Deerly Departed

This morning I woke up to rolling thunder, lightning, and darkness that spread like a funeral pall over the city. Perfect day for some cemetery photography? Possibly, yes, though certainly challenging under such conditions. 

However, as I went out to my car about an hour later, I saw the blue sky and felt the heat. The day quickly turned into one of those white-hot summer days where birds, caught in the intensely magnified rays of sunlight reflected off plate-glass office buildings, burst into flame in mid-air.  As Buddy Holly sang in Raining in My Heart, “The sun is out - the sky is blue there’s not a cloud to spoil the view.” 

You can photograph the most typical cemeteries in the rain and everything looks new. But on a sunny, scorching day, I needed something new. Even with scores of cemeteries to photograph in and around Philadelphia, you would think I’d have hit them all. Not so. Mount Hope Cemetery in Lambertville, New Jersey, was in my sights. This is a little rural tourist town across the Delaware River from New Hope, Pennsylvania, about ten miles north of Trenton, New Jersey.

I found the cemetery down a side road, off the main street running through town. Cleverly hidden, as some of them are, from non-residents. I drove up the small hill road for a couple blocks until a grassy embankment appeared on my left. Quaint houses, bungalows, really, populated the right. As I slowed down expecting to find the entrance, I noticed quite a strange sight.

A young deer, a fawn, was struggling up the weedy embankment. This was right out my car widow, about twelve feet away. I made this photo there. I watched the fawn struggle to the top, where its siblings waited - two more fawns of the same size. At this point I had gotten out of my car and was snapping pictures. They were obviously aware of my presence and had the sense to move away. I could see from here that the cemetery entrance was blocked by a downed tree. From this vantage point I could also take in the breadth and width of this lovely hillside cemetery. It was small enough to see that there were driveway entrances around the other side of the grounds. I mounted my steed and drove around Mount Hope back to the center of the cemetery, returning to the area where I had left the fawns. 

I’m not a wildlife nut, and am a pretty bad nature photographer, so why am I so intrigued by deer? Well, for one thing, you don’t see them often in South Philly, where I live. So it’s a novelty, for sure, almost like being in a petting zoo when you can get this close to the animals. Also, I grew up in northeast Pennsylvania, where deer abound and everyone gets a hunting license – even me.

My dearly departed daddy, a Great White Hunter, forced me into it when I was thirteen. He dragged me along for about four years running, until I almost accidentally blew off my uncle’s head. Though no words were ever spoken, Dad and I both took this to be a sign and I was no longer invited  to participate in this manliest of man-sport. Happy to say I never shot a deer. Shot AT them, else I would have incurred the wrath of the Great White Hunter. No one knows this but you, dear reader, that I always aimed a little high. 

It amazed me early on that you only needed to be TWELVE years old to be licensed in the state of Pennsylvania to carry with a high-powered rifle. This was maybe 1971. At the same time, you needed to be SIXTEEN to legally drive and EIGHTEEN to legally drink! My parents had a farm out in the boonies where my cousins and I could do all these things, even before we became of legal rage. We lived in the town, but the farm was sixteen miles away, in some direction of which I am still unsure. Anyway, back to the deer.

My best friend George, with whom I grew up, used to laugh about my family’s fixation with deer. My father would be driving us to the farm in our Ford Country Squire station wagon some Saturday morning, through some godforsaken Bumfukville, when he would slam on the brakes, point out the window into a field and yell “DEER!” We would watch them off in the distance, my parents marveling at their beauty, grace, and gamey flavor, while us kids would be sneaking peeks at our much more interesting Spiderman comic books. George committed the ultimate sacrilege once by rhetorically asking me why my parents are so into deer. “They’re just deer,” he said. And so they are. 

Three fawns, with adult deer in background.

So maybe its because of my bizarre upbringing that a deer standing in a field still gets my attention. This mini-herd of three fawns sure had me intrigued. I found a shady tree under which to park my car (otherwise, this 100-degree heat would have melted my black leather seats), got out with my cameras and approached the fawns. They were now grazing among a cluster of headstones about twenty feet away. They were wary and would stop and look at me if I got closer. I was satisfied to remain at this distance and tried several times to get all three in the shot, classically posed. This I never succeeded in doing. 

If you look in the background of the photo directly above, you’ll see the brown blurred shape of a larger deer (top center, between the house and the large monument). I did not see this through my camera lens. After about ten minutes, I was taken aback by a thumping and snorting!

Doe to the left, buck (in velvet antlers) to the right.

The mama and papa deer, doe and buck, were staring me down! I suppose one or both would’ve charged had I stepped closer to their brood, but I backed away. The mother was more aggressive, the father just standing by (having just been roused from his easychair by the doe, probably). I had no intention of messing with them. The parents trotted toward their fawns and veered off toward the road. The three fawns trotted after them, as best they could on their awkward new legs. To my surprise, they deerly departed down the embankment, through the weeds, into the road, and across the lawn of a nearby house! Living here must be like living in a nature preserve.  

Although Mount Hope Cemetery has woods bordering just one side, it’s all quite rural here. The road surrounding the cemetery turned out to be a dead end, so there really isn’t much traffic to speak of. A lovely place to raise a family, it would seem. Glad I was able to witness it all without my father around.

A Cemetery, Only Half-Abandoned

Funny how life is simply a constant realignment of priorities. Time was, I wouldn’t go near a cemetery unless it had obvious and grandiose angel monuments. For ten years, I never read an epitaph. A few years ago I began to appreciate cemeteries for more than just their statues. I had no choice—with all the angels shot, I had to dig deeper into cemetery life, that is, if I wanted to continue spending ridiculous amounts of time in them.

I found myself in a weird state last week, New Jersey, to be exact. I was attending an opening reception for some photographer friends at a gallery in the lovely little town of Haddon Heights, NJ. I always carry a map to scout out cemeteries, and I noticed a small one in the area that I decided to check out on the way home.

Mt. Peace Cemetery in the town of Lawnside coexists with the Home Depot, just across White Horse Pike in South Jersey. I pulled onto its ungated grounds, got out of the car and began walking around the neat and tidy graveyard. Grass was cropped short and piles of old flower pots and cuttings lined the cemetery’s wooded perimeter. Lots of Civil War veterans’ graves with small flags waving, but that was about it—a small, sad little cemetery, as my Grandmother would’ve said. At first glance it seemed to have nothing to recommend it; at second glance I was sure it didn't-- until I noticed the tombstones in the woods.

The two sides of the cemetery not bordered by roads were bordered by a forest, essentially. It was densely wooded with vines encircling the trunks of gnarled trees. Bushes with red berries and wildflowers all but covered - scores of old tombstones! Were people buried in the woods, or did cemetery trees just thrive randomly in the fertile soil amidst these lonely graves?

As I walked back through the thicket over fallen trees and empty beer cans, I quickly realized the dates on the stones were not so old. Most stones were of a soft material which lost its detail to the elements over the past century, but some showed dates as recent as the 1930s. Old Mortality must have been on a bender when he was due to ride through Lawnside. It appeared as though somewhere along the line, the groundskeepers decided it really wasn’t worth maintaining the older section.

The cemetery is twice its apparent size—half in plain view from the street, half hidden under the dark foliage cover. Scores of graves litter the forest. Toppled and sunken headstones are easy to trip over, as many are not obvious poking through the wildflowers and vines. Treading among the stones I couldn’t help wonder why people would lose interest in a cemetery, in their own history. How do you just forget about all these people who died? The untended area was shadowy and packed with ghostly stillness, even as daylight filtered through the leaves above. Massive spider webs stretched from tree to tree and creepy shadows played on headstones. I got an unsettling feeling, something akin to that which Mark Twain described as “when one woke up by accident away in the night, and forgotten sins came flocking out of the secret chambers of the memory.”

To add to the creepiness, there’s an old house in the woods, in a clearing beyond the trees. Imagine having a graveyard in your backyard—or rather, a graveyard as your backyard! Not even a fence to provide a psychological barrier between you and the scores of dead bodies mouldering in the ground. Forget wasting money on Halloween Fright Nights—walking through here at night would do it for me.

A good distance into the thicket I came upon a headstone with an old folding chair beside it. The deceased’s given name was “Anna;” the chair was tattered and rusty. Anna found peace in 1935, but obviously her mate did not. I immediately thought of the cinematic vehicle used in the movie “Rocky Balboa (2006),” where Rocky kept a chair at Adrian’s grave to sit on while he visited. Anna and Adrian were relatively young when they died (both in their forties), but whereas Adrian was fictionally romanticized, Anna was a true love lost. The pain suffered by her mate must have been the kind Baudelaire knew:

"When the low heavy sky weighs like a lid
Upon the spirit aching for the light
And all the wide horizon’s line is hid
By a black day sadder than any night"

He could not forget Anna, yet he is long forgotten himself, along with the scores of other people in these lonely graves. As I sit in my comfortable living room a few nights later typing this, its pouring outside. I can’t help but think of that chair in the dark, in the rain.

I knew nothing about Mt. Peace Cemetery prior to my visit—exploration is more personal that way. Afterwords, I did some research. Mount Peace was organized in 1890 by African Americans to provide a burial place for their dead—they were excluded from other cemeteries because of race. Bear in mind that until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, African-Americans were not allowed to drink from "white" water fountains or use "white" bathrooms. Even in death, there was segregation. Mt. Peace was designated as a "black" cemetery, one of the few along the East Coast (GSGI, 2003). Aptly named, it may have been the only place these people finally found peace.

In 1952, the company that owned and maintained Mt. Peace went bankrupt, and the 18-acre site fell into disrepair. A fire in the cemetery office destroyed all of the records and maps of the plots. With the inscriptions worn away from the stones, the dead have effectively disappeared. However, their presence is certainly felt. By 1978, Mount Peace was overgrown with shrubbery and had become a virtual dumping ground. Cleaning it became a neighborhood volunteer project. Residents came out every Saturday during the spring and summer bringing their own tools and equipment to clean up and cut back the undergrowth. The dividing line I noted earlier is simply where the volunteer cleanup crews ran out of resources. The Lawnside, NJ Historical Society continues to expand its efforts to restore and protect the cemetery.

Links for more information:

Garden State Ghost Investigations (GSGI)
Lawnside Historical Society
Mt. Peace Video Documentary