Food for Thought?

One of the clutch-the-pearls claims made to illustrate the unacceptable behavior people engage in is that people visiting the Charter Street Cemetery are walking or sitting around ... EATING!

This article makes the rounds from time to time, and tells us that people used to eat in cemeteries pretty frequently. 

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/picnic-in-cemeteries-america

Nothing about snacking in a cemetery strikes me as offensive or inappropriate on the face of it.  When I am finally laid to rest, come visit and bring snacks.  I won't mind. 

Leaving your half-eaten fried dough on someone's headstone ... well, yeah, don't be that guy.  Have some basic sense here.     

 

But *Those* People, Too ...

The Charter Street Cemetery is reopened!  This is good to see.  I was among those worried that once it had been locked, it might never be unlocked again.  I have been sick and staying in, so only just got over there today.  I spent maybe half an hour or so, taking photos, and saw at least twenty people cycle through, taking pictures and admiring headstones.

And because I am my father’s son, and I will talk to anyone, I asked a few people what brought them out to visit the cemetery today.

One woman was a big fan of the movie, Hocus Pocus (which I just saw this week, finally, and thought it was incoherent and not remotely entertaining, but I digress) and always wanted to visit Salem to see the filming locations.  She knew that Charter Street was not the cemetery featured in the movie, but visited anyway. 

Another woman was from Seattle, and on a trip east.  She had come up from Boston with her boyfriend.  She told me that she always made a point to visit cemeteries when she could; being a history buff, cemeteries are an important resource.  She was looking for Mary Corey’s grave.

Another pair of women told me that they were genealogists, just visiting for the day, and they always checked out graveyards on the off-chance that they recognized a familiar name.  So far today, they hadn’t.

As I was leaving, a father was coming in, with a couple of young, single-digit aged kids.

“Remember, it’s not a playground,” he said.  “This is a graveyard, you have to be respectful.” 

It’s easy to troll social media and find pictures of people misbehaving.  I’ve seen those pictures, too, and it pisses me off as much as it does you, believe me.  But I think most people understand where they are, and treat it with respect.  Not everyone, obviously, but I would say the vast majority.  It’s not a scientific sample by any means, but on my visit today, I saw people with genuine interest in the history of the cemetery, and Salem generally.  I didn’t see the “people wearing all black, and talking about horror” that one of the cemetery commissioners so reviled (see the post titled, “Those People”).  I just saw some nice people who were happy to be there, and they would have been locked out last week, too.  And that would have been a shame.           

             

An Aged Person

Being Cotton Mather's brother couldn't have been easy.

The Mathers all seem to have been overachievers -- Increase Mather, the family patriarch, was president of Harvard.  Nathanael's brothers, Cotton and Samuel, were both Harvard-educated ministers.  Nathanael entered Harvard at the tender age of 12(!) and earned a degree (his first) at 16.  He"excelled" and was called "extraordinary."  At age 14, he dedicated his life to God ... and that is perhaps when his health began to decline.  Noted Salem historian Sidney Perley tells us that, "His dedication consisted of devotion to prayer for personal sanctity, and he deliberated so much and so seriously that had became morbid and melancholy." 

Perley goes on to say that "He had contracted ill habits of posture of body, which, persisted in, produced effects which made him appear like an old man."  


Nathanael earned a second degree from Harvard and that's when he health seem to have become a serious problem for him.  He came to Salem seeking treatment under a Dr. Swinnerton; future Salem witch trials judge Samuel Sewall (the judge who would later apologize for his involvement in the hangings, and call for a day of fasting and prayer and atonement) visited, as did Nathanael's older brother, Cotton.  Sickly and worn out, Nathanael died at the doctor's house on October 17th, 1688.  Cotton closed Nathanael's eyes and is said to have written his epitaph --

Mr.
Nathanael Mather
Decd October ye 17th 
1688
An Aged person
That had seen but
Nineteen Winters
in the World.

He didn't die in the wintertime, and so the use of "Winters" as opposed to "Summers" underscores the sense of loss here.   

Dr. Donna Seger has also written about this on her blog, The Streets of Salem, which is well worth your attention. 

https://streetsofsalem.com/2016/01/27/the-most-poignant-epitaph-ever/ 

(I apologize for the quality of the photo above; it was the best I could do, racing into the cemetery just before it was (illegally) locked up.  I couldn't come back the next day when the light was better.  And no, that's not an "orb" at the top, it's lens flare.  Grow up.) 

UPDATE:  With the cemetery reopened, I was able to go back yesterday and get a better photo of Nathanael's headstone.  I did not realize, upon my first visit, that he is laid to rest next to Dr. Swinnerton and his wife, so I have added their stones as well.  I may look up the Swinnertons and do a post on them in the future.   

   

    

Go Ask Alice

Alice Orne died too young, at only 30 in 1776, and her grave is marked with a impressive headstone. The cherub is distinctive, and I almost wonder if it was based on someone specific. (I say “almost,:” because as far as we know, such portraits were not a thing).

Her epitaph reads:

This stone has something great to teach,

And what you need to learn:
For graves, my friends, most loudly preach

Man's infinite concern.

What Don't Two Wrongs Make ...?

For a little while, I seemed to be having some variation on this conversation once a week –

ME: Locking up a cemetery and denying public access is against the law.

SOMEONE: But the Quaker Cemetery is locked!

ME: That would still be against the law ….

Put another way –

ME: Robbing banks is against the law.

SOMEONE: But Dillinger robbed banks!

ME: That would still be against the law ….

The Quaker Cemetery, also called the Friends' Cemetery, is located on Essex Street, right next to my dentist's office; last year I got a crown in the room that looks out over the cemetery. Quakers were NOT welcome in early Salem, and indeed Puritans outlawed the religion and punished Quaker missionaries who came to town to preach or protest.

The cemetery was open for a century, from 1718 to 1818, next to the long-gone meeting house. Findagrave tells us that “Many graves are unmarked and several stones are severely eroded,” and informs us that the cemetery also holds the remains of Quakers transported from other locations in Boston and Peabody.

Pointing out that one cemetery is locked in no way makes locking a second cemetery permissible. I really have no idea what the logic behind that argument is supposed to be. Two wrongs, we were all told as kids, don't make a right.

But it does set a troubling precedent.

One of my concerns, from the very beginning, has been that once the Charter Street Cemetery is locked, it will remain locked. Those in charge will decide that it is easy, it doesn't cost money, and it seems that most people who express an opinion on the matter are in favor of the closure (if only because those of us who opposed it are being ignored). And we already have one locked up cemetery, and no one is complaining about that, so why not a second?

And even if it does not remain locked year round, the city could decide to lock it back up next October. It went so well the first time, right?

When I have pointed out that locking a cemetery is against the law, I am sometimes met with vague assurances that it is allowable if the cemetery is deemed “at risk” or “endangered.” When I have asked, no one has cited a source for this supposed information.* The Quaker Cemetery can in no way be described as at risk or endangered. It is under no imminent threat. But it's locked. And it shouldn't be either.

*people “know” that an endangered cemetery can be locked in the same way people “knew” a witch couldn't recite the Lord's Prayer. It's something they just kinda think has to be true, right? Because it just makes sense. Even it it's not actually documented anywhere. FFS, let's not go making decisions on things we just think must be true; we got into a lot of trouble in town for that last time.

Making Headlines

The Charter Street Cemetery was on the front page of the Salem News today, along with my friend Giovanni, owner of Haunted Footsteps.  

https://www.salemnews.com/news/local_news/no-issues-in-closed-cemetery-except-for-some-tour-groups/article_9da13223-8df8-533d-b132-91be306d9e20.html

It's a bad headline, but that is the fault of the headline-writer, not the reporter filing the story.  Reading the headline alone, you might think that the only "issues" in the (illegally) closed cemetery were being caused by tour groups, which is certainly not the case. 


The article states that "The move was made to protect the cemetery from damage caused by tourists unaware of the centuries-old gravestones’ fragility."  And that's incorrect.  I attended the meetings where closing the cemetery was discussed and, as noted in another post, historic preservation and protecting the cemetery never came up, and was clearly not ever the point (see the post entitled "Those People.").  

Those People

I went to both meetings where the Cemetery Commission discussed closing the Charter Street Cemetery. I submitted a letter against the closure.  I seem to have been the only one.  The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness.

The discussion at those meetings was ... interesting.   

"I hate what Salem has become," said one member of the commission (I did not catch her name).  "Everyone comes here and everything is about witches.  You can't go downtown without seeing a bunch of people in black talking about horror."

She went on a bit from there, and that's when I started to see a big piece of the puzzle.

This seems to be less about historic preservation, and more about Those People, the ones in black talking about horror.  The people "we" don't like, the ones who aren't "like us," the ones who come here for the "wrong reasons."  Dammit, why aren't they coming to hear about the spice trade?  Or Hawthorne?  And why cant I go to Almy's on a Sunday afternoon anymore? 

We're all in favor of historic preservation.  Nobody wants to see the Charter Street Cemetery trashed.  It's irreplaceable.

But ...

Nobody was saying that at those meetings. 

There was finger-wagging at Those People.  The ones who come here for the wrong reasons, the reasons we don't like.  They're messing it all up for Us because they don't Get It ... like We do.   

I could be wrong, but I just feel that when it comes to sorting out the arguments in favor of closing the cemetery, historic preservation seems to have been the last thing on anybody's mind.