Every once in awhile I find something interesting going on in my hometown of Springfield, IL – whether it be a local event, local flavor or a local view. Each week I’ll bringing a piece of my life to the online world in a series called Let’s Get Local. I encourage anyone and everyone to join in and share a little bit of their own local flair to introduce us to people and places we may never visit.
My drive from Chatham, IL to Springfield, IL leaves me with 3 options: a back woods road, a highway and another highway. Often I choose the first highway because it’s the most direct route to my parents house and the west side shopping centers. As I travel down the small stretch of 8 miles or so on either side of the highway are two small cemeteries. If you weren’t paying attention you’d probably never notice them. Nestled in the adjacent woods, from the car you can see a weathered white fence with overgrown weeds creeping through the boards.
My husband calls me morbid, I call it curious. Who are these people? Why does no one care for their burial grounds? How long have they been there? What were their lives like? All questions that burn at my mind every time I pass by. I still have no answers but I did satisfy my curiosity by stopping at the cemetery this past week to investigate.
photos taken with Casio EX-S12SR
Many of the headstones are unreadable, engraving corroded away by time and weather. Of the few that were still standing upright I was able to find some names and dates of the deceased.
Among the graves there were no signs of any visitors…no fresh flowers, no silk flowers, nothing but overgrowth of nature taking back what once came from the earth. Along side each grave were little white daisies. It leaves me to wonder if anyone cared for these men and women but the earth itself, leaving little signs of love and peace with the tiniest of flowers.
I still don’t who these people were, how the lived or even if the cemetery was given a proper name, but I feel that some of my curiosity is satisfied and can look upon their eternal home with a smile now as I pass them each day, silently whispering a prayer for their peace and happiness.
About Cat Davis
Call me a Taphodile as well. I don’t think it’s morbid at all. I love to walk through old cemetaries and try to think of how life was “before”. One of my “dream destinations” is New Orleans so I can walk through their tombs.
Kas
Neat post, Cat! I am the same way with old cemeteries. My mom and I used to go through really old ones and look at them all and wonder what their lives were like. With my husband being Hispanic we celebrate Dia de Muertos each year (two days after Halloween) and one thing we always do is take flowers to our passed loved ones. We also take an extra flower so the kids can place a flower on a grave that has none or is very old. I think its great and teaches them respect of cemeteries and the ones before us that helped make our world what it is today.
You’re certainly not morbid whatsoever. Whenever we go to the cemetery, we drive through slowly to look at all the old gravestones. Lefty Grove (a famous baseball player) is buried in the same cemetery as my grandmother. There are some old stones that really make you wonder what the story is, as you said.
You might consider talking to a local newspaper about running a story on the little graveyard and listing the names of those interred there. They may be old graves with young/new relatives as yet unaware that they have family buried there. The article might also prompt a local church group to “adopt” the site to provide proper maintenance and help mother nature out. The flowers are beautiful, and with a bit of help the site could once again look well maintained. Now you’ve made me curious about some of the smaller sites I’ve seen in my area. It’s time for a field trip.
If your morbid, them I’m just plain creepy-I LOVE being in cemeteries. I love visiting people I don’t know and exploring different gravestones, making up stores on who these people could be, what they did, etc.
Some people think that cemeteries are creepy, but I find them full of life-Instead of walking into them and thinking, “I don’t know these people and none of them had an affect on my life,” I feel that I know everyone there like they were long lost friends-Who knows if they came into my life at all? Whether they did or didn’t, they affected me.