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Tomb With A View
"Did You Know?" Interesting Cemetery Facts
DID YOU KNOW? . . . .
The "Bird Girl" has become the most famous family monument in Savannah's Bonaventure Cemetery. It was created in 1938 by sculptress Sylvia Shaw Judson. The Trosdals saw the statue and decided it would be lovely marking the family burial plot. Its original name was "Little Wendy". After Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was published in 1994, so many visitors came to see the delightful child with arms uplifted to feed the birds, that the monument was removed, cleaned and put on permanent exhibit at the Telfair Museum of Art.
Based on a standard grave size of 3' x 8', on acre of land will provide enough space for 1,815 graves.
The first mausoleum was built to perpetuate the memory of King Mausoleus of Caria (Turkey) in 353 BC by his widow, Artemisia, at Halicarnassus. So heartbroken was Artemisia that she is said to have dissolved some of this ashes in a potion which she drank to become one with him. His tomb no longer exists, but when ancient Romans came upon it as they conquered Caria over a hundred years after Mausoleus died, they coined the word mausoleum to describe his final resting-place.
The typical iconography for Faith (cross), Hope (anchor), and Charity (mother and child) are among the most commonly used Victorian funerary symbols. Even groupings of three, such as three steps into a chapel or mausoleum, or tiers on a monument, may signify this most favored symbolism of heavenly apiration. The upward pointing obelisk (another popular monument style) will often have a three layer base.
Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York has 600,000 people buried there.
This was submitted by Matthew F. who, in addition to having several hundred photos and "volumes" of info, has been cataloguing and entering data into a database for Green-Wood.
We have heard there are some rural cemeteries in the United States that permitted burying a small "torpedo" or explosive device in the earth above a casket to deter grave robbers or disturbance of the gravesite.
My, my . . . that certainly would be an interesting surprise to anyone digging where they shouldn't be, wouldn't it?.