Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Inch Cemetery

- Note: One of my rules of thumb is that you never find just one of these "Tree Shaped Tombstones in a cemetery.  There are always at least a couple.  But on a fall road trip I ran across a bunch of exceptions to this rule.  Here is "One Off Week". -

Yes, there is a place called Inch Cemetery.  So far the story behind it has eluded me.



As the theme of the week is "Lone Trees" there is just one to show you.



As they tend to do, these stones tell a story albeit an incomplete one.  Notice the radical difference between these two markers?  One is old and the other new. The birth dates for Clark and Etta are similar, just one year apart.  But he died in 1901 and she lived to be 94.  I figure them to be husband and wife.  She seems to have been a widow for 60 years.


No other clear details.  Clark would be too young to be a Civil War vet.  

He does appear to have been a member of the Modern Woodmen of America on the basis of the snazzy little logo.  It is a variant I had not seen before.

2 comments:

Honeybee said...

I want to know who these fantastic gravestone carvers were. Have you ever run across info about where most came from? Italians? Germans? Swedes? Norhoovians?

Tacitus said...

Italians were the elite carvers of that era. But this was more mundane work. Very few were signed. Of the three I have researched one was Italian (Ambrosini), one an English immigrant (Lundy) and one was named Heller. His ethnicity is unclear. There is a lot of his work in the National Bohemian Cemetery but Heller could be English or German.

TW