The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [111]
The term burial brings to mind something hidden and covered, but the word cemetery comes from Greek and means “sleeping chamber.” It’s a softer approach to death, and cemeteries historically came to be places of serene recreation. Trees, flowers and streams became the natural monuments to match the stone ones. Family members once bought tickets and rode streetcars to visit the resting places of loved ones. When cemeteries moved away from city churchyards, they sprouted in the surrounding countryside, and the idea of returning to the earth what once belonged to her became all the more fitting. Over time these towns of the dead came to reveal a city’s history, its stories etched in stone.
More than 125 years have passed, and still, wreaths of fresh flowers stand in Elmwood, browned and crisped by the September sun, on the tombstones of Charles Parsons, Louis Schuyler and the Martyrs of Memphis. It is a reminder—they have not been forgotten.
Old roads with names like Toof, Porter and Wellford wind through the grounds of Elmwood, where a soldier from the American Revolution and Civil War generals are buried. Tombstones, new and old, pockmark the grass like a garden of granite and marble. Some are grand, tall, ornate. Stone angels and monuments of all shapes and sizes stand in the geometry of sunlight and shade. Others are smaller, no more than two feet long, where small children have been buried.
In the middle of the cemetery is a grassy plane, strangely vacant. There are no granite tombs or crumbling concrete, just a sun-washed, treeless patch of green known as “No Man’s Land.” Here, 1,500 unidentified bodies are buried. At one time, their skin burned with yellow fever; now they lie in a cool, dark place where long ago their arms and legs, hands and feet, were intertwined for eternity.
Dr. William Armstrong is buried along Park Avenue in the ground beside his wife, who died on the same date as her husband, September 20, forty-six years later. Their children lay around them. A few feet away is the monument for Gideon Johnson Pillow, the general under whom Armstrong served as a surgeon during the Civil War.
Up the grassy incline from Armstrong is a flat pyramid of stone. On the four sides of the pyramid it reads Constance, Thecla, Frances and Ruth. The dates follow one another in quick succession— September 9, September 12, September 17, October 4. The point of the pyramid is the year 1878, and their bodies are buried in the shape of the cross, their tombstone standing at center.
Across the road from “No Man’s Land,” a tall cross atop a monument reaches heavenward. The cross has been mottled by time, streaked by years of rain. Two names and dates are carved into the stone, but the inscription that reads priests and died of yellow fever has grown shallow with age. Here, Charles Carroll Parsons and Louis Schuyler are buried together. One lived in Memphis for years surrounded by family and parishioners; the other lived in Memphis only ten days.
On November 1, 2005, the superintendent, Sunny Handback, retired from Elmwood. He had worked there since he was sixteen years old. He had scattered dirt across countless graves, occasionally meeting an old man or woman visiting the cemetery who would tell stories about yellow fever and the year 1878, when wagons full of bodies arrived, and citizens just walked into the cemetery, a corpse thrown over their shoulders and a shovel in their hands, to bury bodies anywhere they could find space. Even in recent years, groundskeepers have dug into a plot only to find the bones of an unmarked yellow fever victim buried there.
In 1878, another man held the same position as Handback. He worked as the superintendent of Elmwood during the yellow fever epidemic, and he lived on the grounds with his daughter, Grace, the “Graveyard Girl.” In the cemetery’s red leather