The Buried Past

 

                                                 Alabama: a forgotten cemetery

            A saving grace of this generally unpleasant coronavirus lockdown, one that makes it more tolerable for us than for so many others we know, is that we have been able to see most of our children and grandchildren, those who live in New York City, on a fairly regular basis.  As the adults are abundantly occupied professional people with full agendas of their own, not to mention their own pandemic constraints, the filial piety manifested is neither unnoted nor unappreciated.  Our elder son Rich and his wife Katie, based in Brooklyn, have been able to make frequent escapes to their  gorgeous rural property about thirty miles northwest of us, near Frenchtown, and they regularly drop in on us in Princeton on their journeys to or fro.  They were here briefly on Sunday, with the sun still shining bravely if not entirely effectually for a well aerated and distanced backyard visit.

 

            I have mentioned their place in Kingwood Township before but not, I think, one of its most interesting features, a family cemetery dating back to the eighteenth century.  This appears to have been badly neglected by twentieth-century owners, but the headstones for some of their Huguenot predecessors from Revolutionary times are still clearly intact.  Rich and Katie were quite pleased when a special “grave expert” from (I think) the Hunterdon County Historical Society asked if he could inspect and record the graves.  He came during the last week, and much to Rich’s pleasure, this knowledgeable man took a keen interest in the site, spending several hours in serious clean-up and brush removal, leaving no fewer than seventeen gravestones, some with still legible inscriptions, exposed to view.  (In my own earlier survey, I had found only six.)  I regret that I have no photographs as yet, but even in its “wild” state it was an impressive sight.   My hope is that we can eventually enclose and protect the whole area with a low fieldstone wall.  There is some evidence at the site of a much earlier gesture in this direction.

 

            This local historian was a font of fascinating information, but not all of it was encouraging.  Private graveyards were apparently by no means uncommon in early America, especially but not only on the large properties of rural magnates.  Many of the old, large landholdings in the Delaware Valley survived more or less intact well into the early twentieth century.  There were 180,000 people in all of New Jersey in 1790.  By 1940 there were four million, by 1950 not quite five million, but by 2000 more than double that.   Most of the large old Jersey farms were sold and sometimes repeatedly subdivided, often for suburban residences.  Throughout the Eastern states subsistence farmers suddenly were besieged by developers.  It was standard practice to exempt burial sites from land sales in special clauses.  No matter how needy or greedy people were in unloading their ancestral acres, even those who (in a great line of Wordsworth’s) “would peep and botanize upon their mother’s grave” would not brazenly  face up to having sold their grandfather’s bones for the mineral rights.  But from the developer’s point of view it is quite unsatisfactory to have a protected and unowned pile of gravestones in the middle of their Tinkling Brook Luxury Estates.  Beginning in the 1980s, according to this expert, aggressive Jersey subdividers began simply bulldozing their way through the diminishing  back woods—metaphorically and sometimes literally—in the 1980s..  A landowner had recently denied the  grave historian  access to a small plot that he did not own but effectively surrounded.   Well, we’ve had roughly four centuries of practice trampling over Indian burial grounds.  The shoe has been on the other foot since the Tennessee Valley Administration began building large lakes in places long settled by Europeans.

 

            American family burial plots are not uncommon in most rural places, especially in places of early settlement.  We had some even in the impoverished Ozarks, and I have seen some fairly extensive ones in older parts of the Old South.  There are undoubtedly many small plots that have simply disappeared in the woods.  In old England, with its long-settled village and parochial systems, the normal, expected site of burial would be the churchyard.  There is now a transatlantic divergence in the meaning of the English term yard.  What Americans might call their back yard is in England the garden.  The two words, yard and garden, are obviously close relatives, the original Old English, like Old French jardin, denoting an enclosed and specially tended plot of land.  In England the word churchyard principally signified, and still signifies, the  burial place or cemetery associated with a church building,  as in Gray’s immortal “Elegy Wrote in a Country Churchyard”.  But even in old Christian times the dead could be buried, for a variety of reasons, in many other places.  The burial of the dead was one of the recognized acts of “corporal” mercy encouraging the establishment and upkeep of civic “Potter’s Fields” for indigents, travelers, unknown and unclaimed bodies found on the road, and so on.  Criminal executions, military deaths and epidemic disease often called for a variety of ad hoc arrangements.

 

            In colonial North America the burial customs of the new immigrants from  Spain, England, and France survived but with greater or lesser degrees of mutation and adaptation.  In our country, the radical Protestantism of large sections of the population broke cleanly with the traces of medieval mortuary customs still half remembered even in Puritan Anglicanism.  Furthermore, the old parish system presupposed conditions very different from those of frontier life, which is another way of saying that churchyards presupposed churches with stable, uniform congregations.  We see some of that development in New England, but not much in the sparsely populated countryside.  Family graveyards were common, and in populated places one sees also the growth of the civic public (or semi-public) cemetery, eventually aspiring to the grandeur of a Green-Wood in Brooklyn.

 

            That life is for the living no sane person would dispute.  Its spiritual tense is future—at least until it isn’t.  We spend a great deal of time in hope or apprehension pondering futurities—our own, our children’s and grandchildren’s, our nation’s, the future of food, medical care, race relations, classical music, whatever.  All this is done, however, beneath the shadow of a preterit destiny that becomes ever more importunate with advancing age.  In the midst of life we are in death—a beautiful line from the old burial service, and the English of a Latin liturgical hymn going back at least to the fourteenth century.  I do not regard it as the life-denying downer that many take it to be.  I take it instead to be a reverent and poetic statement of fact that recognizes our own participation in the universality of human life, which has an ending even as it had a beginning and a past as well as a prospective history.  Far from being macabre, a few carved stones in the south forty could be an encouraging reminder that your own animated vitality was not your personal invention.  It came as a gift and can be passed on as one.