Category: Levy County

Blue Graves In The South

I hope everyone had a beautiful Christmas and a Happy New Year!
I’ve been collecting photos for this post for some time, thinking that as the time passed I’d gather more information about this and have an awesome post to write.
But that didn’t really happen. Additionally, something is weird with my formatting for this post, so forgive me.
Blue grave sites in the south are still a bit of a mystery. I’ve heard several different reasons for painting the graves, and I will share all of them here. Special thanks to Dave Lapham for his help on this, and also to Barbara Broxterman, who offered a good deal of information as well.Barbara lives near and old (but still very active) cemetery in Levy County and was able to talk to some ladies who were there one day working, cleaning the graves. Apparently, they have a small business doing just that for other families who aren’t able to do the work themselves. I loved that.
Haint Blue, as it’s called, is a soft blue color generally found on porches in the Southern states. I never really noticed it until last summer when we were looking at houses in Sanford. Two of the homes that we visited had a gentle blue paint on the porch. I didn’t like it much though I did think it gave the porches a fresh, airy feeling. Shawn thought it was odd. Now that I know what I know, I’ll be adding blue to my porches this year.
The blue color is there because of Southern superstition. It is said to fool insects into thinking it’s an extension of the sky, so they’ll go elsewhere and not linger. It’s also said to drive away bad or evil spirits from the home. Both are positive reasons to add a little blue to your porch.
So why put blue on a grave? I know a lot of people believe that bad spirits linger in cemeteries and they would naturally want to protect their loved ones, so they’d paint the grave topper or ledger stone blue. In some cases the color can match the color of the house of the deceased or their families, and thereby continue to tie them to their home or make them feel at home in the cemetery. And then there was the more basic answer- that the paint is used to seal the cracks in the concrete. I guess that is possible too, but the paint is usually blue or white. I even noticed blue tiles in a mausoleum fountain, and even though blue is the usual color for that kind of water feature, I still felt it’s significance when you have to pass the fountain to approach the dead in the mausoleum.
This information made me pause to consider my own use of the color blue when it comes to visiting cemeteries. I have a favorite blue tee shirt that I usually wear, and my boots are blue. I wear blue shorts when I’m visiting a cemetery in hot weather, not because they’re blue, but because they fit well and I’m not worried about getting them dirty. If I was trying to protect myself in some way by doing these things it was done unconsciously.
I’ve noticed that in a lot of African American cemeteries that blue is a choice color for floral arrangements. I know this is sometimes done for men or boys, but it does seem to be very popular. What I do know is that once you start seeing blue in cemeteries, you’ll notice it everywhere.
While in New Orleans this past weekend we were fortunate enough to see the Weeping Angel in Metairie Cemetery, who is perfectly placed under 3 panes of blue stained glass, casting a moody light onto her. Aside from this mausoleum, there were many with blue glass throughout the cemetery, but to me she will always be the most beautiful with the most artfully arranged lighting.
Because I wasn’t able to find out much about this topic please share if you have more information! I’d love to hear some other ideas about why blue is so popular in cemeteries. Thanks to everyone who reads the blog, and I hope everyone has a happy and prosperous New Year!

Adamsville Cemetery…Somewhere In Florida

I’ve been really sick for the last 3 weeks so I’m behind on a lot of things including cemetery visits, writing, and phone calls since I’ve been coughing so much. Thankfully this week Shawn and I have some time off together and will be running around to find some new places to visit. I’m excited to get out of the house. The new job that I started 2 months ago has been the most miserable work experience I’ve ever had, so I’m on the hunt for other things in my life besides cemeteries. But let’s talk about pleasant things instead, like the Adamsville Cemetery.

Adamsville Cemetery is said to be in Levy County in one source, and Sumter County in another. I vote for Sumter being correct. We didn’t really start out with a plan to go see it, but I knew it was on the way to where we were going and figured we’d do a drive by. However, what caused us to stop was not the actual cemetery (though that turned out to be a treasure), it was the small mausoleum that we passed that was literally in the church parking lot. It was the strangest placement for a mausoleum I’ve ever seen, as though they weren’t sure where it would look best but hell, they really wanted one… and hey, there’s a spot right there that’s only being used to park cars on Sunday. It was the true 1960’s style that I’ve seen in several places in Florida (including another almost identical model in Sumter county), and it was pretty hideous. The other one that I’ve seen like that had an alarming smell coming from it and I left that cemetery in a hurry. It happens sometimes.

On this day, Maryanne and I stood there quietly soaking in it’s odd placement while she smoked a cigarette and I just stared blankly.  Needless to say, we both had to get a photo with it.

On one side of the street you’ll find the new memorial park, and on the other, beckoning to you from the shady gloom, is the old section of the cemetery. There are lots of great examples of funerary art here. It’s said to be the oldest cemetery in this county, dating back to what one source said was 1902, but it’s way older than that since we saw stones dating back to the 1880’s and wooden markers as well.

The wooden markers were laid flat on the ground, almost obscured by the carpet of green that cloaks this cemetery and makes it so beautiful and unusual for Florida. We would have missed them if we hadn’t gone down that row, but we saw the wood and knew at once what we were looking at. However, we were in for a surprise. Maryanne lifted one by the top to see if there was any writing or carving and while they were so faded that we couldn’t read anything, they were anthropomorphic styled markers. I was nearly beside myself with excitement. These markers are not ones that we see every day around here. In fact, I’ve only ever seen one and it was made of concrete in Melbourne (in the Shady Oaks Cemetery). The shape is supposed to represent the head and shoulders of a human. They’re quite beautiful to begin with, but to see them in wood was really wonderful. Florida’s wooden markers don’t last too long, but there are still some great examples here and there that have survived our humidity and rainfall. There are a couple of great examples left in Greenwood Cemetery in Orlando.

The cemetery’s history can be read on Find A Grave, and there’s a lot of material to cover so I won’t include a synopsis here, but the church and the cemeteries are the last pieces of what used to be the Adamsville community. I can’t really convey the dark, mysterious beauty of this cemetery, due largely to the very old Cypress trees on the property. I will say that this is a must-see for any taphophile in Florida. Find A Grave has some semblance of directions to it and the mausoleum makes a handy landmark!

 

Before the Hurricane

Maryanne and I were separated at birth. I’m sure of that. We started talking in a Facebook cemetery group and when we met in person a year later (for tea in a local tearoom) we were the only women in there amid a flurry of floral dresses and hats that were mostly dressed down, and we were the only two people in the place talking about embalming techniques. Neither of us is high maintenance. Both of us think cremation is the way to go. Neither of us is afraid of dead people.

Maryanne wanted to go see a family member in a cemetery in Chiefland, Florida, two hours from Orlando, and she asked me to go. I will always go visit a cemetery with someone, so I immediately said yes and asked what kind of snacks to bring.

We jumped in the car at 11 a.m. on a Wednesday before the hurricane was supposed to hit over the weekend. Since we’ve both lived in Florida for years neither of us was panicked and both of us felt prepared. However, the rest of the Floridians had other ideas. It took us two and a half hours to get to Adamsville Cemetery, which you’ll see in another post, and a total of five hours to get to Chiefland Cemetery.

Chiefland is small and situated in Levy county, which I was unaware of until we passed the sign. The population is about 2,300, and it’s rural. Horses and agriculture everywhere. We had to take 2 dirt roads to get to the cemetery, and when we finally found it after five hours in the car it felt like a miracle. We got out gratefully, stretched, and it immediately began to rain.

Maryanne handed me a brightly striped umbrella and we started down the aisles of headstones. At the back of the cemetery was a section for the slaves of the Hardee family, which are numerous in the cemetery. The large flat stone reads, Buried Here Are Faithful Servants of Isaac  P.  Hardee. The family is about 20 steps away from this section, which is something I’ve never seen. I wish that the servants had been named, of course, but I still loved seeing the tribute. Mister Hardee himself was right there and his original stone was on the ground, barely legible, but it had been framed in concrete and a new stone in the same style and with the exact same font had been erected in its place. I loved seeing the original and also being able to read the new one, which was quite unusual in it’s simplicity. It was actually my favorite stone that I saw that day.

Maryanne had found her family member by that time, and she told me that she was named after her. Marie Theresa Hampton was less than a year old when she died on August 19, 1949. Maryanne told me that the story itself was quite tragic and that the little girl had a sad and horrible death with far reaching repercussions, but I honestly feel that the story is for her to tell, and so she may be doing a blog post about her in the future. The little grave was beautifully bright amid all of the darker headstones, and Maryanne bent down to touch the stone for a minute before placing pink flowers on the grave. We said the next time we came we’d bring D-2 solution and clean her headstone.

The cemetery itself is beautiful and has a gazebo with a tin roof and trees all around, so the rain was very loud at times, but that only added to the experience for me. An even greater surprise was seeing the cemetery map, well labeled and preserved, and….legible! I was thrilled. I love seeing the maps but they’re not easy to find. Some of the larger cemeteries will provide a map for you at their offices, and I keep them and frame them when I get one.

Near the back of the cemetery there are two graves with a very unusual feature, something I’d never seen before. The better example of the two simply reads INFANT in block letters that are painted on glass and then embedded in the concrete grave topper. They were quite old but in perfect condition.

Before we got back in the car to fight the traffic on the way home we stood there for awhile, me under the umbrella and Maryanne smoking. She talked about possibly having Marie disinterred and moved to her family cemetery in Orlando, which would mean that the little girl would get to lay next to her parents. I asked about costs, and whether there would be anything left to move at this point, but she felt there might be something. She planned to talk to her parents about it when she saw them over the weekend. She is the only Hampton in the cemetery.

There can be so much emotion in a place like this, when you bend down to touch the stone of that loved one and you’re not seeing the stone, you’re seeing their history and their connection to you. Maryanne certainly never met Marie, but she loves her. It’s obvious. It made me want to visit Kentucky and the cemetery where my family members are buried, just to see what that feels like since I didn’t know them personally. I know them through story and on paper, from the family genealogy my aunts have worked on for years. It’s days like this that make me realize how important markers are for those left behind and why I Iove cemeteries so much.

It took us three hours to get home. I had gummy bears and a protein bar for dinner. We passed gas stations with lines running out of the parking lot and down the street. We stopped at a Publix and the water aisle was empty. Central Florida was scared.

If you’re in Florida I hope you fared well during Irma- and I apologize for the photo quality in this post.