Category: Cast iron

Oakland African American Cemetery, Oakland, Florida

There are a lot of things about Orlando that I dislike, and sometimes progress is one of them. One morning when I was working at the Golf Channel I drove to work at 6:30 a.m. and saw a coyote walk out of the tall grass in a field across from our building and vanish into a nearby office complex. It was an interesting moment since I’d never seen a coyote before, and I sat in my car watching him intently. No one else was there. No one else saw it. And the next week the whole field had been mowed down and was now magically transforming into a storage facility for people to dump all of their crap that won’t fit inside their house.

Oakland Cemetery is facing similar circumstances when it comes to progress. Everything is happening around this site, and I’m not sure where the cemetery will fit in when the construction is completed. There are actually 2 Oakland Cemeteries, and when I saw the first one 2 years ago I thought I was in this one until someone told me recently that no, the other one was in the woods to the left, and that you had to just hike in.

Recently Shawn came home from work and picked me up, telling me he’d passed a cemetery we hadn’t been to yet and that he wanted to take me there. Guess which one it was? When we got to the site around 6 p.m. there were still a few construction workers milling around, but the cleared site is so immense that they never bothered us. They’re building something huge. The site starts right next to the first cemetery that I visited and is a desolate, open expanse of dirt until you look to the left and see an iron arch marking the entrance to the cemetery. We still had to hike over to it through the soft dirt, and then I jumped the fence to get in while Shawn looked around for another way. The arch said it was established in 1882.

At first I didn’t see anything noteworthy except for the fact that the site was heavily wooded and there were no markers. As I walked though I noticed a path and began to follow it. It dipped down into a little valley filled with all types of green ferns and oak trees dripping moss. because of the hour the moss was lit from the setting sun and looked like gold. It was a stunningly beautiful place for a cemetery and I stood there on the path for a few minutes, just looking around and taking in the beauty and odd peacefulness, since the cemetery is very close to the highway. After some time I began to see the odd marker here and there, nearly covered by ferns, and lots of white PVC pipe. In fact I was seeing it everywhere, and I know that each pipe indicated a burial. An archeology group had come out to work on the cemetery a few years ago and they marked the burials they could find with PVC. The Eagle Scouts have also at one time worked here, and from what I was able to find they were responsible for the arch and some previous clean up efforts.

The land was handed over to the city for maintenance and the chain link fence that surrounds the property was put up (there is an open entrance in the gate though, we saw it later on), but the fate of the cemetery is still unknown though it appears that they intend to leave it.

The cemetery is the resting place for many of Oakland’s founders, and also a lot of flu victims from 1918 are buried here. It hit this area particularly hard and many of the cemeteries in the area are a testament to this. It is believed that during that year up to 650,000 people died in America. The totals by state are staggering, and those numbers aren’t even certain. Most likely the numbers were higher. There is once cemetery on Orange Avenue here that is full of flu victims, and the cemetery is actually quite small. I remember reading one account of four funerals being held in one day. For a growing community it would have been devastating.

I used to feel extremely emotional over sites like this, still do sometimes. But I think after the past couple of years of looking for cemeteries that are long gone and doing a lot of reading that I feel more detached. You can stop people from doing what they’re going to do and doing it without regard for others. It’s the way things are now. It doesn’t make the site or the people buried there any less important. They’re still a part of our past and I hope this site will be preserved.

When we got back to the car Shawn spent a good five minutes pulling pernicious little stickers off of me. I was covered.

 

Cast Iron Mausoleums

When I think of cast iron I tend to think of two things; cornbread and cemeteries. Cornbread cooked in a cast iron skillet is far better than any other, and cemeteries usually have iron gates…and apparently in New Orleans, they also have iron mausoleums.

I’d never seen one before, so I literally shot out of the car when we spied the first one in Cypress Grove Cemetery. I could not believe it- it was rusted to a bright orange-ish brown but still sturdy and straight, looking impenetrable. I was smitten. I sent a photo to Gus and he wrote back that he was packing his things and would be ready to move in in a couple of hours. I felt the same way, morbid as it may seem. I did knock gently on one just to hear the ring of the iron, and thankfully, no one answered.

My main experience with cast iron in a cemetery has been the occasional grave marker and of course, ornate iron fence work. A lot of it around here seemed to come from Cincinnati according to the small name plates that I occasionally find on gates and fences, and it looks like you can still get ironwork from that area. Additionally, I’ve always been fascinated with the cast iron caskets, especially the Fisk model patented in 1848. Plus, the thing had a viewing window, which is always a draw for me.

The cast iron mausoleums that we saw appeared to be kits, since we kept seeing the same type over and over. One model was in the same cemetery in both the original rusted iron, painted white, and painted silver, which had the exact same sheen as the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. The silver one had a makers mark on the bottom of the door that said ‘Robert Wood & Co Makers Phila’. His foundry was at 1136 Ridge Avenue in Philly. Online you can view his original catalogs, and they’re fascinating! I scrolled through a book published in 1867 and saw porch railings, spiral staircases, lampposts, and a few cemetery ornaments such as angels and lions. All ornate. All magical. I could never choose if I were building a house in the late 1800’s.

Robert Wood was a blacksmith who operated under his own name until taking a partner in 1857 and becoming Wood and Perot. Robert Wood and Co. became the name after Perot’s death in 1865.

 

The family name was sometimes custom made for the front of the mausoleum and on others it simply said ‘Family Tomb’. The motif on many was the upside down torch, though there were also angels, and one even had an ocean theme with mysterious fish on the sides and waterspouts that looked like seashells. The iron was placed over a brick and mortar base that you can see in one of the photos. Everything, down to the doorknobs and locks was perfectly and ornately detailed. It really is an incredible process and I’m sure these things will last for many more years.

It’s hard to say how many of these came from the same maker since I didn’t see the mark on all of them, but New Orleans has 16 of them in various cemeteries in the city. The ones we saw were in Cypress Grove, St. Patrick’s, and Odd Fellow’s Rest. (You have to look though the fence at St. Patrick’s to see those since Odd Fellow’s Rest is closed for repair.) There is also one in Lafayette Cemetery that I somehow missed, but it’s been in the news because it inspired the resting place for Lestat, Anne Rice’s vampire in Interview With a Vampire (the novel- please skip the movie). The tomb requires restoration and the quote is between 50-70,000 dollars, so they clearly cannot last forever. The tomb is for the Karstendiek family. According to the article, that one was imported from Germany.

Whatever their background it was such a novelty to see so many examples in New Orleans, and I know the next time I visit the city I’ll be trying to see the rest of them. Happy February to everyone! Today is Imbolc so I’m off to burn some sage and light a candle.