Cemetery Irises in Situ

Design on the top of a gravestone in Littig

Something about winter makes Matt & me want to visit cemeteries.  This turns out to be a good impulse, since it means fewer brambles and better visibility.  Interestingly enough, it's MLK weekend, and we ended up at two historically black cemeteries by coincidence. So that seems sort of seasonally appropriate.

The first was Littig Cemetery on Bitting Rd in Littig. Reportedly, it was created on land donated by a former slave. It's located in a pretty valley of pastureland beneath a ridge that I assume was carved out by Wilbarger Creek, which runs through the area.

A pool of irises in Littig Cemetery

Clearly, some folks have recently put a lot of work into maintaining the cemetery--they've been chopping down the (many) trees that died in the drought and gathering big piles of brush. Nicely, however, they've left the big drifts of irises (presumably Iris albicans, commonly known, for reasons that will become obvious, as "cemetery irises") that are gathered in pools around the cemetery--it will be lovely in a month or two.  So many cemeteries are tidy to the point of sterility, but it's so much more interesting when they let a little wildness in.

Littig is a tiny community that has dwindled since its heyday in the 30s and has seen (or is seeing) tough economic times, something that is reflected in the improvised tombstones on many of the graves.

This homemade headstone reads "HUS P. THOMAS DIED 25"

 After Littig, we went to Parks Creek cemetery in Manor.  From the road, it looks pretty small, and I had assumed it was fairly recent, which doesn't really interest me.

Interestingly crooked tree and irises among the graves in the newer section of Parks Creek cemetery

But Matt was intrigued, so I said, "Sure, okay, whatever."  ...And then it turned out to be a wonderful find.

Like Littig, it has a lot of handmade grave markers.  The one below is cast of concrete and stones with a decorative border made of steel wire in a green casing.

A headstone at Parks Springs cemetery

But the most interesting thing about this cemetery is that it goes on and on back into the woods. It is apparently grew slowly over the years, the older sections becoming overgrown while the new sections were being used.  So if you press your way through the brush, greenbriar, and other inexplicable thorns, you find little pockets of graves surrounded by irises, cacti, refuse, and drought-killed trees.

You have to scramble through scrub to reach this clearing

This interesting thicket contains a huge clump of agave.  It's a little macabre, but throughout the cemetery you can see colonies of plants presumably thriving on... people.  Yum.

Honestly, though, if there's one thing touring small, old cemeteries teaches you, it's the impermanence of most grave markers. It only takes a decade or two of neglect to topple obelisks, shatter stones, and efface lettering. A giant agave cluster  or a pool of irises makes at least as good a monument as stone.

A huge clump of Agave (americana?)  Somewhere under that tangle is the remnants of a small metal grave marker.

The plants also make a nice permanent bouquet.  What's interesting is that some of the graves back in the woods are only from the seventies (others go back at least to 1900).  It doesn't take at all long for a cemetery to be overrun.

In both cemeteries, many of the best-preserved headstones are those of veterans; this one from 1975 is in good shape, but it's fairly deep in the woods.

George L. Allen's headstone

 ...Where you reach it by wading through irises--hundreds and hundreds of irises.

A glorious glade of irises (presumably, I. albicans)

In Which We See Dead People

Awesome polychrome Jesus, Dugas Cemetery, Montegut, LA

Matt & I took a trip to south Louisiana a couple of weeks ago to visit some of the little towns that come up over and over in my family tree, and to scan in old family photos. I adore old black-and-white family photos.

My grandmother's family is from the pink area, while my grandfather's is from the blue. We visited Breaux Bridge, St Martinville, Lafayette, Thibodaux, Houma, and tiny Montegut.

We also saw a bunch of cemeteries, hoping to find ancestors. It was a sort of treasure hunt, where the treasure is an ancient, crumbly tomb whose residents have long since turned to dust, or possibly something wetter and stickier than dust, this being south Louisiana. We found a few, plus many unrelated tombs that were interesting in their own right.

Since this is usually a garden-centric blog, I'll start with items of horticultural interest.

Ferns
This neat little fern was growing in all the crevices and cracks it could find in tombs from Breaux Bridge to Houma. This specimen placed itself particularly artfully.

A permanent green bouquet. Not bad for a dude who's been dead since 1882.

Drought
Louisiana, like much of the south, is in a nasty drought. Not as bad as ours here in Texas, but pretty bad. The funny thing is, a terrible drought by Louisiana standards looks like an unbelievably lush summer by Austin standards. It even rained while we were there. Yeah, that's right--they still make rain in Louisiana. Jammy bastards.

Small cemetery by the border of Vermillion Parish. I wish our drought looked like this.

Of course, a drought isn't about how much water you get in absolute terms; it's about how much water you get relative to what you usually get and what you need to be productive. From that perspective, all this gorgeous green is deceptive. Still, I'd rather suffer in a pool of emerald than on a barren brown rock.

Acquisitions
Matt was unbelievably sweet about this whole trip--patient and interested and accommodating about everything, even though ancestors are mostly only interesting to the folks who owe them their genetic material. He even memorized the relationships between all the principle ancestors, by both real name and family nickname (no easy task!), and kept a little chart in his pocket notebook. By way of reward, we stopped at a nursery that had caught his eye. Of course we bought stuff. I got a small silver-blue saw palmetto (Serenoa repens) for the shade garden, and a Formosa lily (Lilium formosum) for... someplace. Matt got a new cuphea (he loves cupheas), an orange-flowered Crossandra, and an unknown variegated foliage plant. Plus Granny Babe gave us some of her yellow-flowered Louisiana irises.

Neat Cemeteries
One of our best finds in terms of ancestral mausolea was for awesomely named Alidor Stoufflet (b1848) and his equally awesome wife Melicie Walker (b1844) in Houma. They were my g-g-g grandparents, and they died in 1930 and 1924, respectively, but they were almost the oldest ancestors we found. Their tomb is only 80 years old, but it already looks like it's about to fall apart. All flesh is grass, folks. Unless you build a Taj Mahal or a pyramid, don't expect to stick around too terribly long after you shuffle off the mortal coil. (This trip may have accelerated the mid-life crisis I'm due for in a few years.)


The very oldest was this guy--not an ancestor, but more like a third cousin, 8 times removed. Or something. His tomb in Montegut, Louisiana is about as creepy as you can desire--the very picture of decay. Deliciously, the inscription's in French; it says, "Here rests Honore Robichaux, died 7 Oct 1907, age 88 years." He was the grandson of my g-g-g-g-g grandfather, Jean Baptiste Robichaux of Halifax. I guess that actually makes him my second cousin, 6 times removed?

I'd have love to have found tombs of older ancestors, but I guess that will have to wait for a future trip. (To be taken at a much cooler time of year. Good lord, it was hot! I think I may have broken Louisiana's drought just by sweating all over the state.)

Thibodaux had the most intrinsically fantastic cemetery (which is good thing, since it's ginormous and took hours to cover, but didn't actually furnish up any family members). First, you see this unbelievably genteel boulevard of irreproachably white and identical mausolea. So uniform! So tidy! But this is the new part.

Respectability Row

When you turn the corner, you start seeing a lot more variety--new tombs, old tombs, rich tombs, poor tombs, big ones, small ones... This is where it starts to get fun.

Old Town

Then, if you're Matt, you go poking around behind the tombs and discover this hidden alleyway. There's no real path to it; you just have to pick your way between the tombs. There's no grass--though there are weeds. It's the weirdest thing. It's like burying someone behind your garage or something--a neglected, hidden area that stretches on most of the length of the (very large) cemetery. Could it be an island of unconsecrated ground? Is this where they stick the Protestants? Or is it just where they stash the poor? Did they dig these folks up and move them to make way for Respectability Row? Answer comes there none.

Storyville?

Meanwhile, Matt, in his role as intrepid investigative reporter, stuck his camera in a tomb whose front door was partially missing. This is what the inside looks like. All those roots dangling from the ceiling kind of creep me out. Stop trying to eat people, you sinister plants!

In an "oven"

According to the internet, a niche like this within a tomb is popularly known as an "oven," partly because these tombs heat up in the sun and turn their occupants into humus in a year or two. Then if space is at a premium, the remaining bones are dumped out of the coffin and swept into a communal ossuary within the same mausoleum, and the oven is ready for its next occupant. Sort of like slow-motion cremation. Pragmatic and efficient, though I find the idea of my bones commingling promiscuously with those of my family members to be off-puttingly incestuous.

Here's a commingling that I love, though: old tomb, new occupant; old vase, new flowers.

Grey tomb, yellow flowers

Family Photos
My grandmother and her cousin, Shirley, were incredibly generous with their time and knowledge, and I was able to scan hundreds of wonderful old photos and gather stories about them. Here are a handful. Shirley has an awesome old carte-de-visite style album given to my great-great grandmother by a hitherto unknown (male!) friend with the implausible name of Webb Zenor. Check out the inscription: his handwriting's as fantastical as his name. See the little curlicues inside of the word "Compliments"?

To Miss Rosa Muller / Compliments of / Webb Zenor / 1879

This is the oldest family photo that I know of. Below it is the inscription "Mrs. (Felicie) Nicholas Muller." Now Felicie Hebert was born in 1833, according to my records, which makes this one old photograph (maybe 1836?). I don't think England's royal family started having their pictures taken till the 1840s. Victoria's coronation in 1837, for example, wasn't photographed. So I'm suspicious--either the attribution or Felicie's birthdate is likely in error. Still, for the moment we'll call it our oldest photo.

Felicie? Maybe? If so, her parents--who lived in New Iberia--were crazy early adopters of photography. They'd have been all over the iPad like white on rice.

Here's her son, Anthony Muller, dressed as a Mardi Gras king.

Anthony Muller, g-g-g uncle

And here's where family history meets the larger tide of history. Several decades later, it's a Mardi Gras parade in Morgan City. The king and page are white. The guys pulling the float and carrying the torches are all very reluctant looking black guys. Very, very Jim Crow. Eerie.

Morgan City's first(?) Mardi Gras parade

On a happier note, here's Tante Rose (g-g aunt) with two unknown pals. She's dressed as a man and smoking a cigar. Granny says Tante Rose was "a character"--not, I think, in a good way. She liked her own way, I gather, and maybe she was a bit selfish and hard on others. But here she looks like a barrel of fun--like the family cutup.

Tante Rose on left, with cigar

And lastly, the Venus of the Bayou. This might be Maggie Elbina Stoufflet (Mommom--pronounced "muh-MOM," not "mom-mom"), but then again it might not. I love her come-hitherish pose.

Acadian Odalisque

Cemeteries for Christmas

A decaying house we passed on our cemetery trip. Seemed to fit the theme, and I love the colors.

Okay, this should be the last in my series on mid-winter procrastination. For those who are NOT fans of cemeteries, we'll be returning to regularly scheduled house & garden programming shortly (coming soon: You too can mass-produce monster trellises!).

Somehow or other, neither of our families ended up celebrating Christmas on Christmas this year, so we were at loose ends. We love having major holiday meals at Chinese restaurants--it feels so transgressive to forgo the turkey and have dan-dan noodles instead--so we did dinner at T&S Seafood on N. Lamar in Austin. (And, I might add, they amply repaid our trust in them, proffering up a rapture-inducing Christmas dinner of salt and pepper shrimp, calamari, and combination seafood on flat rice noodles. Ooooh so yummy.) And to work up an appetite, we hit a bunch of tiny local cemeteries in the bitter, freezing cold.

We saw:
Manda Methodist
Kimbro Community
New Sweden
Rose Hill
Saul
Kimbro Family (sort of)
Shiller

Manda Methodist was the first scheduled stop on our tour. It pretty well gives the flavor of a lot of the cemeteries on our stop--lots of flat farmland, not a lot of trees. I've never been to Iowa or Kansas, but I imagine they look much like this.

The sparse little Manda cemetery in the foreground; siloes in the background. This is the resting place of "Mother" B. Bengtson, 1835-1899.

Based on this tombstone alone, these folks have had a good 180 or so years to plant some trees (nothing fancy--some nice tough cottonwoods or cedars or even hackberries would soften things up nicely)--but they evidently like their cemeteries open and clean and flat.

Is this a Swedish thing, I wonder? Because we're in the Swedish hinterlands of the Austin area, settled by Germans, Bohemians, and most of all, Swedes. The area is now thinly populated, and to an outsider like me, its Swedish heritage is pretty well obliterated, outside of cemeteries. There aren't any Swedish restaurants, for example, nor have I heard of any big Swedish festivals, or any Swedish language communities (unlike Castroville, for example, with its Alsatian architecture and food, or Cestohowa/Panna Maria, with its dwindling community of elderly Silesian speakers). The Swedes just left behind tombstones, street names, and one old church. (If I'm mistaken about this, I'd love to be corrected. How awesome would a Texas-country-Swedish cafe be?)


To be fair to Manda, there are a few trees toward the back, by the hay bales. But it's mostly just open and windswept. And there's plenty of room for new additions, which is rather sad. Families like the one above and especially the mighty Forsdahls made arrangements for whole clans of descendants to be buried together; but the their family compounds are mostly empty. They must have died out or moved away. Or perhaps they're just exceptionally long-lived and the descendants haven't had to make use of their family plots yet. But that's not how it feels. It feels well-tended but sterile--a relic of fruitless dreams and plans from a nearly forgotten era. It feels like the kids moved off to Austin or Dallas or San Antonio and married there and had children there and are now buried near their own nuclear families.

After much misdirection and confusion, we also eventually found the Kimbro Community cemetery, which, with its single cedar, manages to be even flatter and bleaker than Manda.

It does, however, have recent interments, which is nice. And someone regularly changes some of the silk flowers (but not all, which is interesting. What did the deceased do to deserve this final revenge on the part of the flower distributor?) Also, there's a view of the picturesque New Sweden church from this cemetery. Can you see a tiny pointy thing more or less in the middle of the horizon? That's it!

The spare and tidy Kimbro Community cemetery. Home to many a Swenson and Jacobson, including Christina & Ola Swenson, born in Malmo, Sweden, in the old century.

Next we visited the much more extensive New Sweden cemetery, where, to my delight, we found tombstones in Swedish, like the one below, which I cannot decipher, beyond "Har hv... J Edwin Sanderstrom..."


Or this interestingly austere marker. I like to think that it says "Here lies an impassioned bibliophile," but I imagine the book is meant more as a religious symbol than as a testament to S. August Anderson's love of the written word.


New Sweden was the only place that had those awesome old ceramic photographs inset into the headstones--and only one at that.

Mr. Stenholm, New Sweden cemetery:

"Although he sleeps, / His memory doth live, / And cheering comfort / To his mourners give;[sic] / He followed virtue as his truest guide; / Lived as a Christian -- / As a Christian died"
Thanks to our recent research, I've asked Matt to make sure that nothing on my tombstone rhymes. I love these old black-and-white photos, though.

While searching for the elusive Kimbro Family cemetery (in somebody's sorghum field on FM 1660--we could only glimpse it from afar), we stumbled on the Saul cemetery, which is distinctive for its love of fancy ironwork, its pleasant woody backdrop along Brushy Creek, and the slaves purported to be buried there in unmarked graves.

I'm not exactly clear on what purpose these gates serve, but they certainly are interestingly... complicated. I asked Matt if we should erect some of these around us when we croak--y'know, to keep out the riff-raff--but he said "No."

We also found--deep in the back end of beyond--Rose Hill cemetery, unnervingly located down this scary path marked by a crooked sign and bare tree.


Rose Hill appears to have been a German settlement, and someone appears to be in the process of restoring it. Broken tombstones, like the one below, are marked.



While other stones appear to have been neatly patched back together with cement.


And all the graves here rated fresh silk flowers. All this effort is very touching and romantic--what a nice thing to do, prolonging the frail relicts of the dead and preserving a link to history.

But the best find of the day was Shiller. We stumbled upon it by accident--I don't think it even has a historical marker. It's weedy and overgrown and full of trees, which is exactly how we like our cemeteries.

It's like Where's Waldo for little Pugsley and Wednesday Addams--can you spot the cemetery?

It appears to be full of Czechs, as most of the tombstones are in Czech. This one, for the baby Josef, says "Zde. odpciva v panu zesnuly. Josef. Vincenc. Syn. F. a M. RIPL. Mar 2o cervna, 1895 Zemr 14 cervna, 1895."


It was a gorgeously blue there, despite the cold, and the trees and rolling pale gold pastures made a much more picturesque setting for this cemetery than most of the others.


Like so many of these early settlements, this one seems to have lost a disproportionate number of infants and small children, and there are many of these in this cemetery, their markers rising out of the dead weeds in an appropriately plaintive fashion.

Mager Cemetery

"The Mager grade school once stood adjacent to this cemetery. The water supply was furnished by the well which still stands south of the cemetery. The school house had also served for a [??? as a place?]"

Matt & I like cemeteries. We're not big-time hobbyists taking rubbings or doing systematic regional surveys--not that there's anything wrong with that--but we just have a casual but long-term affection for old cemeteries. New ones you can keep, with their sharp-edged headstones tidily flush with the ground so that the dead in no way impede the lawnmowers of the maintenance crews. But old ones, with their curiously mawkish or curiously morbid inscriptions, their often puzzling imagery, their fascinating old names, and their decades-old plantings thriving on human fertilizer--old cemeteries we quite like.

We were in a roving sort of mood today, so we decided to motor off into the countryside and see what we could find. We were going to start in Coupland just because it's close, but their cemetery is treeless, which Matt disapproves of, so instead we turned east of toward Beyersville.

(Yeah, you know, "Beyersville." No? Actually, we've been here 3 years, and this is the first time we've heard about it either. Nor its sister metropolis, Structure. I doubt if together they have a population of 50 people. We never found Structure (or else we drove through it without realizing?) but Beyersville appears to be a tiny knot of ancient clapboard houses on a hill and--inexplicably--a mini-storage business. That's it.)

Anyway, long story short, we stumbled upon this neat little German cemetery just outside of Beyersville. In its suburbs, as it were. It's called Mager Cemetery, and it has a nice grove of nearly leafless trees, a pretty view of an unassuming little swale and some rolling pasture, and a bunch of naturalized old bulbs.

The light was so intense that photographing was rather difficult, but everything was brown or leafless or spare, which made the whole thing interestingly desolate and lonely.

It's all empty farmland out there for miles and miles--very few trees, very thinly settled.

Sam Wernli[?], 1859 - 1916

The area was settled by Germans (Mager was a German family that founded the cemetery), and some of the tombstones are actually in German, like that of little Reuben Wm. Mager, who died in 1926, just a few months old. It says (I think):

Shlaf wohl von deinen / Lieben fern, bis wir uns/wiedersehn, beim Herrn

Little Reuben William Mager, 1925 - 1926

Babelfish, ever helpful, translates this as:

Sleep probably of yours/love far, until we/again-long yourself, with the gentleman

Very touching sentiment.

A few of the tombstones have attracted lichen, though the organisms evidently draw a heavy distinction between the rough decorative finish in the center of this stone and the smooth finish in the margins. Headstone designers, take note: rough stone around the edges, smooth stone where the writing is would be a better arrangement.

Sophie Harms, Mother. 1886 - 1906.

One of the many things I like about old cemeteries is how people were able to mark graves with a living tree or shrub, instead of one of those awful sterile little metal vases sticking up out of the ground holding plastic flowers. And since the people were buried in things that were capable of decay, and they were, themselves, allowed to decay instead of being pumped full of nasty chemicals, fifty or a hundred years later, their plants still flourish. Though the people are gone, their substance has been reabsorbed into the living, breathing world around them. Much better than being mummified in a horrible cement bunker, though I suppose Nefertiti and Hatsepshut and Akhenaten and all the rest would disagree with me about that.

In this cemetery, a century after her premature death, little 4-year-old Clara Walther has transubstantiated into a glossy-limbed crape myrtle.

Clara Walther, 1906 - 1910

And a couple of folks have sprouted venerable old rose bushes, including one that I suspect is a swamp rose (Rosa palustris).

Long-lived Barbara Thonig, 1832 - 1922

I don't know what kind of rose this is, nor whom it marks--I'd like to take cuttings of both, though, and return in the spring to see them in bloom.

Karl Shlenfeldt, 1879 - 1908

Mager was our big find for the day--Coupland, Butler, and Structure (if we ever passed it) didn't turn up anything good, at least not from FM 1468, 419, or 696.

However, when I looked up Beyersville back at the house, I found a list of nearby communities:

• Beaukiss, TX (6.8 miles SE)
• Carlson, TX (9.3 miles SW)
• Conoley, TX (10.1 miles ENE)
• Frame Switch, TX (8.5 miles WNW)
• Lund, TX (8.2 miles SSW)
• Noack, TX (3.6 miles NNE)
• Norman, TX (9.9 miles W)
• Normans Crossing, TX (9.7 miles W)
• Rices Crossing, TX (8 miles WSW)
• Sandoval, TX (9.3 miles NNE)
• Shiloh, TX (7.6 miles E)
• Siloam, TX (6.4 miles SSE)
• Thrall, TX (6 miles NNE)
• Type, TX (4.7 miles SSW)
• Waterloo, TX (9.6 miles NNW)
• Wuthrich Hill, TX (8.2 miles NNW)

Surely, there are bound to be a few more good cemeteries in Type, Frame Switch, or Noack, right?