"Death and Dying in Central Appalachia: Changing Attitudes Practices" by James K. Crissman--Book Review

 

This book was published by The University of Illinois Press in 1994 which means that it is somewhat dated in terms of changing attitudes and practices in the Appalachian region.  But no one has published an adequate book since this one was released to account for any changes in the intervening 27 or so years.  The only book I know of which comes close is "Decoration Day In The Mountains" by Alan Jabbour and Karen Singer Jabbour and it is directed only toward the practices of decorating graves and cemeteries and not toward the entire broad spectrum of how death, dying, burials, grave digging, funerals, memorial services, and numerous other aspects of how we, as a people with one of the most unique cultures in the entire country, deal with our dead.  Until another author produces a book of this quality and depth of research which covers the entire width, depth, and breadth of the field, this is the book most likely to give the best answers to any interested person about death and dying in Central and Southern Appalachia.  I have mentioned this book at times in several other blog posts on this blog but I have never written an entire blog post about it and, in that respect, I have been remiss.  Due to the fact that it was published by a major academic press, there are usually a few good used copies available at one or more of the large used book websites on the internet and it is well worth buying for the serious student of Appalachian Studies or the avid reader who is simply interested in any aspect of the book.  

The author, James K. Crissman, did a well researched, scholarly job of discussing nearly every aspect of death and dying in the area of Central and Southern Appalachia in the slightly more than 200 pages of this book.  His bibliography and notes are exemplary in both their volume and precision and he supplemented his writing with numerous photographs throughout the book.  The one shortcoming of the photographs is that they are all in black and white.  The book is comprised of an Introduction, ten chapters and a Summary.  Chapter topics include Familism, Neighborliness, and the Death Watch; Preparation of the Body; Burial Receptacles and Grave Digging; The Wake; The Funeral Service; Burial Customs; Grave Markers and Other Forms of Memorialization; Funeralizing and Memorial Traditions; Dying, Death, and Central Appalachian Music; and Mining Disasters and Death.  All of these chapter topics are important and many aspects of all of them have changed in some ways over the course of the nearly thirty years since this book was published.  

If we look briefly at some few aspects of most of these chapters we can get some general idea of how these aspects of death and dying in Appalachia have changed.  Firstly, let's look at the top of Familism which is a word many readers may not fully understand.  Familism is a concept from sociology which amounts to somewhat of a double edged sword for the people who practice it in their lives.  But it is less widespread in Appalachia today than it might have been thirty to fifty to one hundred years ago.  Familism occurs when members of a family, especially an extended family, have deep ties to the family and to each other.  Familism is a bit of a double edged sword.  It means that a second cousin might take a day off work to drive his cousin to a doctor's appointment or to help her move.  It also means that family members and families can become negatively enmeshed to such a degree that fights can occur over very minor points and, yet, two family members who have been in disagreement for months will spring to the defense of each other if an outsider comes in conflict with one of them.  Neighborliness is now less likely to result in extensive assistance being provided by neighbors in the event of a death than happened in the past.  Today, death watches in Appalachia usually involve only family members or close friends with an occasional involvement by a church member or co-worker.  In the past, it would not have been uncommon for neighbors to visit at least once daily to offer sympathy and assistance as a person was approaching death.  Preparation of the body for burial in Appalachia in this day and age is almost always performed by undertakers, embalmers, and their assistants in a funeral home.  Even in my childhood, it was much more common for female family members, close neighbors, or "granny women" to come to the home of the deceased and wash and dress a dead person for burial.  I am nearly seventy years old and I can only remember one person in Appalachia who was buried unembalmed in a shroud. But I do know of several who have been buried, at their request, unembalmed and dressed in everyday clothes instead of the now common fancy burial dresses and suits. But I do remember the Old Regular Baptist preacher Clabe Mosley who was buried in a homemade casket which he bought, paid for, and tested for fit almost a quarter of a century before his death at 102.  Clabe was also buried under a concrete homemade tombstone which one of his sons constructed to Clabe's specifications.   I also remember seeing graves dug for the old, cheap, wooden caskets which were buried without a  vault.  In those situations, the grave was dug in two different widths, a close fit for the casket in the bottom two feet of the grave, then the top three or so feet was dug with a step outward on all four sides of about six inches so that boards of rough, hardwood lumber could be laid over the casket to help retard the eventual rotting of the casket and body along with subsequent sinking of the grave. Today, cremation is much more common in Central and Southern Appalachia than ever before.  At the time Crissman wrote this book, almost no one in Appalachia was being cremated. When I was young, almost no one was ever buried in a grave which anyone had been paid to dig and graves were always dug by hand.  Now, almost all graves in Appalachia are dug by a backhoe and it is truly rare to see neighbors, family, or friends perform the grave digging service as a sign of respect for the dead.  

Today, nearly all funerals in Appalachia are held in a funeral home and it is incredibly rare to see a home based funeral where the body is brought home and a visitation and church service is held nightly for up to three days which is how most of my family members were funeralized until about 1980.  Grave markers have changed drastically in my lifetime.  When I was young, it was possible to still see a few people who were buried with only a sandstone or rough lumber marker and that changed in my childhood to markers being primarily either professional granite or marble tombstones with carving on them.  Double tombstones for married couples and occasionally a parent and child were also the norm and that is still common.  In my early years, nearly everyone was buried in a small, privately owned family cemetery.  That is far less common today.  The majority of people are now buried in commercial cemeteries although family cemeteries have not disappeared completely.  Many, if not most, of the commercial cemeteries now require that markers be made of bronze and lie level with the surface of the ground so the entire cemetery can be mowed with a riding lawn mower or tractor without the operator or an additional laborer ever being required to move flowers and other decorations or stop and**** get off the mower.  Most also have strict rules about how decorations such as flowers may be used on graves.  Up until about twenty years ago, all tombstones were simply engraved with names and dates of birth and death along with one short phrase such as "Asleep In Jesus", "Gone Home", or the like.  Today, it is common to see laser decorated tombstones with very complicated scenes which may be purely artistic in nature or copied digitally from a photograph.  

Lastly, mine deaths and disasters are less common than they were in 1994 when Crissman wrote his chapter about them.  They are not totally non-existent today and I cannot remember the last occasion when coal miners were permanently entombed in a mine due to the extreme danger of further deaths of recovery workers if attempts were made to remove dead bodies after an explosion.  Crissman devoted an entire chapter in his excellent book to that subject and it deserved to be addressed at that time.  Now, most attempts to address that topic have become historical in nature due to the steady lessening of mine deaths both due to mechanization and decreased underground mining.  

James K. Crissman produced one of the best books in the entire field of Appalachian Studies with this book.  It should always be included in any attempt to create a broad personal library of Appalachian books.  The subject of death, dying, and burial practices in Appalachia should never be addressed without including a discussion of this book.  It is masterpiece.  If you haven't read it and consider yourself a student of life in Appalachia you should read it. 

Relocated Cemeteries In Appalachia

A recent posting by my blogging friend the Wayfarin' Stranger on his blog which was actually about an old one room school prompted this post. The post and his wonderful blog can be found at: http://cumberlandvistas.blogspot.com/2012/05/one-room-school.html  I responded to his discussion of the movement of the school for the creation of Cave Run Lake near his native Morehead, KY,  with an e-mail about the need for both of us to examine and blog about the movement of family cemeteries to facilitate the construction of these flood control projects all over Appalachia.  He responded with the idea that we both write about it and cross link our articles which was his way to get me reactivated in blogging since I had done nothing since the March 2, 2011, tornado devastated my home town of West Liberty, KY.  That is a topic which I will approach sometime soon.  It is still a bit too fresh in most of our minds.

But, to get back to the real topic of this article, there are several federally funded flood control lakes in every state in the Central Appalachian Region.  Within easy driving distance of me, there are Cave Run Lake, Paintsville Lake, Yatesville Lake, Dewey Lake, and Buckhorn Lake.  All were built after World War II, funded by federal dollars, and in whole or in part managed by the US Army Corps of Engineers.  There are actually 18 such lakes in the entire state of Kentucky, 10 throughout West Virginia, 5 in Tennessee, 6 in Virginia, 4 in North Carolina, and 10 in Georgia.  Each of these states may also have one or more river drainages which are overseen by the Corps of Engineers.  There are also several other lakes in each of the states which is partially contained in the greater Appalachian area but outside Central or Southern Appalachia.  I am concerned only with the cemeteries which have been affected by the construction of lakes in the Central Appalachian Region.  But within the states named, there are more than 50 such lakes. I also note for the record that all of the above states territory does not lie in Central Appalachia and neither do all of the 53 lakes. 

The Corps of Engineers actually controls more than 400 lakes in 43 states.  Nearly every one of these man made lakes required the movement of grave sites and cemeteries.  A few may have also affected or destroyed Native American archaeological sites including grave sites. A fairly good, but relatively non-disclosive and primarily tourism oriented page about the lakes can be found at:  http://corpslakes.usace.army.mil/visitors/visitors.cfm

Each of these lakes is entirely man made and their construction mandated the removal and relocation of several and perhaps dozens of small, family cemeteries.  In each case, the government purchased title to the land involved whenever possible and paid contractors to excavate and relocate all known graves which would be in the flood plain of the lakes. Whenever opposition to the individual purchases was encountered, the government began adverse legal proceedings under the legal doctrine known as eminent domain and seized the land.  In either case, the government paid for the purchase of land near the lake for the construction of a merged cemetery which would contain most or all of the relocated graves.  So far as I know, in each case, the cemeteries were also built large enough to allow for the burial of future dead in the locale.  Whenever descendants objected to relocation of graves to the merged cemetery, they were generally given the option of moving them to a site of their own choosing although this relocation may not have been at government expense. And one of the other real tragedies of this whole relocation effort lies in the fact that many of the older cemeteries would have also contained poorly marked or even totally unmarked graves which were never found and are flooded today.  In many of these cases, no living human remained who even remembered the exact location of these graves or the names of the individuals buried in them. 

Each of these merged cemeteries is operated by a manager under the laws of the state and federal governments. Most, if not all, of these cemeteries are managed in an efficient and ethical fashion.  This article is intended to be a non-biased look at the cultural issues involved in relocation of graves in Appalachia and not intended as any negative assessment of the processes involved in the management of the new cemeteries.  I will leave readers to draw their own conclusions about how this massive relocation of graves has affected the descendants of the dead in each case, both in and outside Central Appalachia. 

I have not visited most of the cemeteries involved in Central Appalachia.  But I have visited several in both Kentucky and West Virginia.  I am more concerned with the general cultural issues involved and limit specific references to those lakes and cemeteries with which I am most familiar.  I have also sought to gain first hand information from one or more of the managers involved in the process.  However, an initial attempt to gain previously publicly released information about the cemeteries from a Corps of Engineers employee was less than openly addressed.  I suspect that, in many cases, relocation of graves has been a touchy subject in Central Appalachia.  I can only vaguely remember the construction of Carr Fork Lake in my native Knott County Kentucky.  But I do recall that my neighbors who were often unemployed avoided applying for the jobs available as laborers in the relocation process.  Contractors were generally not local but did advertise and hire local people when they would accept the work.    However, most local males would not apply for and would not have accepted jobs whose sole purpose was the excavation of graves and relocation of the dead.

Culturally speaking, three major aspects and key values of Appalachian Culture collide with the process of relocating cemeteries. These values are Love of Place, Familism, and Religion.  These relocated graves and cemeteries were most often located on old family home places and considered sacred to the descendants.  The two most important institutions in Appalachian Culture are family and church.  The three most important physical locations to the average Appalachian are the old home place, the family cemetery, and the church which the family usually attended.  In many cases, the construction of these lakes and the relocation of graves would have destroyed all three of these important locations and dealt serious damage to the two institutions as well. In all cases of property transfers for these lakes, the property would have been appraised at actual market value if sold.  Many of these older churches, especially Old Regular Baptist, United Baptist, Holiness, and Pentecostal churches would have been simple wood frame buildings with little monetary value in relation to their religious and cultural value. These congregations would have often been tasked with buying land and building new buildings in an area where land was now more valuable both because of the tourism potential and the increased scarcity due to flooding. More often than not, these small congregations would have been placed in a position of great monetary stress due to the much larger cost of replacement compared to the market value of buildings that were small, cheaply built, and of advanced age.

Although I do not generally believe that feuding was as common an occurrence in Appalachia as various forms of media have described it, disagreements between neighboring families occur in all locales across the world as a part of normal daily life.  Relocating several small family cemeteries in a relatively constricted locale, usually one creek or river valley, would have often resulted in members of several families being buried in close proximity to people with whom they had disagreed in life.  Descendants would not have forgotten those disagreements and would have been upset by the idea of having family members buried in the same cemetery with "them Hicks'" for example. 

But the real opposition to moving graves lay in the idea that graves are sacred and the dead should remain in the original grave until the resurrection. This is a topic which I did not address adequately in my earlier posting about family cemeteries.  It was an idea I should have addressed more thoroughly at the time.  Most graves in Appalachia, especially if they are more than 40 or 50 years old, nearly always face the rising sun due to the belief that the resurrection will happen in the early morning at or near sunrise.  This positioning of the graves is intended to guarantee that the people interred will be oriented toward the coming Jesus in order to be one of the first to rise from the grave. The relocated cemeteries almost never made a point of facing graves toward the rising sun and usually located the orientation in the manner most likely to maximize the use of the land.  This point alone would be upsetting to descendants of the dead who had been raised to practice this religious based custom. 

Whenever I discuss the issues of death and burial in Appalachia, I generally refer to two books: "Death And Dying In Central Appalachia" by James K. Crissman and "Coal Camp Kids" by Barbara Ford Ritch.  "Faith And Meaning In The Southern Uplands" by Loyal Jones, whose work I often mention, also contains material pertinent to this discussion. The Crissman book is a somewhat dated but classic discussion of nearly every aspect of death and dying in Appalachia. It is in every way a masterpiece.  The Ritch book is a large oral history of the coal camps on Beaver Creek in Floyd County Kentucky which contains a large chapter on death, dying, and burial customs which contains many vintage photographs of graves, tomb stones, caskets, and dead bodies.  It is somewhat deficient in expository writing but the photos and first person transcriptions are quite informative.  For those readers who are interested in further information on the topic of death in Appalachia, I would also refer you to any or all available copies of "The Minutes" of any of the various associations of the Old Regular Baptist Church in Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, and several of the northern states affected by the Great Migration.  Individual obituaries are generally contained in most associations minutes and are written by either ministers or family members who knew the deceased individuals.  Although they may appear to follow a stock and rather staid format, individual obituaries may contain real gems of cultural information and these gems may often be found only by browsing dozens of "Minutes".  I refer to one such obituary in my post on "Visiting The Urban Appalachians In Kendallville Indiana".  Although I have never done research there, it is my understanding that the University of Pikeville library in Pikeville Kentucky has a nearly complete collection of these minutes from several of the associations.  Each of these "Minutes" is an annual report of events in a particular association of Old Regular Baptist Churches and, in addition to the obituaries, contains statistical reports of the churches.  They are a wealth of information for researchers and the simply curious in Appalachia.  In particular, the statistics are often far more complete than other enumerations of any kind at the same time in Appalachia. 

There have also been numerous cultural collisions between coal and other mineral extraction companies and the local populace concerning attempts to relocate cemeteries in order to facilitate strip mines, oil wells, gas wells, and rock quarries.  One such battle is currently ongoing at Carcassone in Letcher County Kentucky.  I have no direct personal knowledge of the conflict other than what I have seen in the media. But a local couple whose family members are buried on a small, mountaintop cemetery are involved in an ongoing battle with a coal company which wants to move the cemetery more than twenty miles away, which is a massive distance by Appalachian mountain standards.  Newspaper accounts can be found at the Mountain Eagle , the local newspaper in Whitesburg, KY. I will attempt to directly contact the people involved in the conflict and gain more information which is certainly pertinent to this discussion.

 

This article will not be complete until I have managed to interview at least a couple of the cemetery managers involved about policies and procedures involved in the relocation of these graves.  I will also try to take the time to do some research in the Floyd, Rowan, and Johnson County Kentucky Libraries and newspaper morgues from the time period involved in the construction of Dewey Lake and Paintsville Lake in order to search for information about current events and opinions at the time the lakes were created.  Please feel free to insert your own personal information about this process and to make suggestions of ways to obtain more accurate information about the processes involved.  I would also love to interview any former employees who may have worked in the relocations. 

"Decoration Day In The Mountains: Traditions Of Cemetery Decoration In The Southern Appalachians" by Alan Jabbour & Karen Singer Jabbour--Reflections On A Wonderful Book

Over the last few months, I have written on this blog about several wonderful books which I have deliberately strayed into or sought out on purpose.  I was so pleased with this one when I bought it and it arrived that I mentioned it in an earlier blog post based solely on having scanned the wonderful photograps it contains which were shot by Karen Singer Jabbour as her primary, but not her only, contribution to this book with her husband Alan Jabbour. 

Alan Jabbour worked in several high level capacities for the federal government including as head of the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress, director of the Folk Arts Program at the National Endowment for the Arts, and director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. The Jabbours completed the research for this book over several years primarily in the area of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park but also did extensive research in Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Virginia.  It is fascinating to me that Alan Jabbour was the son of immigrants and produced such an incredible book about folk culture and folk life in Central and Southern Appalachia.  The book was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2010 but I had not known of it until recently.  It is the best book about burials and burial practices in Central and Southern Appalachia since James K. Crissman's "Death and Dying In Central Appalachia" came out in 1994.  

The Jabbour's focused their first research on several cemeteries which are located in the North Shore area of Fontana Lake which lies within the boundaries of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  These cemeteries are unaccessible by land except for what could be miles of hiking in the mountains or by crossing the lake on a boat from landings on the south shore.  The National Parks Service decided at some point after the lake was built to accommodate people who wished to attend what had always been annual "Decoration Day" at these cemeteries by providing a pontoon boat operated by Parks Service staff which would transport the people, their cemetery decorations, and food for dinner on the grounds.  The Jabbour's attended the first Decoration Day on the day when a new park superintendent chose to attend the ceremony also which had never been done by his predecessors.  The boat actually had to make three trips in each direction across the lake due to the number of people.  The Jabbour's crossed on the first boat load and returned on the last boat load in able to document the arrivals and departures of the community members attending the ceremony which consisted of the annual cleanup of the cemeteries, placement of flowers and other decorations on the graves, a church service, and dinner on the grounds.  The photographs by Karen Singer Jabbour and the text by Alan Jabbour are thorough, highly informative, and enlightening about Decoration Day in Western North Carolina.  

It should be noted that Decoration Day is not necessarily on the same day as Memorial Day and is often set on other days in all the states of the Central and Southern Appalachian region.  In small localities, it is also often arranged so that Decoration Day does not conflict with the event on other local cemeteries since many people have relatives buried on several nearby cemeteries.  As a result of their work at these first two cemeteries, the Jabbours were able to meet and come to know many of the attendees and were invited to Decoration Day on numerous cemeteries within a large geographic area.  They shot photographs, recorded interviews, and made extensive notes as they traveled from cemetery and community to others in this large area.  

They did an excellent job of photographing and discussing different practices in the use of tombstones, grave markers, grave decorations, types of church services, and varying local customs in many areas of dealing with death and burial.  I cannot say enough good things about their work and their book.  They discuss and provide excellent photographs of a practice I had never seen before called "raking and mounding" of graves in which the grave has no grass growing on it but is, instead, raked clean and the dirt is mounded on top just as it would be immediately after a burial until the freshly dug earth settles.  But in that area of North Carolina, this practice is done long term as a way of maintaining graves cleanly and with dignity.  They also discuss and provide photographs of another practice which is not common in all areas of Central and Southern Appalachia which is covering graves with white sand or gravels instead of grass.  They provide only one photograph of a grave house which is a shame but they are not common in the Western North Carolina area.  But they provide several photographs of handmade field stone grave markers, some of which are very large and complex.  The provide several excellent photographs of shelters, pulpits, and seating equipment on cemeteries used both for the church services and dinner on the grounds.  These seating and roofed areas are more common all across Appalachia.  The book has 32 color photographs from probably a dozen or more cemeteries in a central section of the book on high quality stiff, slick paper.  But every chapter has at least a few black and white photographs, some with more than a dozen, of graves, shelters, entire cemeteries, church services, and other items and events.  This is the best book I have ever read about cemeteries in Central and Southern Appalachia.  It is beautiful blend of high quality photography, professional folk lore documentation, and very professional writing.  Nearly every discussion of a practice, item, or event has an insertion directing the reader to the appropriate photographs which document the practice, item, or event.  This book is well worth the price of admission if you have any interest in cemeteries either in Central and Southern Appalachia or elsewhere.  

I grew up near three cemeteries in Knott County Kentucky and attended many burials, Decoration Days, grave diggings, and cemetery clean ups in both Kentucky and West Virginia.  I also, for one year, supervised juvenile offenders in mowing and maintaining a historic cemetery in Franklin, Pennsylvania.  I have documented, photographed, and created memorials on the website Find A Grave for many cemeteries in Kentucky and other areas.  This book is a masterpiece especially if you have prior knowledge or interest in Appalachian cemeteries.  It is also a great book to own and read if you simply want to learn more about these practices from the viewpoint of a novice.  You will enjoy this book tremendously if you know or want to know anything about Appalachia and Appalachian people. 

Cratis D. Williams and I On Death, Dying, and Funeral Rituals In Appalachia

I am currently reading "Tales From Sacred Wind: Coming of Age in Appalachia" by Cratis D. Williams and I will write about it more fully in a more formal kind of book review when I finish it.  But I have just read some important sections of the book about the deaths of various people in the Sacred Wind community of Lawrence County Kentucky in the book and they prompted some memories of my own which led me to write about that aspect of Williams's observations and to insert some of my own.  I also wrote another post about "Tales From Sacred Wind..." since I posted this one which has also become quite popular with lovers of Appalachia and Appalachian History and folkways. It is about both our experiences as children in traditional Appalachian children's games.  At the time I wrote these two most recent posts about Cratis Williams, I neglected to mention in either of them that I had written a much earlier post called "Responses To Some Reading Of Cratis Williams" which might also be interesting to some of you.  It is a response to a small pamphlet he wrote about his most important early teacher, William H. Vaughan, who was a primary influence in leading Williams to pursue a career in academia which was not common at the time in Eastern Kentucky. 

Cratis D. Williams--Photo by The Williams Family

I have written previously on this blog about these topics but the practices in Appalachia have been ever changing in both my lifetime and that of Cratis Williams who was born about forty years before me and has now been dead for thirty-five years.  Cratis Williams was one of the premier scholars in the field of Appalachian Studies and served in various capacities at Appalachian State University.  The best, and perhaps only book, devoted solely to death, dying, and burial practices in Appalachia is "Death and Dying In Central Appalachia" by James K. Crissman.  But it was published in 1994 and is becoming a bit dated twenty-six years later.  "Tales From Sacred Wind..." was published in 2003 based on manuscripts which Cratis Williams had left unpublished at his death in 1985 and is also a bit dated.  There is a genuine need for a more recent scholarly look at death and dying in the region.  Crissman's book is excellent, well researched, professionally documented, and wide ranging in its coverage and I have cited, quoted, and recommended it for many years.  But the work of Williams in "Tales From Sacred Wind.." provides a brief but needed addition to the work of Crissman.  I hope my own observations from a long life in Appalachia also contribute to the field.  

My primary impetus to write about Williams's observations came about quite serendipitously shortly after I read his section on death practices through an e-mail exchange with a new acquaintance about a cemetery in our native Knott County which both of us have known all our lives.  I grew up near that cemetery and my acquaintance has several relatives buried on it.  In his book, Cratis Williams tells a story about one of his elderly female ancestors who planted two cedar trees beside some graves on a cemetery at Sacred Wind.  The old woman would not allow anyone else to assist her in planting the trees and expressed an old folk belief that the person who plants a cedar tree will die before the tree is fully grown.  As my e-mail exchange progressed with my acquaintance about the Knott County cemetery, he said this: "My grandfather died in (a) mining accident in 1948, and my grandmother later moved to Michigan. Her last visit to this cemetery was in 1974. During that visit, she planted some cedar trees near the grave of my grandfather. She told me  there was an old saying, that if you planted a cedar tree, you would be dead by time the tree was large enough to shade a grave.  My grandmother died five years later, in 1979. The cedar trees are still standing, and are posing problems to headstones due to their roots."  It is always fascinating to me to read, and especially to hear first hand, about any Appalachian folkway or folk tale.

Another friend of mine, both on Facebook and in real life, John D. Shelton, responded to this post after I had posted it on Facebook with this story about planting cedar trees which concurs almost exactly with Cratis Williams's story and the one above from my other acquaintance.  "As a teen, I was going to plant a Cedar Tree my Uncle scolded me saying never plant Cedars, because you will die when they are big enuff to shade your Grave."  Obviously, the folkway or folktale about planting cedars and impending death of the planter has spread across a wide area.  

Williams also discussed several funerals he had attended both as a child and as an adult in Lawrence County including the deaths of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc.  He even discusses one funeral which his entire one room school attended for the father of a classmate who had died from "lockjaw", tetanus, after having stepped on a nail while tearing down a house.  He discusses the man having been buried in a shroud or winding cloth only one of which such funerals I have ever known about in my life.  A man who owned property adjoining ours in my childhood home and, in fact, adjoining the cemetery which my acquaintance and I have been discussing was the only person I ever knew who was buried in a shroud or winding cloth and I did not attend that funeral which I regret.  For those of you who have not encountered either term, a shroud or winding cloth is a plain flat, usually white, garment or sheet in which a dead body is wrapped in the casket.  As I understand it, a full sized or larger sheet was used in most cases and the body was placed with the feet a foot or two above a corner with the head a foot or two below the diagonally opposite corner in order to increase the length and folding options of the shroud or winding cloth.  The washed and prepared body was then wrapped in the cloth usually beginning with a fold of the lower corner over the feet up to about the knees.  Then one side was folded over and possibly under the body and the other side was folded in the opposite direction in the same manner.  Usually after a viewing, visitation, or funeral, the top corner was then folded down to cover the face of the deceased.  It is my understanding that in some other countries, especially in the Middle East, this is still the dominant method in use.  In Appalachia, America, and several other countries, the use of white cloth is, of course, a symbol of purity.

Cratis Williams also discussed having known people who had their coffins made while they were alive and storing them in attics, barns, or spare rooms.  In an earlier post on this blog, I wrote about Clabe Mosley, an Old Regular Baptist preacher, whose coffin hung in the attic of my maternal grandparents' house for several years before he actually died.  Williams, in this book, also concurs with my writing that these people who had coffins built while living would sometimes actually get in and test the coffin as I reported that Clabe Mosley had done.  John D. Shelton also relayed this story about a person who had their coffin made well before they died and allowed the coffin to deteriorate in a fence row before his death.  But others, after the death, repaired the coffin and used it to bury the original buyer.  "I had another relative who was poor, so he built his own Casket and painted it, tried it for size, placed it in the Grave Yard fence row, it sat there many years covered in grass and weeds, no one moved it, he died and a Cousin and Preacher dug it out the weeds and cleaned it and made repairs, and a woman from Church made a cloth lining, and he was buried in it. This happened a few years back."

Cratis Williams also discussed grave houses in "Tales From Sacred Wind..." as I did in my post about burial practices in Appalachia in which I also included a few photos none of which are originally shot by me.  One of the funnier stories in the book is about a distant relative of Williams who, after getting drunk at a square dance, decided to crawl in the grave house of an ancestor to avoid walking home in the rain.  The man was awakened and terrified by an old sow and her pigs when the sow decided to use the grave house to scratch an itch.  Williams's relative thought he was experiencing a "hain't" and left the cemetery in terror until he realized it was only a sow.  I know of a couple of grave houses on a small cemetery near the Johnson/Lawrence county line on US 23 which are clearly visible from the divided highway.  I also know a few in Lawrence and Elliott counties in an are near where Williams grew up.

Williams also discussed, and his posthumous editors provided several photos of his grandfather David O. Williams who had a large stone, homemade mausoleum, or grave house built to hold the bodies of himself and his wife.  I know of one hand cut stone grave house of a similar nature at a small cemetery between Mousie and Lackey in Knott County Kentucky which is unmarked and said to contain the body of one of the first white settlers to that area.  That stone grave house has several cracks and openings where the stones have settled over the years and I have to admit that I have been tempted to return with a flashlight to see what is visible through the cracks.  I also know of a similarly constructed grave house in a small cemetery near Morgan County High School in West Liberty, Kentucky which also shows signs of settling and age. John D. Shelton, whom I mentioned above, also reported this anecdote about a grave house he had seen: "There is one Grave Yard in Clinton County (Kentucky) which has a little House on one Grave about four feet tall that has Windows in it, I guess they wanted the Loved one to get Sun and be able to see out."

I am thoroughly enjoying reading this book and regret that I was never able to meet Cratis Williams in the flesh.  He is funny, informative, at times risque, and well worth reading.  "Tales From Sacred Wind..." is a book which ever student of Appalachian Studies should place on their "Must Read List". 


 

The Family Cemetery And Burial Practices In Appalachia

The Family Cemetery

The family cemetery in Appalachia has played an important role in social life, local history, and culture since Daniel Boone led the earliest settlers through the Cumberland Gap.  The early settlers were coming into a country in which there were no roads, no white or European presence, and no prior history by their own kind of people.  It was a rugged and dangerous environment.  In a very short time, accidents, child birth, Indian warfare, and disease began to take their toll.  Customs and sanitary norms of the time required that the dead be buried immediately.  A certain percentage of those deaths took place even before the settlers were near an area where they intended to stay long term.  In those cases, the dead were simply buried in the next available bit of ground where it was soft enough to dig. Many of those trail side graves have been lost for centuries. At times of Indian warfare, it was also not unknown for the settlers to make attempts to conceal the graves of their dead.  They generally would have done this for two reasons: 1) to conceal losses of able bodied fighters from the enemy; and, 2) due to generally unfounded fears of desecration of the graves.  But after settlers had found the piece of land they intended to call home, they buried their dead on their own land.  A small piece of land would be chosen at the time the need first arose.  The first grave would be dug and that spot would be designated the family cemetery for the Browns, or White's, or Hicks'. These first and most eventual graveyards in Appalachia were usually located on a piece of high ground, often with a good view of the surrounding area.  It was often a favorite spot of the head of the household. There was also a common belief that on resurrection morning the dead in Christ would arise with the first rays of the morning sun.  The higher elevations usually got morning sunshine earlier than low lying ground.  It was also common for graves to be placed with the face of the dead toward the sunrise.

Photo of A Family Graveyard

 My maternal grandfather, Woots Hicks, chose the site for one of the graveyards my relatives are buried in when a great-grandchild died of SIDS.  It was a high spot in his cow pasture overlooking the home and garden.  It was also a spot he often stopped to rest when he was working in the fields.  In time, a fence might be added.  Some form of marker was generally made for the graves in the early cemeteries, usually a local sandstone with rude carving.  Sometimes, the marker was a piece of wood with equally rude carving or wood burning with a hot poker.  And, with a certainty, more graves would be added to the location.  Even in the last few years, I have known of families who designated a piece of land near the house in Eastern Kentucky or Southern West Virginia as a graveyard.  I know of one near a small church in Western North Carolina.  I have seen them in Kentucky, West Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee.  One of my favorites in West Virginia is the Hatfield Cemetery in Logan County which contains the graves of Devil Anse Hatfield and most of the other members of the family from the days of the Hatfied-McCoy feud. 

Woots Hicks Cemetery Photo By Roger D. Hicks

Decoration was not common on graves for many years after settlement began.  The earliest form of decoration was usually some form of flowering tree or plant. Red buds and dogwoods were common.  I have found mention in two different writers work of asparagus being used to mark and decorate graves.  Both Cratis Williams and Verna Mae Slone mention the use of what they say the locals called "spar grass" to decorate graves. I have never found asparagus on a cemetery.  But I have helped a cousin plant some on one which is located on a farm he owns in Lawrence County Kentucky since I learned of the practice.  Cratis Williams was writing primarily about Lawrence County.  Slone was writing about Knott County. The best book about Appalachian burial customs is "Death And Dying In Central Appalachia" by James K. Crissman.  He covers burial practices from settlement to modern times. He does an especially good job of documenting changes in trends and practices over time.  "Coal Camp Kids: Coming Up Hard And Making It" by Barbara Ford Ritch has a large chapter on burial practices with many good photos of graves, caskets, graveyards, and corpses. It is an oral history about the coal camps near where I was born around Wayland, Kentucky. The book has excellent recording of first person oral history and a fine collection of photos on many subjects which make up for what it lacks in expository writing. 

 The current practice of placing multitudinous plastic flowers on graves came about after the end of WW II.  It began initially with handmade flowers using wire and crepe paper.  My sister and I made some once to put on the grave of an elderly alcoholic neighbor who died without family in a house fire.  But today it is common to see relatives of the deceased spend large sums of money, which they often cannot afford, to put extravagant displays on graves.  They often seem to feel that the flowers at Memorial Day proves their continued love and devotion for the dead.  I was raised to believe and still practice the belief that a far more fitting memorial for the dead is the effort to live an exemplary and admirable life of which the deceased could be proud.  I also know of a few occasions in modern times where families have turned graves into veritable shrines to the deceased.  I recently observed a case where a family spent more than fifty thousand dollars for marble and a building to cover the grave of a young person killed in a car wreck.  I have also seen one other incident in which a mother spent extravagantly to decorate and memorialize the grave of a son who committed suicide.  In both cases, the expenditure appears to be a manifestation of the inability to fully process grief upon the early death of a cherished child. 

 At some point, shortly after the original settlement, the use of grave houses became common.  A grave house is a simple wooden or stone roof placed over the grave to protect it from the elements and, in those earliest times, wild animals which might attempt to dig out the unembalmed body.  Grave houses are uncommon today.  I know of one site in Johnson County Kentucky right beside US 23 not far from the Lawrence County line where a grave house still exists. A modern variation of the grave house is the use of a large slab of granite or marble to cover the entire grave.  These are usually heavily engraved. It is also becoming more common today for grave markers to be decorated with laser generated images of the deceased.  The most memorable use of a marble grave cover I have ever seen was in a small cemetery in West Central Georgia not far from Holy Trinity, Alabama.  It was the grave of a young boy who had died in a car wreck and was very extravagantly carved prior to the days of laser images. It also fits my earlier statement about such practices often being a response to the early death of a cherished child.  One cemetery near where I grew up in Knott County Kentucky has, perhaps, its earliest grave simply outlined with hand cut sandstones about eight inches square and two or three feet long marking the entire outline of the grave.  No one I know in that community knows who the occupant of the grave is.  But that grave has been protected for the entire time it has been there and a cemetery with more than a hundred graves has sprung up around it.  That particular cemetery is more a community cemetery than a family location.  In fact, members of a dozen or more unrelated families, including a few of my own relatives, are buried in that cemetery.

Appalachian Grave House Photographer Unknown

That cemetery also, for many years had a covered but open sided shelter with a pulpit and seating for church services which usually occur on Memorial Day or, as it colloquially known, Decoration Day. At times in good weather, funerals might have been held in such a "stand" as they were known.  The Old Regular Baptist Church, The Primitive Baptist Church, and a few other regional denominations still adhere to the practice of Memorial Meetings.  This practice is an outgrowth of the circuit rider tradition which followed the early settlers. They are often accompanied by dinner on the grounds or in the home of a nearby member of a family represented in the cemetery.  In the 17th and 18th centuries, settlements were widely dispersed, communities were small at best, and ministers were few and far between.  It was common at that time for burials to take place as soon as possible with whomever was nearby in attendance.  Someone would say a few words, deliver a prayer, a song or two might be sung, and if anyone present was literate, a few Bible verses would be read.  Then at the next visit of the circuit riding preacher, a formal service would be held for anyone who had died and been buried since his last visit.  This circuit riding practice is also tied to the once monthly Saturday and Sunday meetings of the Old Regular Baptists and a few other denominations. 

The family cemetery is less common today but, as I noted earlier, new ones still periodically spring up.  At times, they come to negatively effect the price of land when it becomes necessary for a family to sell.  I also know of at least one case in Menifee County Kentucky where new land owners have made attempts to keep relatives of people buried in a family cemetery from visiting the graves.  But, in general, most new land owners have the common decency to act more mature and allow free passage to and from cemeteries.  Usually, graveyards are excepted out of deeds along with a right of way to the site.  I have also known of one recent case in Pike County Kentucky in which an old casket believed to be from the early twentieth century was found by a land owner dumped by party or parties unknown on his property.  The embalmed body of a woman was in the casket according to press reports.  Apparently, the casket had been removed from land by a landowner or mining company and dumped on the land of the man who discovered it. His land was described in press reports as a likely dumping site because of its proximity to a paved road and lack of close neighbors.  I have never seen a report that the deceased woman or the individuals who violated her original grave site and abused her corpse were ever identified or the site of her original grave ever found.  It is likely that a relatively new land owner simply decided they no longer wanted a grave on their land.  This is a rare occurrence anywhere in Appalachia although there have been numerous documented incidents in which strip mining enterprises simply bulldozed over existing and generally unused graveyards.  

Grave digging and burial practices have changed over the last half century. I was actually grown before I ever knew of anyone being paid to dig a grave and I was nearly that old before I knew of anyone paying for a burial site.  I was nearly forty before anyone in my family was ever cremated.  Up until about the 1980's in most of Appalachia it was the rule that friends and neighbors dug graves.  I remember one old man who lived not far from us who always farmed and logged and never held "a public job".  When anyone within walking distance of his house died, he would appear the next morning at the home carrying his tools and volunteer to  help dig the grave.  It was his chosen form of community service and he was dedicated to it until he was too frail to carry his tools.  I feel safe to say that he alone helped dig several hundred graves in his lifetime.  He was also a perfectionist about grave digging and felt all four walls of the grave should be smooth, level, and unblemished.  He, and most of the people I grew up around, felt that digging the grave was the last act of respect you could show the dead and they deserved to get the best. I have seen him actually use clay or mud to fill in a small hole in the side of a grave where a stone came out and left an imperfection.  When my half-brother, Curtis  Hicks, was buried several years ago in Kendallville, Indiana, I thought of that old man at my brother's grave site.  The grave, in a public commercial cemetery, had been dug with a backhoe and one side had fallen in leaving, perhaps, the worst looking grave I have ever seen.

 It was common for several men and boys to dig graves in Appalachia taking turns and working for brief spells.  The family of the dead would supply drinking water, soft drinks, and lunch.  That was all anyone expected or got for digging a grave.  At the time of the actual burial, friends and family members would fill in the grave after the casket was lowered into the ground.  I was also nearly grown before I saw funeral home staff allowed to fill in a grave.  Today, almost no one digs or fills in a grave for a friend or a family member except in rare occasions where a family cannot afford the charge for grave digging.  During my childhood, it was still common for many people to be buried in simple pine coffins without a burial vault.  Such graves were dug in a unique manner due to the fact that the cheap wooden coffins were prone to collapse quickly after burial leaving a grave with a sunken surface of several inches to as much as two feet at times.  Such graves were dug wider in the top half and more narrow at the bottom.  An earthen vault was constructed in this manner which had edges that were offset from the upper opening by about four to six inches on all four sides.  After the casket was lowered into the grave, precut rough oak lumber of exactly the width of the grave was laid over the casket on the offset to protect the casket and decrease the propensity for sinking.  It was also common for most cemeteries of any size to have a pile of unused dirt just outside the fence for use in sunken graves. 

It was not uncommon for children in Appalachia to play on cemeteries; and, in those days, vandalism was not common as it is today.  Once several of us were playing hide and seek on a local cemetery after dark and there was one grave which was sunken to a considerable depth.  As we went to hide, I happened to be looking directly at another boy who was slipping along behind tombstones looking for a hiding place.  Suddenly he dropped totally and instantaneously out of sight.  He had stepped into the sunken grave without seeing it.  The tombstone was between me and him so I had no idea what had happened. He and I both screamed and he clawed his way out of the grave and took off running toward the gate.  However, he never even opened the gate.  He jumped the fence and kept on running straight home.  None of us who were chasing him and yelling could get him to stop.  The game of hide and seek was broken up and, so far as I know, he never again went on a cemetery after dark. 

Many of the old family cemeteries in Appalachia have fallen into disrepair and are rarely mowed these days except just prior to Memorial Day.  Often family farms have been sold off or fallen into neglect after ownership has been split between dozens of heirs without division of the whole.  Also, with the construction of flood control lakes such as Dewey Lake in Kentucky, Blue Stone in West Virginia and dozens of others in Appalachia, many of the old cemetery sites were flooded.  But federal policy required that all graves due to be flooded were to be moved at government expense.  Every flood control lake built has a government funded cemetery somewhere just outside the area of flooding.  Contactors and crews would be hired to move the cemeteries and graves from a dozen or more might be put in one large public location.  Graves from the same cemetery were usually put in close proximity and names of the original cemeteries are sometimes on stone markers near their particular graves.  These cemeteries usually are operated on an ongoing basis by a board of directors and have added space for continued sales of plots.

Today, family cemeteries are growing less common and some day may well cease to exist except as unused plots with a few old graves.  But their place in the history of Appalachia has been important and every effort needs to be made to respect and protect them.  A few people and agencies from state to state have done work recently to locate the cemeteries and use to GPS technology to document them.  In a few cases, individual marked graves are also documented. 

Addendum March 28, 2017

Recently, I did a Google search of myself as I frequently do, and as I believe everyone should do, to keep track of my publications and citations of my writing and also to become aware of any potential misuse of my online presence.  I found that this blog post has been quoted and appropriately cited in a masters dissertation by Marjorie Fey Farris in pursuit of a masters degree in history at Eastern Kentucky University which was completed and published online in 2015.  The title of the dissertation is "The Persistence of Place in Appalachia: The Phenomena of Post-Death Migration, 1930-1970".  The dissertation addresses the practice of Urban Appalachians of returning deceased family members to the region for burial in Appalachian ground.  I had discussed this phenomena superficially in this post and other writings about Appalachian burial practices but had never seen it discussed at length before.  It is an interesting practice, still common today throughout Appalachia, and unlikely to cease in the immediately foreseeable future.  If you are interested in Appalachian burial customs, the dissertation is worth the time to read.  I recommend it.