Since I started writing this blog, I’ve had several people ask me about “green” cemeteries. These are cemeteries that are more environmentally friendly than traditional ones. I didn’t know much about them so I had a lot of questions.

Georgia currently has two green cemeteries, Honey Creek Woodlands (a natural burial ground) outside of Conyers and Milton Fields in Milton, a suburb of North Atlanta. My friend and fellow “Church Chick” Sarah told me she had been to the Monastery of the Holy Spirit while on a ride with her cycling group. The Monastery (officially called Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Monastery) owns and operates Honey Creek Woodlands, which is right across the road.

A few months ago, Sarah and I invited another Church Chick, Megan, to join us on a sunny January afternoon to visit the Monastery, then explore Honey Creek Woodlands and find out more about “green” burial.

Because Honey Creek Woodlands is owned by the Monastery, you can’t tell the story of one without the other. In 1944, 21 Trappist monks left Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky to found a monastery in rural Conyers, Ga. At the time, the diocese was centered in Savannah and only one Catholic family lived in Rockdale County where Conyers is located.

The monks lived in a barn while building the concrete Abbey Church, which took 15 years to complete. A museum that shares the history of the Monastery is inside that original barn today, which we walked through during our visit.

In addition to a visitors’ center that opened in 2011, the Monastery has the largest Christian bookstore in the state on the grounds. The monks grow and sell Bonsai trees in their garden center, in addition to baking delicious breads that they sell. Stained glass made on site is sold. They also host onsite retreats on topics from prayer to photography.

Over the years, the monks tried their hand at growing hay and farming various crops but were unable to find a reliable source of income in addition to their other efforts. Starting around 2006, the monks began looking into other options to raise funds while being good ecological stewards of the 2,200 acres they own.

Amid that land, almost 1,000 of those acres are under permanent protection as part of the Mount Arabia Heritage Corridor. Within these protected acres are the green burial grounds of Honey Creek Woodlands, which was once part of an old terraced farm area that probably grew cotton and other bare-earth crops. The first burial took place in 2008.

Sarah had already made an appointment for us to meet with Joe Whittaker, who has a lot of experience with green cemeteries. He previously worked at Ramsey Creek in Westminster, S.C., the first conservation burial ground in the U.S. The original 33-acre site opened in 1998. While Joe is not a monk, he enjoys working with them and helping people explore their green burial options.

Honey Creek does not have a chapel yet to hold funeral services in, but that’s coming soon. They do have an area in their main building (where the office is located) where you can host small receptions afterward. The monks do not take part in any of this but they do offer up prayers for everyone buried at Honey Creek.

Meeting with Joe (the only full-time employee) reminded me of how different green cemeteries are. At a traditional cemetery or funeral home office, the environment can seem stiff and formal. At Honey Creek, Joe was wearing jeans and a ball cap and we were dressed casually as well. He spoke respectfully but frankly with us. I’ve also never been to a cemetery office that had it’s own cat.

Honey Creek does not allow embalming. That surprises most people, who are used to traditional cemeteries that tell them it’s required by state law (it is not). So what if you can’t have the burial within 24 to 48 hours? No problem. Dry ice or refrigeration at a local funeral home can extend that time to three or four days.

The body is wrapped in a shroud or placed in a biodegradable container, such as a wicker or simple wooden casket. It’s then buried in a shallow grave, about three and a half feet deep, where microbe-rich soils break down the body naturally. The distance between graves is at least four feet. A concrete vault is not required.

The monks at the Monastery do not make caskets but the Trappist monks of New Melleray Abbey in Iowa do. They make them by hand, from the simplest pine to more grander styles. You can order one and have it shipped to you.

Above ground, two to three feet of topsoil is mounded on top, and the grave is marked with something like a tree, wildflowers or some type of inconspicuous ecologically functional marker. The small flat stone markers that Honey Creek sells range from $200 to $400, and you can inscribe as much or as little as you like. Any marker brought in from the outside has to be pre-approved. No obelisks or towering bronzes.

One question I had was if you have to be Catholic to be buried at Honey Creek and the answer is no. All religions (or none at all) are welcome.

So how much does this cost? Joe explained that one key factor can determine that: body burial or cremated remains (cremains) burial. Body burial is more expensive due to the cost of the container and labor involved in digging the hole (which is done by hand, not with a backhoe). Unlike most traditional cemeteries and funeral homes, Honey Creek posts their prices on their website.

Plot costs vary depending on what area you want to be buried in, with the Meadow area as the cheapest ($2,500 for body burial, $950 for cremains burial) to the Hilltop area ($4,500 for body burial, $2,000 for cremains burial).

One of the most appealing aspects of green burial (aside from the environmental benefits) is that families and friends are encouraged to take part in any burial ceremony or funeral service at the graveside. That can range from signing one’s name on a wooden casket, singing songs or laying flowers/mementos at the grave.

Joe said that on occasion, clients have asked if they could dig the grave themselves in homage to their loved one. But it’s such a labor intensive job, few are able to complete it. One exception was a case in which a young college student was killed in a car accident. His friends took turns one at a time digging his grave to honor his memory.

Two options not usually available at traditional cemeteries is having a dove or butterfly release at the burial ceremony/funeral. In case you were wondering, the doves are locally owned and are trained to fly back to their owner’s home (wow!). Butterfly releases are a bit cheaper (and once released, they’re gone).

To get to the burial sites, we went on foot down the gravel road. If you aren’t physically able, golf carts are available for that purpose. Walking is the best way to get a feel for the place. As we trekked through the Meadow area, I noticed how incredibly quiet it was. You could hear the birds and the breezes but little else. It’s just you and nature.

One question I had for Joe was if someone doesn’t have a stone marker placed at their grave, how do they keep track of who is buried where? What happens when a visitor wants to pay their respects? The answer is that they enter data into a GIS (Geographical Information System) database for individual burials, based on reference markers along the trails, which are archived electronically and on paper. So they know where everybody is at all times and where not to dig.

According to Joe, the first year Honey Creek Woodlands was in operation, they had 12 burials. In 2015, there were 140. They’ve been averaging about five burials per week. With enough room for 16,000 burials, Honey Creek has plenty of room for many more.

I’m not sure if I would ever choose to buried at a green cemetery. But after visiting Honey Creek, I’m certainly impressed by how it’s operated and the less expensive options available. It’s definitely food for thought. This kind of burial truly allows one to return to the soil without the use of toxic chemicals in a peaceful, natural setting.

 

You might think that after visiting a large cemetery like Wyuka or Forest Lawn Memorial Park, going to a small rural cemetery would be a let down. In truth, I find them a bit of a relief.

Instead of trying to take everything in and not miss anything, I can wander a smaller cemetery without rushing and just enjoy it for what it is. Another genuine pleasure  cemetery is seeing several generations of the same families buried close to each other.

On my last day of my September 2015 visit to Nebraska, Christi and decided to go to St. Joseph, Mo. to visit Mt. Mora Cemetery. On our way down, Christi wanted to stop at Heart United for Animals, a no-kill shelter near Auburn. It’s out in the country so I looked on the Find a Grave phone app to see if there was a cemetery nearby that we could visit afterward. And indeed there was one only two miles away.

Glenrock Cemetery is easy to spot along the rough rural road that’s carved amid large cornfields. We were kicking up enough dust to choke a horse but I was just glad we didn’t have to drive into a cornfield to find it. You can see right away that someone is taking good care of it.

Thanks to a very helpful website created by Mary Beth Lavigne Kernes, I found out quite a lot about Glenrock Cemetery. Every grave is documented and photographed on the the site. I am always grateful to those helpful souls who provide details of a cemetery’s history.

According to the site, Salathiel J. and Eulala Good sold a little over an acre of land to the trustees of the Glenrock Burial Lots. Dated February 3, 1874, the deed stated that the land was to be used “solely for the purpose of a burying ground, and no other.” Mrs. Good gave up her “dower rights” to this land when it was deeded to the trustees. Unlike other early cemeteries in Nemaha County, Glenrock never associated with any other organization such as a church.

The town of Glenrock was platted and dedicated on September 8, 1857. That’s 10 years before Nebraska became a state. Of the eight Nemaha County towns proposed in that same year, only Nemaha and Peru still exist.

Records of the oldest section of the cemetery (to the left of the front gate), were lost in a fire. Stones still mark many of the graves there. According to Ms. Kernes, stories handed down through the generations mention Native American graves, as well as Gypsy graves from families who camped along Rock Creek, east of the cemetery.

A second purchase of land from Oliver Good (Salathiel and Eulala’s bachelor son) in November 1895 secured the middle section of the cemetery (south of the original purchase). A third parcel of land south of the others was purchased from Tom and Eleanor Adamson in October 1963. This completed the land purchased, making the total area of the cemetery about 3.25 acres.

Records show that for many years lot owners were assessed $1 per year for upkeep. In 1908, Lettie Higgins collected $102 for building a fence. This section of fence is apparently still in place!

I’d noticed (as any seasoned “hopper” would) that like many other cemeteries’ fencing, Glenrock’s front section of fence is from the Stewart Iron Works of Cincinnati, Ohio. You can find their work in almost every state. I wrote about the Stewart Iron Works last year if you want to know more about them. If this is the fence Mrs. Higgins bought, she spent her money well!

I spent most of my time in the older section. It has a wide variety of different gravestone styles and varieties of materials.

This is what I can only describe as a large hunk of rock. I don’t know what kind or why it was chosen. It’s for Oliver Hazard Perry Good, the Good’s son who sold some of his land for the cemetery. He’s one of several Goods buried at Glenrock.

Not far from Oliver’s grave is that of Evet Elsworth Good, who died at the age of four in 1879. This is by far the largest lamb I’ve seen on a child’s grave marker. Most lambs on gravestones are fairly small and many are damaged. This one looks to be in very good shape for its age.

Another child’s grave is this one belonging to Dennis W. Higgins, who died in 1871 before he reached his second birthday. His parents, Jonathan and Mary Fletcher Good Higgins (she was another of Salathiel and Eulala Good’s children), had 12 children. Of that number, five died in infancy or childhood. I’ve not seen an angel playing a harp like this one before on a grave marker.

The weeping willow is a common mourning theme on grave stones but this one has a lamb beneath it, indicating a child is buried there. Elbert A. Starr, who died at the age of four in 1903, was the son of William and Catherine Good Starr (another daughter of Salathiel and Eulala Good).

Then you have Clarinda Cooper’s marker. It looks to be made out of concrete but I’m not sure on that. She was 51 when she died in 1906, and she was the husband of R.W. Cooper. He’s not buried at Glenrock.

The nameplate on the marker is possibly slate or some kind of metal. It’s rusted a good bit but you can still read the inscription.

The grave of Baby Reimers struck me as odd yet interesting. It’s shaped almost like a spool of thread and is made of a highly polished stone. There are other Reimers buried at Glenwood (August Reimers was one of the original trustees) but the date doesn’t seem to match up with any of them. It’s a particularly fine marker for such a short life.

The last grave marker I’m going to talk about is a bit of a mystery. I had seen the name “Marchand” on a handful of the graves, indicating French ancestry. The one I photographed of Pierre Marchand, in fact, has an inscription written in French. He died at the age of 72 in 1878.

I learned later this part of Nemaha County was where many French immigrants settled even before Nebraska became a state. The first were trappers or Indian traders who were some of the first Europeans to settle there. More French settlers (who intended to make Nebraska their home) cam in the 1850s and the years after.

One of of their settlements was at the village of Julian, which had a station on the Missouri Pacific railroad. Julien Bauhuad, one of the first settlers, was the source of the town’s name because the railroad company could not pronounce the Frenchman’s last name. Julian’s still on the map but it has a tiny population of about 60 now.

In 1899, Julien Bahuaud (who lived alone on his farm) was robbed and murdered. The crime went unsolved for 14 years until one of the men suspected of the crime had heatstroke while in Kansas. Told that he was dying, he confessed to his part in the murder. To his chagrin, the suspect recovered and was brought back to Auburn for a trial. Convicted, he spent the rest of his life in the Nebraska State Penitentiary. Julian Bahuaud is buried in St. Bernards Catholic Church’ cemetery in Julian.

The puzzling thing about Pierre Marchard is that when I tried to research his name, I discovered a website that indicated he was actually buried at St. Bernard’s. Not at Glenrock. There are a few other Marchands buried at Glenrock but Pierre doesn’t appear to be directly related to any of them. I couldn’t find much about him.

Because we were headed to St. Joseph, we couldn’t linger at Glenrock for long. But this cemetery is indicative of many I’ve seen in Nebraska. It’s well cared for and the people who settled the area have descendants still living there today. Their children who died young are remembered with love.

Generation unto generation.

If you’ve ever flown into Omaha or seen the movie About Schmidt, you’ve seen this building.

So what does that have to do with cemeteries?

If you’ve spent any time ambling among the grave stones, you’ve probably seen the Woodmen of the World (WOW) seal on a number of markers. I talked about WOW a little in my post on Wyuka Cemetery. But because WOW’s founder Joseph Cullen Root is interred at Forest Lawn, I’ll share a bit more about it.

A native of Massachusetts, Root was born in 1844. In 1865, he graduated from Eastman Business College in Poukeepsie, N.Y. He operated a number of businesses, including a mercantile, a grain elevator, and two flour mills. He sold insurance and real estate, taught classes in bookkeeping, managed a lecture bureau, and practiced law. Needless to say, he kept busy!

Root was a strong believer in membership in fraternal organizations. Along with being a Mason, he was a member of the Knights Templar, the Knights of Pythias, and the Independent Order of Odd Fellows.

In July 1882, Root heard a sermon by the Rev. Sidney Crawford about “pioneer woodmen clearing away the forest to provide for their families.” This inspired him to to organize Modern Woodmen of America as a society which would “clear away” problems of financial security for its members.

On January 5, 1883, Root established Modern Woodmen of America. He served as the first Venerable Consul of Pioneer Camp No. 1 and the first Head Consul of the new order. In 1888, the Royal Neighbors of America was established as a ladies auxiliary, with a relationship to the parent order similar to that of the Order of the Eastern Star to Masonry. By 1889, there were 42,694 Modern Woodmen.

In 1890, conflicts within the order’s hierarchy compelled Root to resign and move to Omaha. On June 3, he organized Woodmen of the World. The name resulted from his desire both to maintain the name “Woodmen” and to build an order international in scope. They also offered insurance benefits to their members.

In 1913, Root attended Woodmen of the World conventions in Florida and Ohio, and visited camps in Southern states. He died in Hendersonville, N.C. on December 24. His body was returned to Lyons, Iowa where a ceremony was held in the Congregational Church before his interment at Omaha’s Forest Lawn.

When Root died, Woodmen of the World had nearly 700,000 members and over 10,800 camps. Insurance in force amounted to over $927,000,000. Through 1913, the society had paid $553,004 to beneficiaries. More than 45,000 Woodmen monuments could be seen above the graves of members throughout the country. Women of Woodmen was a group that also arose out of WOW.

As a fraternal order, WOW is pretty much gone but as an insurance company it is going strong. Now called WoodmenLife, it provides financial services to approximately 800,000 members. The Woodmen Tower (WoodmenLife’s central office) was once the tallest building in Omaha until 2002. It’s featured prominently in the movie About Schmidt, starring Jack Nicholson, who plays the role of a retired Woodmen insurance agent.

Forest Lawn has its fair share of amazing statues. I know I didn’t see them all but I’d like to share a few. The Barlow monument is one of the first I saw. It was created for prominent banker, Milton T. Barlow.

I couldn’t find out anything about who made this bronze, but the shrouded figure motif reminds me of the Wasserburger monument and the Graves monument (“Eternal Sience”) by Lorado Taft (at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago).

The next bronze I saw was equally lovely but this time, I was able to find out more about the family it was made for.

A prominent lawyer in Omaha, Myron Leslie Learned was married to Mary Poppleton Learned, an author and music critic. Her father, A. J. Poppleton, was one of Omaha’s pioneers as the city’s second mayor and a member of the First Territorial Legislature.

The Learneds owned a large estate up in the hills past Florence, where the oldest grist mill (which I visited) in the state is located. It overlooked the Missouri River and was called Walden Woods (echoing Thoreau).

Myron died in 1928 and Mary commissioned up and coming Chicago sculptor Nellie V. Walker to do a bronze in his memory. The daughter of a monument maker, Walker couldn’t afford to go to art school and worked as a legal secretary for six years before she could afford to attend the Art Institute of Chicago.

Interestingly, Walker worked and was good friends with Lorado Taft (who created “Eternal Silence”). Only 4’8″, she was known as “the lady who lived on a ladder.” One of her best known works is of Iowa senator James Harlan in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the U.S. Capitol in Washington D.C.

in 1931, Walker visited Omaha to see the finished work at Forest Lawn. She continued working for many years after that and settled in Colorado, living to the ripe age of 98.

Over where there’s a long row of mausoleums and monuments, three members of the Swanson family are represented. Yes, the company that invented the TV dinner began in Omaha.

Carl A. Swanson, a Swedish immigrant, arrived in Nebraska in 1896 to work on a farm near Wahoo. He moved to Omaha, where he continued studying English, business and accounting. After teaming up with John Jherpe and Frank Ellison, he eventually grew a successful business. During World War II, C.A. Swanson & Sons became one of the largest suppliers of poultry, eggs and powdered eggs to the military.

Carl’s two sons, Gilbert and Clarke, took over after Carl died in 1949. There’s a story that the overpurchase of 500,000 turkeys that were sitting in 10 refrigerated railroad cars led to frantic Swanson executives scrambling for a way to keep them from going bad. According to Swanson executive Gerry Thomas (now deceased), the actual facts were a little different but nonetheless, the company had a lot of turkey it needed to sell quickly.

Thomas is credited with perfecting an aluminum compartmentalized container with turkey, cornbread dressing and peas (sold in stores for 98 cents). Pan Am had been using a similar method for in-flight meals since 1944. Because the box design looked sort of like a rectangular television screen, the product was dubbed the TV Dinner.

Unsure of success, Swanson produced 5,000 of the meals and they instantly sold in the first year. The second year, a jaw dropping 10 million were sold.

TV dinners are now produced in microwavable-safe containers instead of aluminum trays. The Smithsonian Institute inducted the original Swanson TV dinner tray into the Museum of American History in 1986.

The monument for Walter Clarke Swanson is definitely unique. Thanks again to Marta Dawes of Graveyards of Omaha.com, I know that it’s signed “”Bruno Innocenti, 1963.” Innocenti was an Italian sculptor. Honestly, the first thought that popped into my head was “Touchdown Swanson” when I saw it.

The Swanson name lives on in Omaha through the W. Clarke Swanson Public Library, Swanson Elementary School, Creighton University’s W. Clarke Swanson Hall, and the Durham Museum’s Swanson Gallery.

I could write much more about Forest Lawn but it’s best experienced in person so if you’re ever in Omaha, don’t leave without stopping by.

I also recommend a trip to nearby Glenn & Flav’s Alpine Inn, which serves some of the best fried chicken in a relaxed setting. We headed there after we left Forest Lawn.