I am a nerd, if you haven’t figured that out yet.

One aspect of my nerd-dom is that I love documentaries. The more obscure the subject is, the more I’m likely to watch. While this boosts my desirability as a trivia contestant, I’m still pretty weak on the sports categories.

Last year, I watched an episode of “Nova” on PBS about the history of the elevator. While Elisha Otis (who started the Otis Elevator Company, still in operation today) did not invent the elevator, his innovations in their critical braking mechanisms changed everything. Before that, elevators were often viewed as deathtraps and accidental deaths did occur. But by the 1900s, elevator safety was almost taken for granted.

Elisha Graves Otis, 1811-1861. His elevator braking innovations are still in use today.

Or so I thought, until I learned about Riley Owen Medlock.

Norcross City Cemetery is located off busy Buford Highway, tucked beside a large sports field. It is a medium-sized cemetery with several generations of local families buried there, plenty of history. Ivey Brown Wingo (1890-1941), a catcher for the 1919 World Champion Cincinnati Reds, is the most famous.

While hunting for a grave for a Find a Grave photo request, I came upon the graves of John O. Medlock and his wife, Elizabeth Medlock. If that name sounds familar, it is. Medlock Bridge Road is a major traffic artery in Gwinnett County, north of Atlanta.

Elizabeth’s death date was not recorded on the monument and that always gets me curious. Why? Thanks to Ancestry.com, I figured out she had died in 1921. For reasons unknown, nobody inscribed that on her grave.

Successful businessman R.O. Medlock owned a number of buildings in Norcross.

But it was the eldest child of John and Elizabeth’s that got my attention. Riley Owen (R.O.) Medlock was a prominent businessman in Norcross. Among the buildings Medlock owned was the city’s first brick structure, which currently houses a successful Italian restaurant. He also founded and operated the Medlock Harness Company, which helped make him a wealthy man.

In his 40s, Medlock wanted to expand his real estate interests. He rented office space in Atlanta in what was then called the Empire Building. At 14 floors, it was one of the tallest buildings in the city. Later, it was known as the Citizens & Southern National Bank Building and today, Georgia State University’s J. Mack Robinson School of Business owns it.

Located on the corner of Marietta and Broad Streets, construction of the Empire Building was completed in 1901.

I doubt that many current GSU students are aware of the horrific event that took place there on July 25, 1908.

On that day, for reasons not fully known, R.O. Medlock fell down the Empire Building’s elevator shaft to his death. When I read this, my first thought was that he had less than three seconds to realize what was happening. His death was probably instantaneous. I hope for his sake that it was.

I could find little about the incident but this article in the July 28, 1908 issue of the Atlanta Constitution contained this bit of information:

“Though a thorough investigation was instituted by the manager of the Empire building, W. B. Stovall, assisted by the engineer, R. C. Boone, the fatality is still unaccountable, except that it was one of those accidents that will happen in the best regulated affairs. No blame is attached to the elevator boy, and he will retain his position. As there was no eyewitness to the accident, no inquest was held.”

If such a thing happened today (and it does happen on rare occasions), you can bet there’d have been a thorough police investigation performed. Medlock’s widow, Emma Knox Medlock, would have had grounds to sue. But such things were unheard of at the time.

That evening, Medlock’s body was carried by wagon back to Norcross. Emma was no stranger to tragedy. She and Medlock had seven children together (he had one daughter with his first wife, who died in 1885) but only three survived past childhood. She did not remarry after her husband’s death and she is buried beside him.

According to the 1930 Census, Emma was still living in Norcross with her unmarried daughter, Minnie, while another daughter, Rowena, and her family lived next door. Emma and Minnie rented some of their rooms out to single female school teachers. The house is now known as the Medlock/Simpson House, the Simpson family having purchased it from Emma’s daughters after her death. It was sitting vacant and in bad shape until a few years ago when Don and Christine McClure purchased it, then restored it.

R.O. Medlock’s house on Thrasher Street in 1888. Photo courtesy of Georgia Archives.

The Medlock/Simpson House today in downtown Norcross.

Around Halloween, ghost tours are held in Norcross City Cemetery. Riley Owen Medlock’s story is among those shared. It is a stunning tale, to be sure. But a sudden accidental death, especially one that could have been prevented, is doubly tragic.

And even in the “best regulated affairs”, it can all be over in less than three seconds.

Ever since MTV’s “The Real World” first aired in 1992, people have been fascinated by “reality based” television. I use that term loosely. Supposedly, these shows are unscripted but I believe that varies widely from show to show.

There’s even been a few about funeral homes. The first was probably A&E’s “Family Plots” in 2003 that covered a family-run funeral home in a San Diego suburb. It only lasted a few years but I thought it was done fairly tastefully. More recently, TLC introduced “Best Funeral Ever” about a Dallas-based funeral home and the over-the-top funerals they provide. That’s one I haven’t watched yet but I plan to TiVo it (as I do anything I want to watch these days to avoid commercials).

So I wasn’t surprised when I stumbled across a new show called “Funeral Boss” debuting on Discovery Fit & Health. I’m sure one of the first thoughts some people have is “Are you kidding me? How depressing that has to be, and creepy!”.

Naturally, my reaction was quite the opposite.

“Funeral Boss” follows the lives of the Harris family, led by the father, William (Bill) Harris, Sr. Their family-owned funeral home is located in St. Louis, Mo. Bill and Garnet’s (his wife) four oldest children work there. But the show does look beyond just funerals to highlight their personal lives.

Bill Harris is the Funeral Boss. Photo courtesy of Discovery Fit & Health.

The Harris family is African-American. I’ve always had a keen interest in black funeral traditions, such as homegoing celebrations. The history of African-American funeral service is a multi-faceted topic I plan to explore here very soon.

In previous blog posts, I’ve talked about how in the past, in the South, there were different cemeteries for blacks and whites. When I moved to Georgia in 1973, there were what people called “white funeral homes” and “black funeral homes”. Even in the post-integration era, this separation was very apparent. As a child ignorant of the Civil Rights movement at the time, it made no sense to me. While this is no longer the case, funeral service remains an industry still somewhat divided by color.

Amid society’s desire to encourage more diversity, this creates some interesting challenges for African-American funeral directors. Sara Marsden of US Funerals Online sums it up better than I can:

The question is, how does one either promote being a “black” funeral home, or locate one, in an era when mentioning “black” is not PC? Many African-American owned and operated funeral homes will openly acknowledge that they are a “black funeral home”, and obviously there are certain areas in the United States where it is expected that black funeral homes operate.

Like the Harris’ business, African-American funeral homes are often family owned and operated. The funeral director is usually a much respected person who is a leader in the church and community. In large urban areas, this is less common since traditional black churches tend to be bigger and the congregations more transient than in the past.

Bill, the Harris family patriarch, is a dynamic fellow in more ways than one. Not only does he have a lively personality, his snappy wardrobe is a sight to behold. But at the same time, you get a genuine sense that this man cares deeply about helping his clients because he already knows so many of them personally.

You might think a show about the funeral industry would be dreary but it isn’t. In the first episode, viewers meet the oldest son, William Jr., who is cleaning up his act after experiencing drug issues and a brief prison stint. He and middle brother, Windall, are given the task of transporting the deceased to the church and conducting the funeral service.

Bill Harris and his son, Windall (left), comfort a mother at the funeral of her 19-year-old son. Photo courtesy of Discovery Fit & Health.

The hearse pulls up to the church but guess what? It’s the wrong church! This is made all the more comic by Windall’s admission that he plans to kept quiet about it to his father, knowing Bill would raise the roof if he knew. William Jr. takes it all in stride and comments, “The church is a block up the street, so it all worked out fine.”

“Funeral Boss” reminds me of a family at my old church who operates a funeral home. Mr. Mowell was, and still is, a much loved man in the community. He is retired now, and his son, David, runs the business. But back in the day, you never knew when Mister C.J. would be paged to answer a death call. One minute he might be laughing with you over cheese straws at a party in the fellowship hall, the next he’d be gone.

That’s something you learn from “Funeral Boss” that transcends race and time. Running a funeral home is never a nine to five job. You don’t turn it off at the end of the day because you may be summoned to pick up a body at at 2 a.m. In many ways, it’s a calling. You have to have a great deal of compassion and patience to help people at one of the most difficult times in their lives.

Not everyone has that unique ability. Those that do, like the Harris and Mowell families, have a special place in this world.

That’s a reality I can take comfort in.

To get a glimpse of “Funeral Boss”, here’s a clip.

To read more about the Harris family and the show, check this out.

It’s impossible to spend much time with me before I start talking about the Chicks. Not the Dixie Chicks (watch out, Earl) but the Church Chicks. That’s how we started because most of us met in church.

In 1996, I worked at the Home Mission Board (now known as the North American Mission Board or NAMB) of the Southern Baptist Convention. That’s where I met Sarah, who introduced me to Lisa. They invited me to visit their church and I did. That’s where we eventually met Beverly and Tiffany. Sarah also introduced us to Regina and Mary (now living in Michigan). I introduced the Chicks to my college roommate (we became roommates again years later), Megan. That makes eight Chicks. When we get together, we cackle a lot. And we like to eat. Because in the South, food and friendship go together like a knife and fork.

Meet the Church Chicks!

We lead busy lives so a Chick road trip is a rare thing but when it comes up, I try to be a part of it. When we started planning an adventure to Cloudland Canyon State Park in Northwest Georgia over Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, the Chicks knew that they were in for their first experience in cemetery hopping. Thankfully, they were excited at the prospect and let me plan some excursions.

Cemetery hopping by yourself is fun. But with three other people, it’s even better because, as my son wisely says, more eyes see more stuff. That means finding graves faster. It also means I get to introduce people to one of my hobbies while praying they don’t think I’m off my rocker. But the Chicks already know I’m quirky like that and accept it, and even encourage it.

Hopping in a rural locale is appealing to me. The cemeteries tend to be smaller and often include several generations of the same family. You can also see the same names popping up in different cemeteries. Then when you start seeing those names in the local roads, a history of the area starts taking shape. For example, at one point we were driving on Hinkle Road. Sure enough, at one of the cemeteries we stopped at, there were Hinkles buried there.

Our first hop was in Mount Pleasant Cemetery and from the beginning it was different. There was a tent up, indicating a funeral was happening soon. We saw two young men in uniform (I believe they were Marines) and something you don’t see in the middle of nowhere very often. A man dressed in a kilt practicing on the bagpipes.

I hesitated to even stop, but since the three men were on the far side of the cemetery and casually talking, we decided to give it a try. I gave the Chicks some names and we started looking around. Beverly found one first and then I think Sarah was next. We didn’t find all of the graves we were looking for because some were really old and those tend to be impossible to read or are broken. When we saw the funeral procession coming down the road, we left as a show of respect to the deceased and the mourners.

About five miles up the road was Paynes Chapel Cemetery, a picturesque and well maintained property. The graves were easy to find here, even the one hiding under the side of a bush.

Megan hunts for a grave.

On our way back to Atlanta, I found one last cemetery to stop at but this one was much harder to find. A bit off the beaten path. But those are some of the best cemeteries because they don’t get a lot of attention. Beverly’s GPS proved to be invaluable to us.

Wesley Chapel Methodist Cemetery is off Trion Highway (in case you wanted to know). The cemetery is on the hill behind the church and like many of the other country cemeteries I have seen, is well tended. But the first thing we noticed was this clever little sign.

I’m tempted to call Bill since he sounds like a good person to know.

Also unexpected were two dogs lounging at the edge of the cemetery. One was a tiny little thing but the other larger dog looked like a pit bull mix. When Beverly got to that side of the cemetery, she soon found out that the bigger dog wanted no part of us. We left him alone and he left us alone for the rest of our visit. I did not want my friends to end up hopping into a dog’s bared teeth.

Now seasoned hoppers, we located the graves we were looking for pretty quickly. It’s always interesting to see the different styles of headstones and monuments. This one, for John Adam Wilson and his wife, Mary, looked a little different than the others.

I’m at a loss as to why they were buried this way. It does not look like vaults were used.

The inscription on a monument in front of the graves of John’s parents, Benjamin Capus and Elizabeth Lucinda Wilson, also got my attention. It reads:

An amiable father here lies at rest/As ever God with His image blest/The friend of man/The friend of truth/The friend of age/The guide of youth.

Benjamin Capus Wilson and Elizabeth Lucinda Adams Wilson

Benjamin Capus Wilson, according to Ancestry.com, was a farmer in Walker County who served in the 34th Georgia Infantry as a Confederate soldier. He and Elizabeth had nine children together. Most of them, like their son John, are buried closely around them.

Sarah and Beverly take a look at the inscription on Benjamin Capus Wilson’s monument.

On the drive home, I found myself wanting to come back to this neck of the woods again. Many of the graves I saw had been documented on FiAG but had no pictures to go with them. It looks like there aren’t a lot of FiAG volunteers in that area compared to Atlanta, where there are several of us to take on photo requests.

Sound like a future Chick roadtrip, doesn’t it?

Sarah, Megan, Beverly and me after hiking to the bottom of Cloudland Canyon.

In my college days, I worked as an intern for the Athens (Ga.) Daily News. One of my tasks was to be at the office on Sunday nights to take any obituary calls that came in. This was before the Internet and e-mails, so most funeral homes just called us and I took their obits over the phone.

It was through one of these funeral home contacts that I first heard the term “sitting up with the dead”. But it was never referred to in our obits like that. We were advised to write “the body will lay in state at the home of Mrs. XYZ” instead. It did nothing to make it sound less bizarre.

Even in the late 80s, few families were still practicing the ritual of bringing the body of a loved one back to the home so they could stay up all night with it before the funeral the following day. The communities that seemed to still adhere to this practice tended to be up in the mountains where old traditions die hard.

In decades past, many smaller rural communities had no access to a mortuary or funeral home. The tasks of preparing the body for burial and constructing the casket were done not by a mortician but the community members themselves. According to Southern newspaper columnist Emily Sells, this was a common practice in her small Tennessee town of Highland Mountain.

Web sites exist that show you step by step how to build your own coffin ahead of time. That’s the ultimate DIY project.

The men did the building of a casket, and the job of lining and dressing the inside as well as the outside of the casket was done by the women. The material used for the building of a casket, the labor involved, including the sewing, the batting and fabric used, was not something the family of the deceased person paid for. It was all done without any expectation of money exchanging hands. Neighbors helping neighbors was a way of life then.

It’s hard to imagine, in the mobile, disposable society we now live in, that this kind of concern for your neighbors was something upon which you could rely. But it was.

So what about sitting up with the dead? Why did families do this? Again, much of this took place before the commonality of funeral homes. After the body had been washed and dressed (embalming was very rare), it would be laid out on a large table or wooden board. If the weather was warm, a veil might be placed over the body to protect it from insects. Or someone might have the task of manning the fly swatter to take care of such things.

Sitting up with a dead body had a practical purpose as well. Along with flies being a problem, rodents could be an issue if the body was left alone overnight. So along with being on insect watch, you had to be on the lookout for mice (or worse).

Ever wonder where the ritual of sending flowers to a funeral came from? Sometimes the deceased, for several reasons, could become…a bit fragrant. The aroma from the profusion of flowers around the deceased helped mask the odor. So all those flowers did more than look pretty.

Other traditions accompanied sitting up with the dead. My mother still remembers how, when my great-grandmother died in rural Kentucky, that the family sat up all night with her body. The mirrors in the room were covered. Here’s why:

The tradition of covering a mirror with a cloth when someone dies initially goes back to ancient times. When a person had died through violent or suspicious circumstances all the mirrors in the home would be covered immediately by cloth. The reason for this was the belief that a returning spirit could use a looking glass as a portal. – taken from “The Weird World of Death”.

From an exhibition on Victorian funeral customs held in Denton, Texas in 2012.

In later times, mirrors were covered because it was believed that if the living caught their reflection in one, they would join the dead in the near future. It was also believed that a mirror falling and breaking of its own accord was a sign that a death in the family would happen soon. While these superstitions seem almost quaint now, they were taken quite seriously.

In the Jewish faith, one of their mourning traditions is to “sit shiva” at the home of the deceased (or principal mourner) for seven days. The word “shiva” means seven in Hebrew. Family and friends visit to pay their repsects. They, too, cover their mirrors but for different reasons according to orthodox rabbi Ari Enkin.

Mirrors are covered in a shiva house (a place of mourning) for two reasons. The primary reason is because prayer services take place there and one must ensure that no one faces a mirror during prayer. The other reason is to emphasize that a mourner avoids vanity during the shiva, focusing on their loved one rather than themselves during this period. A mourner is permitted, however, to look into a mirror to ensure their hair is in order, etc.

A less spooky Southern funeral tradition is bringing massive amounts of food to the home of those in mourning. Baptists, especially, are reputed for doing this and it still happens today in many Southern communities. Transplants from up North (like I once was) or out West are usually astounded by it. The fact is that in the past, a funeral did not always take place as fast as it does now. Family would come in from far and wide, and often stay for days. They needed to be fed so the community again pitched in their support via pies and casseroles.

I can attest to the fact, too, that when a loved one dies, the last thing you want to do is cook. To know that someone else has that covered is a true blessing. There’s even a joke among Baptists that we like to eat our way through our grief.

If I could have my own funeral catered, this would be on the table along with some peach cobbler.

And who wants to mourn on an empty stomach?

Now it was time to return to Rogers Cemetery to document the graves and take photos. I still feel a bit guilty for initially thinking about the place in negative terms. It may not have fancy gates or a gazebo, but Rogers Cemetery is just as important as Rogers-Bell Cemetery. A lot less is known about the people buried in Rogers Cemetery. Supposedly, there are Indian graves there but I did not see any.

In appearance, Rogers Cemetery is the opposite of Rogers-Bell. It seems to be haphazardly maintained. Someone placed a few crude cement benches near the largest tree, where most of the graves are located. The rest are on the other side of the clearing. This is where I believe the oldest graves might be located but they are probably buried in mud. Scraggly weeds are everywhere. But clearly people do come to visit these graves or the benches wouldn’t be there.

I was surprised to find that most of the graves I found dated from the 1890s and later. But it occurred to me that the quality of the markers from before this time probably wasn’t very good. Wood was the primary material for grave markers of poorer families and it didn’t last that long. Stones cost money and they didn’t have much. There were a few broken graves and some I couldn’t read.

The oldest grave I could find was for Ellen Rogers Carter, who was born just before the Civil War began. By looking on Ancestry.com, I discovered that by the time of the 1880 U.S. Census, Ellen was working as a servant for the Anderson family. This was post-Reconstruction, when life for former slaves and their families wasn’t much better than it had been under slavery. What was her life like? When did she marry? I wasn’t able to find that out. Several of the graves had military markers on them, most of them for the Navy.

Now for the snakes. Many of you know I have a great dread of snakes due to an incident from my teens when I accidentally (and stupidly) stepped on a copperhead in my driveway. The result was a visit to the ICU and a five-day hospital stay. So let’s just say I think the best kind of snake, near me anyway, is a dead one.

One of the first graves I found was surrounded by a very low wooden enclosure. Due to the autumn conditions, a lot of leaves were covering the gravestone. As I brushed some leaves off the gravestone, I saw the unmistakable scaly texture of a garden snake. And nearly jumped out of my skin in the process.

It’s not every day you see snakes on a grave!

When I realized that the snakes were fake (and my heart rate slowly returned to normal), the questions started. Why would someone place rubber snakes on both sides of someone’s gravestone? To keep nosy cemetery hoppers like me away? Maybe Bebe liked snakes or his friends and family were a protective lot. Who knows?

I created a new page for Rogers Cemetery, also with a brief bio and map. The bio is brief because next to nothing is known about it. Hopefully, because of my work, someone trying to find a loved one will look them up on FiAG,  locate the grave and be able to visit it.

Rogers and Rogers-Bell are an example of a common situation in the South. As most public places were, cemeteries were segregated until the 1950s. The races were not supposed to mix in life or in death. My guess is that someone in the white land-owning families provided land for the freed blacks who had worked on John Rogers plantation. An integrated cemetery was unheard of at the time.

Black cemeteries are often abandoned and in poor shape because there is no one left to care for them. Their history tends to be a mystery because little is recorded about them. African-Americans migrating from the South to Northern industrial cities for work took their family histories with them. That is a great shame because surely there are stories about the people buried there. But they may never be known.

If you want to know what kind of satisfaction I get from cemetery hopping, I would point to this kind of experience. I like knowing that someone, somewhere can trace their family tree better because of my efforts. Doesn’t seem like much. But if you’re trying to figure out where you came from and how you got where you are today, that discovery can mean something special.

And if surviving some fake snakes is necessary in the process, it’s worth it.