Out and About

Out and About and usually a quiet walk through the park.  I love cemeteries and visit them quite frequently no matter where I am visiting.  This photo was taken in New Martinsville, West Virginia.  I was visiting with my cousin Judy and we went to the Williams cemetery.  She probably thought I was a nut case wanting to stroll the grounds but she is a very good sport. I have had this made into wall art for her and it is numbered and signed.  I informed her that she would probably get it when I hand it to her personally.  I am the worlds worst at mailing anything.  So... cousin Judy thanx so very much for tolerating me and my obsession with cemetery art.  Your the greatest and I love ya.

This shot was taken in Maplewood cemetery located in Durham, North Carolina.  Years and years of neglect effected just about anything and everything there.  Within the last five years, people have been volunteering to come forth and help clear and maintain what has been done thus far.  It is a lovely old tree which was covered in vines and surrounded by underbrush.  Instead of cutting down the tree, they cut around it to kill the roots of the vines and still have not cleared them from the top of the tree as of yet.  Anyways I found it to be most interesting and something I personally have never seen.

This crypt is on the grounds of the Greenhill cemetery in Greensboro, North Carolina.  This crypt was ornate and lovely.  I am going to research this person and will post later who she was and why she is so missed.  Her crypt is well maintained and there are always beautiful flowers present so someone still thinks of her.  It amazes me how a lot of the cemeteries are abandoned with no one to care.Green Hill Cemetery, established in the mid-1800's by the City of Greensboro, is enlivened today by it's visitors, flora, and fauna, providing a park-like setting for remembrance, contemplation, respite, and education about local history, people, and nature.   

 This is my three year old grandson who evidently is inspired and appreciates the art the carvers and masons put into memorials.  This was taken at Greenhill Cemetery in Greensboro, North Carolina also.

Mid 1800's memorials at Greenhill

the book on the angels back has poetry
on it...at first I thought it was the book of life.

Another work art at the Maplewood cemetery in Durham.  This cemetery is spread out with city streets seperating the cemetery into four sections.

In 1892 Grover Cleveland was elected President, Thomas Edison patented wireless telegraphy and the motion picture camera, Americans were buying their first automobiles, and a small community in North Carolina made a commitment that would create an enduring partnership for its future. In 1892 Durham business leaders Washington Duke and Julian Carr made an offer of $85,000 and a 67.5 acre gift of land to move Trinity College from near Greensboro to Durham.

The factories - tobacco, cotton and hosiery have long been closed, but Duke University remains as the largest single employer in North Carolina. 18,000 people.

A close up shot of the memorial with the book on her back, it is odd and I have never seen another like it.  She is one of the many memorials overlooking the Carr family plots.                      

Maplewood cemetery--Durham, North Carolina

How beautiful is this?  She and four other large memorials grace the family plot at Maplewood Cemetery in Durham nc

On top of a crypt of the Mangum crypt in Durham NC at the Maplewood cemetery

Triplets memorialized in the Jewish portion of the Maplewood Cemetery at Durham, North Carolina.  This area was the most maintained and beautiful are there.

In 1884, four of Durham’s earliest Jewish settlers got together and bought 500 square feet of land from Durham’s Maplewood Cemetery. The four men -- Jacob Levy, Samuel Lehman, Myer Summerfield and August Mohsberg -- must have foreseen that, sooner or later, their small community would need to bury its dead in accordance with Jewish tradition. In doing so, these Jews, all German born, acted on Jewish law, which dictates that prompt burial is among the faith’s highest obligations.

They may not have known that the first death would be from among their own. Seven year-old Ida Levy, the daughter of Jacob Levy, died in 1888, four years after the group bought the land.

Creating a cemetery -- followed by a burial society, or Chevra Kadisha -- was the Durham Jewish community’s first collective act. In subsequent years, more than 230 people were buried in the old section of the cemetery along Morehead Avenue.

A very ornate and huge crypt at the Maplewood cemetery.
Washington Duke served in the Confederate Navy (1863–1865) during the American Civil War against his will. He was vigorously opposed to slavery though some have mistakenly concluded that he owned slaves because he once purchased a slave. In reality he was purchasing the slave's freedom and he set her free immediately after the purchase as is shown by the census records shortly thereafter when she was living on his land as a free woman. It is also alleged that he was once recorded selling slaves but this is not correct either. He mentioned that slaves might be sold at the same time as a sale of his property. He did not say they were his slaves and, in fact, the 1860 census, just prior to this "recorded" event shows that he did not own slaves. The third reason some claim that he owned slaves is that he once hired a slave from a slave owner to work for him on a temporary basis during which that slave escaped. It has been reported that he actually assisted the slave in the escape and he hired him so that the slave would have time to get to a northern state before Washington reported him missing.

After the war, he grew tobacco, but in 1874, he sold his rural home and moved to the city of Durham, where he began his tobacco business. His workers hand processed tobacco into a form that could be sold by the bag for pipe smokers or hand rolled into cigarettes. In 1881, the W. Duke Sons and Company was established as a tobacco manufacturer and was soon a marketer of pre-rolled cigarettes. In 1884 he was nominated by the Republican Party for North Carolina State Treasurer, an elected position, and lost.