"TearDrop Memories" and the Mourning Arts

If you’re at all into the mourning arts, you owe it to yourself to visit a shop in New Hope, Pennsylvania, called TearDrop Memories. The proprietor, Greg, is well-versed on the subject and can be wildly entertaining and informative. If you’re also into antique bird cages, he has them as well. I’ve never asked him about the connection – I’m sure there is one.

Pre-Civil War Hair Work Memorial

I just made my second visit to TearDrop Memories in six months. I suppose it will be a routine stop for me from now on when I visit New Hope or Lambertville (in Jersey, just across the river). Greg’s shop is unparalleled as to the extent of his collection, all but one item of which is for sale (you can ask him what that singular item is!). He has an inventory of thousands, large and small. Yes there are coffins and Victorian mourning attire, but there are also death masks and fine examples of Victorian mourning jewelry. (All the close-up images of mourning art pieces in this article are from TearDrop Memories' website.)

Check this out on Amazon.com

If you’re unfamiliar with mourning arts items, there’s a good book called Mourning Art and Jewelry (2004), by Maureen DeLorme. According to the author, decorative art to commemorate and memorialize the dead reached its zenith in beauty and popularity in the Victorian era. When the husband of Britain’s Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, died in 1861, Victoria went into a period of mourning that was unheard of up to that time. She eventually emerged from her overwhelming grief, and although she resumed her official duties, she dressed in black crepe for the remainder of her life. An entire industry of mourning arts grew out of this.

DeLorme explains: “Life spans were short … with the average age of Victorians at death being forty to forty-five.” Due to prevalent wars and the filth and grime of cities in the throes of the Industrial Revolution, people frequently did not live past the age of seventeen. Out of respect for the dead and a desire to preserve their memory, things like hair jewelry and mourning clothing were invented.  DeLorme states:

“Thus the pressures of continually facing death as an intrusion into everyday family life made the need to keep both the presence of the “Lost Beloved” near while simultaneously bidding farewell, a preoccupation. Victorians met this need by creating an extensive mourning culture employing elaborate mourning dress, jewelry, and funeral trappings; memorial portraits (both drawn and painted); postmortem photographs; sculptures, busts, and death masks; and a myriad of commemorative artifacts.”

Example of Victorian Mourning Jewelry:

Human hair Memento Mori Remembrance Mourning Brooch

And by no means was this mourning culture isolated to Britain - mourning arts spread across the United States as well. You can see hundreds of full-color examples of these memorial items, with their histories, in DeLorme's book. You can also see most of them in person at TearDrop Memories. I’ve included in this article some photos I took in the shop, and you can see more on Greg’s website. Honestly, until you see such objects up close or hold them in your hand, you cannot fully appreciate their intense human connection.

Scene inside TearDrop Memories Antiques, showing Victorian bird cages

TearDrop Memories is located at 12 West Mechanic Street in New Hope (click for map), a block up the hill from New Hope’s storied Main Street (two blocks south of the bridge over to Lambertville). If you’ve never been to New Hope, you’re in for a surprise. This little town has a most intense tourist trade! Custom automobiles cruise the main street on sunny Sunday afternoons, while packs of deafening Harleys rumble by. In a four-block length of road, its not unusual to find fifty motorcycles parked. Leathers and feathers co-exist among the shops as well as on the shoppers themselves. Leaving the tourist traps one can veer up Mechanic Street past the quiet coffee shops and restaurants to number twelve, a storefront that welcomes you with an antique birdcage and an arrow inviting you down the steps to the back of the building, where TearDrop Memories is located. Goth girls, couples, and Victorian enthusiasts alike amble in to the small shop at a regular rate.

Greg Cristiano of TearDrop Memories

Outside on his patio, Greg stands a bird cage on a pole with a child’s white coffin propped against it. A curious juxtaposition for Main Street tourists to see. Once lured in, TearDrop Memories can certainly give you the willies. However, the one thing you can never fear is the act of asking questions. Greg, the owner, is most engaging, entertaining, and I might add, extremely well-schooled on his subject. He has been in this business since about 1996. He supplies both private collectors as well as cemeteries and museums with authentic mourning arts items.

Photo from TearDrop Memories' website

What can you find at TearDrop Memories?

One of  many displays at TearDrop Memories

Probably many things you never knew existed, like antique embalming pumps, mourning jewelry, wall hangings, clothing, memorial plates and other ceramics, coffin handles, coffin name plates, oh yes, coffins themselves. There are books, creepy dolls, death masks, post-mortem photographs, antique funeral parlor signs from when undertakers also built furniture. Many of the wall hangings and many of the brooches, pins, and rings incorporate the woven hair of the deceased (think weeping willow trees made of human hair). All in all, TearDrop Memories is a fabulous history lesson in our seldom discussed past.

Image from TearDrop Memories' website

On my most recent visit, I asked Greg to show me the weirdest thing in his shop. I won’t tell you what it was, but I’m guessing if you asked him on a different day, he’d pull something even more shocking out from under the counter! This place is not for the faint of heart. On one of the walls hangs an 8 by 10 inch lithographic remembrance of a child’s death (maybe from the late 1800s) – with four small coffin handles surrounding a little broken white porcelain angel. I commented “Why would you want something that grotesque hanging in your home reminding you of your child’s death?” Greg very astutely pointed out that it was one of the few things the family had to remind them of their child, not simply its death. He added, “Photography was invented in 1840, but it really wasn’t until after the 1910s that people could actually afford to have their picture taken. Up until then most people only had their photograph taken once in their lifetime.  So they wanted SOME tangible memory of the child.

Post Mortem Ambrotype Photo 1850

As a photographer, I obviously have a soft spot in my heart for photographs and photography. I never thought about how precious a photograph could be, or used to be. Back in the Victorian era (1837 – 1901), it was a major life event to have your photograph taken. So after a child’s death, a remembrance of some sort was needed. I’m sure that if the cost of a photograph was great, the cost of a commissioned oil painting must have been out of most people’s reach. That said, people who had the money at the time of their child’s death would sometimes have a post-mortem photograph made of the child. Such photos might show the child in a coffin or dressed up and sitting up in a chair. Sometimes open eyes were painted on the closed eyelids, so as to appear alive, the way the family wanted to remember the child. TearDrop Memories has photographs of this sort for sale.

Queen Victoria Mourning Pin

The items in Greg’s store (and on his various websites, listed below) are not inexpensive. Even (at the time) throwaway Queen Victoria commemorative death pins can cost forty dollars. But you must remember that most of Greg’s inventory is unique, like the human beings they were designed to memorialize. So if you need an antique wicker casket or old marble headstones, this is the place to get them. Unlike the epitaphs carved on grave markers, Greg’s hours are not set in stone. It’s best to call him (215-862-3401) and leave a message regarding the day you’re planning to come by. He’ll phone you back and most likely have the door open for you whenever you’d like to stop in.

References and Further Information:

TearDrop Memories Antiques website
TearDrop Memories photos on Yelp site

Visit TearDrop Memories' web shops for great antique treasures:
http://www.TearDropMemories.com
http://www.NorthForkPets.com
http://www.MaidensMemoirs.com
http://www.WeSpeakAntique.com

TearDrop Memories Antiques
12 West Mechanic St. 2B
New Hope, PA. 18938
215 862-3401

Witch's Heads in the Holy Rood Cemetery

"Holy Rood Cemetery has all the looks of a haunted graveyard. Perched at the crest of a hill and held above Wisconsin Avenue by a stone wall, the cemetery looks from the street like the setting of an Edgar Allen Poe thriller." - Holy Rood: A Cemetery With a Tell-Tale Heart

One of the very first cemetery angel photographs I ever made was this one, possibly around 1998. I was tramping around the cemeteries in the Georgetown area of Washington, D.C., and came across the “Holy Rood Cemetery” on Wisconsin Avenue. Having not a clue what a “Rood” was (Holy or otherwise), I went inside. I remember walking around the hilly place, most of it knee-high with weeds, and finding this solitary angel. The grounds were in deplorable condition and the angel seemed frozen in the act of beseeching the Heavens for help.

The idea of an unkempt cemetery was not a concept with which I was familiar at the time. It kind of baffled me - the broken fence, the scrappy sign, tombstones knocked over in the high weeds. I never thought to write about Holy Rood, since I only actually got one photograph from there, and it was kind of a nondescript place. However, I recently came across some interesting material on the cemetery while I was looking up other things.

The reason I only have one photograph is because I improperly exposed the entire roll of film I shot there. Back then I was shooting black and white film, Kodak Tech-Pan to be exact, an unwieldy film that rarely gave me more than a few good images. Kodak Tech-Pan was extremely unusual − you could expose it at any ISO between 25 and 320, and what varied was not so much the grain, but the CONTRAST. The lower the ISO, the finer the grain, the lower the contrast. At ISO 25, it was the world’s finest grain black and white film. The roll I shot at Holy Rood was at high contrast ISO 320 in bright sunlight. I over-exposed everything. Somehow, the angel survived (possibly because of the ability of the film to capture celestial bodies? It was in fact very popular with astronomers!).

At the time, I had no idea this cemetery had such a tumultuous history. Holy Rood is the English way of pronouncing  the Scottish haly ruid, or holy cross, and this cemetery certainly has a cross to bear. The cemetery was established by Georgetown’s Holy Trinity Church in 1832, and was predominantly Irish Catholic. Over the years Georgetown's founding fathers have been buried here, alongside German and Irish immigrants, former slaves, and Revolutionary War veterans. When the church joined the archdiocese of Washington in 1942, the cemetery was given to Georgetown University.

The land on which the cemetery was located was extremely valuable to the university, and a plan was set forth to move the bodies and develop the land. This raised the ire of plot owners and historians alike, so the idea was shelved. The university to this day has been stuck between a tombstone and a hard place - it would certainly like to use the land for expansion (like Temple University did in Philadelphia in 1953, when it condemned nearby Monument Cemetery so it could build a parking lot), but it does not want to risk another public black eye. As a result, this unenthused cemetery owner puts forth minimal effort to maintain the place. As a result, it is an overgrown, dilapidated mess. The homeless set up camp inside and deer give birth to their fawns here - thus we have contradictory life among the dead, as described by John Gillis in his 2011 article, "Holy Rood: A Cemetery with a Tell-Tale Heart." 

“The patchy, browning grass is dotted with headstones and funeral monuments, which are mostly toppled over or sinking into the ground.  Weeds break through the asphalt path that winds around the hilly graveyard.  Leaves remain unraked, and untrimmed bushes overwhelm gravestones. “ - Six Feet Under GU

 In 1931, Holy Trinity’s original cemetery was discovered during a construction project on Georgetown University’s main campus (currently the site of its Reiss Science Center). By this time the church had long ago filled it up and had been using the larger Holy Rood Cemetery, about ten blocks away. For the next twenty years, the old original graveyard went untouched.

“Just a few years after being unexpectedly uncovered, the graveyard also became an established part of campus lore. In February of 1939, The Hoya ran an article claiming that a century earlier “the burial place was a playground of strange apparitions known as ‘Witch’s Heads.’ On hot nights, ‘transparent, luminous globes’ floated over the cemetery, terrorizing students.

The Hoya’s explanation for these ‘Witch’s Heads’ was that at the time, bodies were buried unembalmed in crude coffins, so their decomposition released gases, particularly phosphorous, that seeped through the ground and would hover above the graves.” - Georgetown Voice, 10/29/2009

In 1953, the land on which the smaller cemetery was located was developed to make way for the new science center. Many of the graves were moved to Holy Rood. I imagine the Witch’s Heads disappeared after the bodies were reinterred, since they usually place the crumbling coffins and bones in a new box, or a concrete crypt. [The photo above is actually from Mt. Moriah Cemetery in West Philadelphia; when I read the piece about the hovering (yellow) phosphorus, I immediately thought of this image.]

Holy Rood Cemetery was closed to new burials in 1984. As of 2011, there are no plans to develop the land, nor is there any upkeep done to the cemetery.  It is just one of countless small graveyards (and even some very large cemeteries) in the U.S. that exist in a limbo of disrepair. A glimmer of hope exists, however, for Holy Rood - there is currently discussion among parishioners of Holy Trinity Church to negotiate with Georgetown University to have the cemetery returned so that improvements can be made.

"Holy Rood is no longer an operational cemetery. It is in very sad repair, although there has been an  improvement in grounds keeping in the past few years.Numerous gravestones are destroyed or  overturned." - Holy Rood Cemetery  Gravestone Transcriptions

References and Further Reading:

Holy Rood: A Cemetery With a Tell-Tale Heart
Holy Rood Cemetery  Gravestone Transcriptions

Six Feet Under GU - The Georgetown Voice
How Temple University Destroyed Monument Cemetery