Vandals Strike in Wilmington Cemetery

Around mid-summer 2014, I was getting my car fixed at the Saab dealer in Wilmington, Delaware. After the sizable extraction of money from my wallet, I grabbed a burger and a Coke from a nearby fast food emporium. What better place to eat lunch than the nearby cemetery (its not just postal workers and cops who do this, you know). So I drove to Riverview Cemetery about half a mile down the road.

"Abiding faith and hope in a glorious reunion"

On entering the north side off Market Street (which is the newer half of the 1872 cemetery), I was a bit distracted by all the headstones that appeared to be knocked over, off their bases. I drove around to find some shade in which to park, and noted many more knocked-over headstones and small obelisks. Odd. I’d been in here many times before and would have definitely noticed this. Was it because the grass was cut so low that I’m seeing this? I’d been here before where the grass had grown kind of tall. Maybe I just never noticed them?

Doorless crypt

I stopped in the shade of some trees near a crypt which had its door removed; interesting stained glass window at the back. I ate my lunch and just got out of the car to photograph the stained glass when I realized a pickup truck was headed down the road toward me – I was blocking the road. There’s usually no activity at Riverview so it didn’t occur to me to pull off the road.

I moved my car to one side and then got out with my camera, to make it very obvious to the driver what I was doing there. Obviously the crypt had at one time lost its door to thieves so I didn't want anyone to think I was casing it out to steal the stained glass. Much thievery has occurred here over the years - you can tell by the blocked up doorways of the larger mausoleums. The truck stopped and the woman driving it looked at me and I said “Hi.” She asked if she could help me and I just told her I stopped to eat my lunch and take some pictures. I assumed she had some authority here so I wanted her to know that I was not up to no good. She probably assumed this, since I was driving a bright blue turbo Saab convertible – not the vehicle of choice for thieves and vandals.

Blocked up mausoleum

I mentioned to her that it appeared that many headstones had been knocked over. She told me this had only happened the previous week (July 15, 2014) – the work of vandals. Seventy monuments and other grave markers in all had been pushed off their bases. Given that horrible situation, I told her that it was great that she stopped me to see what I was up to. I introduced myself as a Board member of the Friends of Mount Moriah Cemetery, Inc. in Philadelphia, an organization of which she was well aware. She was the Secretary on the Board of the Friends of Riverview Cemetery.

Cylindrical grave markers displaced from their bases

Security is a major issue when you have limited funds to protect your space. Neither Riverview nor Mount Moriah have intact fencing, gates, or security patrols. Volunteers are left to patrol the grounds when they can. Local police sometimes cruise through, or park for a while. I myself have stopped people at Mount Moriah and asked if I could help them. Usually, they are there for a good reason, but sometimes not. You don’t want to lock the cemetery up and prevent visitors from accessing their loved ones’ graves while you’re keeping out vandals, scofflaws, and ne’er do wells. It is a challenge. After I posted the photograph below (with my blue car in it) on Facebook, someone made the comment, "One day the idiots responsible will go to visit their mother's grave and find it like this. Then they'll know the true cost of their criminality." Couldn't have said it better myself.

We struck up quite a conversation, the two of us there in Riverview, seeing many parallels between the cemeteries and our Friends groups. At some point the woman said, “What are the chances we would run into each other like this?” I replied, “Well, actually the chances are pretty good that two cemetery nerds would be in the same cemetery at the same time.” So I’ll make a few introductions and perhaps the two Friends groups can share some ideas to their mutual benefit. Like they say, everyone you meet knows something that you don’t!

Vandalized headstones at Riverview Cemetery

I had actually written about Riverview Cemetery back in 2012 (click here to read), when I noticed that the place seemed to be having a lot more attention paid to it than I was used to seeing. I’d been coming here since the early 2000s, when I first started having my previous Saabs repaired down the road at Sports Car Service. Weeds used to be waist high, but then new management took over in 2008 and things turned around. The Friends of Riverview Cemetery was actually granted legal ownership of the cemetery and through the hard work of these volunteers, Riverview Cemetery continues to be an active burial site. This is a goal for Mount Moriah Cemetery in Philadelphia/Yeadon – to once again have active burials once the ownership situation is resolved.

Riverview Cemetery chapel

It really is quite a nasty blow to Wilmington's Riverview Cemetery to have had all this damage done; the estimated repair cost is about $20,000, i.e., to reset all the stones and monuments. The owners, the Friends group, barely has enough money to cut the grass. I guess one of the useful things I did learn from this travesty is that so many grave markers, by design, merely sit on a stone base, without actually being attached to it. Perhaps modern headstone carvers should make headstones with steel dowels that fit into the base, to secure the stone. I have seen this with older marble headstones.

Anyone with information about the vandalism at Riverview Cemetery, please call the Wilmington police Confidential Tip Line at (302)576-3990.

References and Further Reading:
Riverview Cemetery website
Vandals damage 70 tombstones at cemetery
70 Headstones Toppled At Wilmington Cemetery

Christmas in Wilmington

I bought my car a new water pump for Christmas - a surprise gift for both of us. It had been slowly leaking coolant for the last few months so I’ve been slowly considering having it checked out. It was one of those situations familiar to any car owner - you expect it to be a leaking hose and it turns out to be a $450 repair.

Riverview Cemetery, Wilmington, Delaware

Anyhow, I have my car maintained by Sports Car Service, a Saab specialty shop in Wilmington, Delaware. Its twenty-five miles from where I live in Philly, but tearing down I-95 in a turbo Saab puts me there in an almost embarrassingly short amount of time. I typically take my camera with me and walk around the neighborhood while my car is being attended to. There’s also a cemetery about a quarter mile away. (Put me in a cemetery with a camera and you’ve just killed a quick hour!)

When they broke the news to me that I needed a new water pump, I was easting brefass at McDonald’s down the road. Not my first choice, but since the wonderful greasy-spoon old Post House Diner across the street closed (!) since my last visit, I had no choice. The Post House was actually a Pony Express stop back in the 1800s, if you can believe that! I don’t think they’d scraped the grease off the grills since that time (which, of course, added extra flavor to the food). So there I was with an extra two hours on my hands. May as well walk up to Riverview Cemetery, there on Market Street in Wilmington. Restaurants may close up shop, but you can rely on a cemetery to keep its doors open for you.

Riverview is actually about two miles from the Delaware River, so there is no actual river view. It’s bisected by North Market Street, the north side of the cemetery being newer with some grand monuments and mausoleums. The south side is older, with quite meager stones and grave markers. I’d never spent much time on the south side, but seeing as I had a couple hours, why not?

Dupont Nemours Mansion, Wilmington, DE (ref)

The old office/gatehouse on the south side was being renovated, getting a new roof for Christmas. The entire cemetery was under new management, as the signs indicated. They’d apparently also participated in a local city garden competition, which tells you the new owners are serious about the upkeep of the cemetery (with all the local Dupont family estates, competition in this regard must be rather stiff!).

Old and new (condos) construction, Riverside Cemetery, Wilmington, DE

Riverview has been in operation since 1872, with a few glitches along the way. Most recently, the cemetery had been abandoned (I’m guessing for at least a decade between the mid- 1990s to the mid 2000s). In 2009 it was taken over by a Friends group which is, of course, the best Christmas present an abandoned cemetery can receive. Since then, it has been cleaned up and there are active burials occurring.

I remember walking around the newer side of the cemetery ten years ago and the weeds were a couple feet high. There are early-2000s accounts on the web of descendants trying in vain to get information about family interred at Riverview. Supposedly, people were being buried with no records being kept at all, and several homeless people were sleeping in the cemetery. Typical occurrences in an abandoned cemetery. All that appears to have changed.

It was cold on water pump day as I walked around the old side of Riverview Cemetery, so I only spent about an hour there. However, something unusual caught my eye the moment I set foot on the grounds. There were many – and I mean scores of − old marble headstones lying face up in the ground, carefully excavated out of the sod. Some were flush with the grass, with their edges carefully weed-whacked, others obviously dug out of several inches of soil and cleaned off – possibly for the first time in decades.

Excavated headstone, Riverview Cemetery

It’s not unusual to see this sort of thing in most cemeteries, but it was obvious that something of a project had recently occurred at Riverview. The cemetery has recently been taken over by a Friends group, with actual transfer of legal ownership to the group. Therefore, it is no longer abandoned. The volunteers appear to be digging out many of the old toppled stones and making them visible - quite a Christmas present to the descendants of people buried here. And there are many buried here – about 36,000 interments on Riverview’s 87 acres (according to Riverview's website). The soil may have protected the stones to some degree, as most inscriptions are readable.

If I had not given my cemetery sleigh a new water pump that day, I would not have had the time to make such a studied visit to Riverview Cemetery. While I wasn’t thrilled to drop $450, I’m glad to have spent so much time here, to appreciate the small details I could have easily missed. The visit subsequently gave me a reason to do some related web searching. It was so heartening to discover the existence of the Friends group, an on-line presence for the cemetery, and contact information – all evidence that people care a great deal about their history. Merry Christmas − I’ll leave you with this notation from the Riverview Cemetery website (http://www.riverviewcem.com/news07.htm):

"INTERESTING FACT:

Riverview's early interment books list cause of death and some terms such as Apoplexy, Dropsy, Bright's Disease, and La Grippe were not familiar to us. So we have defined a few terms: Apoplexy was used to describe any sudden death that began with a sudden loss of consciousness; heart attack and ruptured cerebral or aortic aneurysms fall under this category. Dropsy or edema refer to the same condition; an increase in interstitial fluid in any organ resulting in swelling. Bright's disease is a historical classification of kidney diseases first described in 1827. La Grippe was one of several names used to describe the influenza that caused a flu pandemic in 1918."

References and Further Reading:

Riverview Cemetery website

Friends of Historic Riverview Cemetery

Cemetery Rain

Sitting on the bed at night playing my guitar, all is peaceful as I watch the rain against the window. The colors continually shift into new Impressionistic patterns as the rain and glass refract the glare from street lights, traffic lights, and cars. The colors have a liquid flow not unlike the lava lamp my childhood dentist had in his waiting room. 

With all this tranquility, I naturally think about cemetery rain. Great name for a song, huh? "Cemetery Rain."

More specifically, about how no one ever visits a cemetery when it’s raining. I used to be one of those people. But a few days later, I find myself driving around Cathedral Cemetery (est. 1876) in New Castle County, Delaware, hopping out of my car here and there to grab a few shots with an umbrella over my head. When the rain gets heavier, I simply shoot out the car window. With the exception of the occasional funeral, I’m alone in a cemetery when it’s raining. It’s a very quiet place. As Cathedral Cemetery’s website says, “when our temporal world requires refuge, our cemeteries offer solace.”

 

Being here brings to mind the old Velvet Underground song, “Who Loves the Sun:”

"Who loves the rain
Who cares that it makes flowers
Who cares that it makes showers
Since you broke my heart
Who loves the sun
Who cares that it is shining
Who cares what it does
Since you broke my heart."

When you play guitar while looking out at the rain, you find yourself playing to the rhythm of the weather, the rain gently tapping against the window pane. Which is not unlike visiting a cemetery in the rain – you play to the rhythm of the weather. You’d be surprised at the new things you see, once you get yourself past the inconvenience of it all − strange dampness forming on headstones, water dripping off plant leaves, marble monuments glistening. The odd patterns that formed on this mausoleum above as the moisture soaked into the granite made me realize that this stoic material is not impervious to change. 

I wouldn’t have even noticed this flat-to-the-ground headstone if it wasn’t for the wet, red artificial flower resting forlornly at its base. A lot of people assume headstones just fall over, and that is why they’re flush with the ground. Who would’ve known they do this on purpose in Scotland? In Glasgow, any rickety headstone is placed flat for safety reasons. Unfortunately, a playing child was once killed when an old tombstone fell on him, prompting the practice.  

It sounds counter-intuitive, but you really can’t take a bad photograph during a cemetery rain. You would think it would be severely limiting, given the conditions. Sure you may not be able to control every aspect of the photographs you make, but nature may help you create something you would never have thought possible. Like playing guitar during a rain, it alters your mood. When I photograph cemeteries under less than ideal weather conditions, it’s very much like allowing the rain and color patterns on my window to influence my playing. Sometimes it doesn’t work out, but it always adds a new creative dimension that helps me leave the temporal world. When I can’t quite coax what I feel out of the instrument, however, I take solace in the words of guitar virtuoso Leo Kottke, who  said, “A guitar sounds good even if you drop it on the floor.”