The Grave of C.F. Martin, Guitar Maker ... Located!

 
This blog is part two of a minor odyssey I began in the summer of 2013 (click link at end of article for part one, The Grave of Guitar Maker C.F. Martin ... Almost). Back then I attempted to find the grave of C.F. Martin (Christian Frederick Martin, Sr.), patriarch of the Martin Guitar Company in Nazareth, Pennsylvania. I remember at the time assuming he was buried with his wife, Lucia Otilia Martin (formerly Kühle), at Moravian Cemetery in Nazareth. At the time, there was no entry (or gravestone photo) for him on the website Findagrave.com. There was, however, an entry for Lucia.

After a highly enjoyable tour of the Martin guitar factory in the summer of 2013, I visited Moravian Cemetery – just a couple miles from the factory. Not having a map to Lucia’s grave marker (just the photo from Findagrave.com), and with all the grave stones looking alike, I still managed to find her grave within about ten minutes! However, C.F. was not buried with her or next to her. I conjectured that he may have been in an unmarked grave or possibly shipped back to Bavaria for burial in a family plot. While I was at Moravian Cemetery, I failed to notice that all the markers surrounding Lucia’s stone marked female graves.

What is the Moravian Church? Wikipedia tells us: 

"The Moravian Church … is the oldest Protestant denomination emerged from the Bohemian Reformation. This church's nickname comes from the original exiles who came to Saxony in 1722 from Moravia to escape persecution, but its religious heritage began in 1457 in Kunvald, Bohemia, today part of the Czech Republic, an autonomous kingdom within the Holy Roman Empire. The Moravian Church places a high premium on Christian unity, personal piety, missions, and music"

Music, hmmmm? A few months later, I emailed Chris Martin, current C.E.O. and fourth generation owner of Martin Guitars, about the whereabouts of his Great-great-great grandfather. A Customer Service person, Mr. Jason Ahner answered me back: C.F. Martin, Sr. is buried on the men’s side of the cemetery! This never occurred to me at the time of my first visit.

Map of Moravian Cemetery, Nazareth, PA

Apparently, this is how the Moravians buried their loved ones – women segregated from men. Mr. Ahner was kind enough to even send me a hand-drawn map showing the plot location of C.F. Martin, Sr. as well as subsequent Martin family C.E.O.s at the Nazareth Moravian Cemetery. It took me over a year to make the second trip, which I finally made in December 2014 for closure.

Snow-covered Moravian grave markers

My first attempt at the planned second trip was aborted when it snowed the previous night. Older Moravian cemeteries have smallish, low to the ground, grave markers, almost like a memorial park or a Quaker burial ground with no high tombstones or monuments. If you’ve ever been to a Quaker cemetery, you’re familiar with the small, rectangular stones. The Moravian stones in this Nazareth graveyard are larger, however, and are made of white marble – perhaps twenty inches long, fourteen inches wide, and four inches high. As you see in the photo above, such stones, once snowed over, have their inscriptions covered. 

According to Funeralwise.com, “Moravians focus on the simplicity of burial grounds. They believe in uniform, plain grave markers and inscriptions to emphasize the equality of all human beings.”  

A few weeks later, I had another opportunity to make the trip. The map came in very handy and I found the grave in question within ten minutes – even though the stones all looked alike. C.F. Martin, Sr.’s stone had recently been brought to level and shored up a bit. Another thing that made his grave marker easy to find was the photo of it that I found in a Martin Guitar promotional magazine, The Sounding Board (Vol. 34, January 2013), that I picked up after the tour when I was at the factory. 

C.F. Martin, Sr. and grave marker

In a gatefold section of the magazine was a pictorial history of the founding of Martin Guitars. Beneath an artist’s illustration of the patriarch was an illustration of his headstone. 

The older portion of this cemetery, closer to West Center Street (see map), is organized first by gender, men closer to the cemetery entrance, women higher up the hill. Interment.net offers an explanation of these segregated burial practices in describing the Schoeneck Moravian Cemetery, which is on West Beil Avenue closer to the Martin Factory: “…within each gender, by date of death and marital status, married men together, single women together, children, etc., with families not buried together. Most of the graves are very late 18th through very early 20th century. A number of the stones are in German, or a German-English mix, but most are in English."

The grave marker of Lucia Otilia Martin, the matriarch of Martin Guitars, is about twenty feet away from Christian Frederick’s. The mens’ section is separated from the women’s section of the cemetery by a strip of grass maybe eight feet wide. Here’s a photo (at right) of her grave marker with C.F.’s marker downhill in the background (my blue camera bag is next to it in the white circle).


After finding C.F. Martin’s grave, I thought I might head over to the factory to thank Mr. Ahner for his help. I pulled up in front of the building and got out. A lovely Christmas tree stood above the main entrance. As I was making a photograph of this, a gentleman in a red coat came up the walk from the parking area. As a photographer, you sometimes want a human in your photo to give a sense of scale to the composition. His red coat would add a splash of color to the scene as well.

Chris Martin, CEO Martin and Co. (ref.)

As I snapped the photo, the gentleman turned around and said, “Did I photo-bomb your picture?”  I recognized him from publicity photos. I asked, “Are you Chris?” (Meaning, Christian Frederick Martin, IV, Chairman of the Board and C.E.O. of Martin Guitars) He said “I am.” I was a bit taken aback and blathered on about why I was there and he said, “C’mon in.” Very nice guy. After some discussion with the receptionist about who I was there to see, Mr. Ahner came into the lobby and we chatted a bit. He said they were considering adding a tour of Moravian Cemetery for vising dignitaries and I offered to add the location of Lucia’s grave site to his map. After we said our goodbyes, I played a few of the guitars in the lobby and toured the museum.

As an aside, I did buy my first Martin guitar last year after taking the tour of the factory. Once you go through the factory and see how these guitars are made, you realize that the (relatively) high cost of these instruments is totally justified. I would also like to express my gratitude to the Martin Guitar Company for its hospitality and welcoming attitude toward my rather offbeat inquiries!

Reference and Further Reading:

Martin and Co. website 
 Part one of this article: The Grave of Guitar Maker C.F. Martin ... Almost

The Grave of Guitar Maker C.F. Martin ... Almost

This summer, my brother Tim had the great idea to visit the Martin guitar factory in Nazareth, Pennsylvania. He (traveling south from Wilkes-Barre) would meet my son Christopher and I (traveling north from Philadelphia) in Nazareth to take the tour through the factory. We are a rather musical family - Chris and I both play guitar, while Tim occasionally plays a compact disc player.

Factory worker at Martin Guitars, Nazareth, Pennsylvania

Martin is the manufacturer of the most highly-regarded factory-produced acoustic guitar in the world. They’ve been in business for 180 years – Christian Frederick Martin, Sr. started the company in 1833 when he arrived in America from his native Germany. The company is currently run by C.F. Martin, IV. Martin guitars are extremely expensive. If you play one, you immediately see why. Not only do they sound wonderful, but they look and feel like beautifully crafted objets d’art. At the tour’s end, we were all given souvenir soundhole cutouts from the guitar-making process, probably the only Martin guitar-related item that I could ever afford to own!

So where am I going with this and what does it have to do with cemeteries? Well, I always check out the local cemeteries when I travel, and was surprised to find that Nazareth is basically a small town loaded with cemeteries (which of course will require a follow-up visit!). In fact, there’s one right down the street from the guitar factory at Beil Ave. and North Broad Street - “Schoeneck Moravian” cemetery (which you can see in the photo just beyond the blue sign).

Strange stones in most of these cemeteries – flat thick marble ones, like full sized headstones, but lying down instead of upright. I wonder if this is where they got the idea for memorial parks, with uniform flush-to-the ground markers? These are not flush, though, they stand anywhere from four to eight inches off the ground.

Another local cemetery is Moravian Cemetery (Center and Willow Streets), in which repose the remains of one Lucia Otilia Martin, wife of Christian Frederick Martin, Sr., founder of the company. So, there’s the big tie-in between the Martin Guitar Factory tour and the Cemetery Traveler – the grave of the patriarch’s wife. Must visit. But what about C.F. Martin, Sr. himself? Where doth repose his mortal remains? My guess is right next to his wife, who died a year before him in 1872. But if that's the case, why an unmarked grave? Perhaps instead his body was shipped back to his homeland for burial – Saxony, Germany. Who knows? I tried to get in touch with the company’s current president, C.F. Martin IV, to see if he knows. I received no reply.

So after the wonderful tour of the Martin Guitar factory, Tim, Chris, and I had lunch at the restaurant down the street, across from Schoeneck Moravian Cemetery. I then sprung my request on them to visit the Martin grave, a couple miles away. All were game. Then I popped out the piece of paper with the photo of her grave from the Find-a-Grave website. I showed it to them saying, “I don’t know how big the cemetery is or how easy it will be to find this, but maybe you guys can help. I promise if it takes more than twenty minutes, I’ll give up.” My compatriots were ok with that, bless their souls. So we drove off and found Moavian Cemetery with little trouble.

My car parked in Nazareth, PA's Moravian Cemetery

It’s an interesting visual – cemetery on a hillside. Blazing hot August sun, around 4 pm. Drove my car up the main cemetery road to about mid-terrace, and pulled in to a crossroad. I stopped my car, my brother pulling his car in behind mine. I rolled down the windows and stepped out onto the grass, Chris getting out the passenger side. As I began to announce my plan for finding the grave to those gathered before me, I felt a sharp sting on my ankle. I thought there was a picker bush so I looked down. At the same time as I saw all the hornets swarming out of the hole in the ground next to my foot, I felt two more stings under my arm (I assume I was waving said arms wildly at the time, allowing the little buggers easy access to my more tender parts)!

Did I mention that since it was so hot that day, I was wearing shorts and a short-sleeved Black Sabbath t-shirt? Yeow! I ran around my car and jumped into the passenger seat, over the shifter and jammed the key in the ignition – had to get the windows up! Oh, man, those stings started to REALLY hurt!

Son Chris and brother Tim searching Moravian Cemetery, Nazareth, PA

I got out of the car, manufacturing new curse words as I grabbed my camera and began to instruct Chris and Tim about how we would fan out and look for the Martin grave. As we began walking, I could not BELIEVE how these three bee stings hurt! Omigod! And to think some people get themselves stung regularly for medicinal purposes or worse - those bizarre tribal rituals involving hundreds of bee stings ….

I really had no idea whether we would actually find the Martin grave – every stone in the place looked exactly the same! And everything was flat, so you actually had to look down at every stone to read it – no cursory glancing around. So I was rather amazed when I found the stone in about five minutes. Snapped a few photos and that was it – the grave of Lucia Otilia Martin (formerly Kühle), the matriarch of Martin Guitars. (Oddly, the Martin website refers to her as "Ottilie Lucia Kühle.") My quest was successful and I got to spend a fun day with my son and brother (at least until the bees got involved). Those stings hurt for DAYS afterward!

Epilogue - A Bit of History

Lucia Otilia Martin's grave marker

So, I’ve been flipping this “Moravian” term around like I know what I’m talking about. The Internet tells me that Moravia was one of the “historical countries” (meaning it no longer exists) of Eastern Europe. The area is now Czechoslovakia. The Moravian Church is one of the Protestant denominations (ref.).

Nazareth, Pennsylvania was founded in 1740 by Germans, and was “… specifically Moravian by charter. Outside faiths were not allowed to purchase property within Nazareth, a basically all German Protestant community.” (ref.) Nazareth itself was named after the Biblical town where Jesus Christ was born. There’s a great holiday gift shop on the outskirts of town where you can buy gift baskets loaded with beef sticks, farmer’s cheese, crackers, and the like – the place is called “Cheeses of Nazareth.” (I just made that up – sorry, couldn’t resist!)

References and Further Reading:

The C.F. Martin Story from the Martin Guitar Company website

The Bee Hunter