ARTFUL FAREWELL – Intricate carvings offered solace to those left behind by the dearly departed. This stone is in a Sandwich cemetery.
A stroll through the Cape’s graveyards
There are 135 old burial grounds on Cape Cod with stones pre-dating 1880, containing over 38,000 names with stones carved by 46 carvers, 15 of whom lived on Cape Cod. Their stories are a fascinating record of the changing attitudes regarding death and loss.
A gravestone was an expensive luxury and a great deal of consideration was given to the words and images that would be placed on them. The earliest decorated stones reflected the religious beliefs of the iconophobic Puritans, who found the carving of gravestones a compromise. Thus, the first symbols they allowed themselves to use represented the transition from the material world to the spiritual world. Hollow-eyed skulls, often with wings, were somber illustrations of the early Puritans' grim emphasis on human mortality and the moldering away of the flesh. Downright scary, bones, an hourglass, or flames of hell were often part of these “death’s heads” and revealed the Puritanical fear and pessimism. Vines, flowers, and abstract designs often frame the stone and add a beautiful decorative element that adds balance to the subject matter.
The scary visages gave way to less somber descriptions, the skulls becoming more abstract and less grim in demeanor until they looked more like round heads. Beginning around 1730, the same time period of the religious revival known as the Great Awakening, the death's head became more human in appearance and more sophisticated in design and execution. Friendly faced winged cherubs now symbolized the soul's ascension to heaven, with the sense that now there was a blissful afterlife that awaited the righteous. “Medusa” heads are quirky variations on this theme in which wings have given way to wavy, energized lines of hair that now seem to propel the individual towards heaven.
Portrait gravestones start appearing on stones dating to the late 17th century and there are a few gravestones on Cape Cod that display realistic figures from the waist up and bring all of this symbolic imagery down to earth. Sarah Fessenden’s grave (1794) in Sandwich at the Old Burial Ground is a wonderful example in which a young woman is depicted with long hair, her portrait flanked by wilting tulips, underscoring that both beauty and life are fleeting. She has no wings, because she is of this world, confident and sophisticated.
The epitaphs that appear on the bottoms of many stones also add credence to this explanation of change in form over time. Early epitaphs, with death's head designs, stress either decay or life's brevity. In Sandwich, Benjamin Fessenden’s (d.1746) lengthy epitaph begins with “Here mouldering lies.” By contrast, a grave in Woods Hole dating to 1798 shows a softening sensibility in its lines, “Sweet is the Sleep that here we take
Till in Christ's arms we do awake.” Death is no longer scary as it is just a passage on the way to heaven.
Among the more interesting gravestones are those of sailors, of which there are many on Cape Cod. The simplest ones include an image of an anchor, while others are decorated with depictions of ships, some depicted as they are being tossed about by gales, and carved with epitaphs that are often quite poignant. One gravestone in Yarmouth Port Woodside Cemetery memorializes Charles Lewis Hallett (d.1845) who “…lost his life in attempting to reach the shore, To save the lives of those on board.” Then there is the gravestone for Ebenezer and James Scudder (d. 1729) located in the Centerville Congregational Cemetery, on which there is no image, just the almost incredible story of two young brothers, who, when their ship sank in the midst of winter, heroically set to saving others rather than save themselves and in so doing died as a result of exertion and exposure.
As the 19th century made its entrance, rising nationalism and secularism swept away much of the religious imagery. The excavations in Pompeii in 1748 provided inspiration for the new artistic vocabulary, and in fact, spurred the Greek Revival period in this country. Gravestones from this time are often decorated with an urn, weeping willow or combination of the two. Their appearance is logical as the Greeks used urns to keep the ashes of the cremated and the willow was a symbol of the Underworld goddess Persephone. What is significant, as scholars suggest, is that these images and their accompanying epitaphs indicate a shift in emphasis away from the fate of the soul of the deceased to the mourning of those left behind. On the headstone of Rebekah Jenkins, (d.1797), who is buried in Falmouth, the epitaph reveals this new sensibility: “She's dead, she's gone, oh doleful sound, Snatch't from her friends lies underground.”
Stones from this period become enlivened by a whole host of images, including broken columns, inverted torches and spilled flowerpots which were meant to convey a simple message that a life was ended too soon. Others were meant to give hope to grieving loved ones, and are marked with ferns, chains, wreaths, clasped hands, animals, bibles and pointing fingers which direct the mourners to look toward heaven. Here is peace and rest and the worries of the world can now be left behind.
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