is It OK to Bury the Past?
In my mind, that’s where this all goes: to stories. Among the silk flowers and peony bushes are the stories of people who have led us to where we are today. They reflect people, very much like us, whose lives mattered and who made an impact on the world as it is today – whether we knew them personally or not.
Maybe that simple reality means cemeteries should be recognized for their historical importance, regardless of who we know there at rest. But I think it mostly is up to personal conviction. For those places to survive, it takes commitment and time from folks like Leroy and Ridgway, people who care and likely have a connection with those who rest there.
“I recently joined the board at Parsons Cemetery, and it has been rewarding cleaning the graves and helping maintain the cemetery, with the help of the other board members and volunteers,” Leroy told me. “Another hope I have is that my videos will get more people interested in researching genealogy and history.”
But as time ticks by, eventually cemeteries will have fewer people alive with personal connections. What is a realistic hope for smaller ones tucked along farm fields or along rural roads where no one is left who remembers the people buried there?
Small, rural cemeteries are scattered across the Ozarks, and many are in need of funding and volunteers to manage their upkeep. (Photo by Kaitlyn McConnell)
“We’ve all seen broken stones that say ‘Gone But Not Forgotten,’” said Burnett, the cemetery researcher. “And of course, they are forgotten. Once everybody who knew you (is gone), or if the story of you does not continue, we all become forgotten unless you’ve done something that leaves our name on a highway overpass or something.”
Maybe some people will be inspired by stories and decide it’s their time to be part of caring for a cemetery. Maybe, in other cases, these places will fade peacefully into the past.
“I wouldn’t want to see that happen,” Burnett said, “but at the same time, when nature reclaims a cemetery and simply moves in, and, ultimately, the tree roots heave up those stones and there’s no information really to be lost, does it matter if it goes back to nature? Personally, I don’t think it does matter.”
As they say, “dust to dust” … .
The post Ozarks Notebook: Rural Cemeteries Shift in Changing Times appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
