Jonathan Cohen's photos with the keyword: cemetery

Langdon Clemens (eighteen months) the first member of the Clemens family to be buried in the Woodlawn Cemetery, died of diphtheria. He rests near his grandmother and grandfather. Olivia Susan Clemens (24 years) first of three daughters, passed away unexpectedly of spinal meningitis while Clemens and Olivia were abroad. Of her death, Clemens wrote, "It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can be struck by a thunder-stroke like that and live." Olivia Louise Langdon, Clemens’s wife (59 years) died in Florence, Italy. The reference to "ashes" on her stone is symbolic. Jane Lampton Clemens, called "Jean" (29 years) suffered from epilepsy from adolescence onward. She drowned in the bathtub on Christmas Eve morning. Clara Clemens Grabilowitsch Samossoud, the only surviving child, married Ossip Grabilowitsch, a Russian pianist who became the Conductor of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Together, they had Clemens’ only grandchild, Nina Gabrilowitsch. Ossip requested that he be buried at the feet of his father-in-law. Following Ossip’s death (58 years) Clara married a French musician, Jacques Sammosoud. The grand-daughter, Nina (56) never married and died of a drug overdose in Hollywood, California. Other family members buried here include Charles Jervis Langdon, his family and descendants, and Susan and Theodore Crane. The large Westerly granite shaft depicting the images of Samuel Clemens and Ossip Grabilowitsch, erected by Clara Clemens and designed by Ernfred Anderson, weighs eight tons. The Langdon family monument, central to the plot, contains four religious symbols: Alpha and Omega; the symbol of the Trinity; the monogram meaning "In His Sign;" and a formee cross. Samuel Clemens chose the inscriptions on the Stones of Susy, Jean, and Olivia.

The most prominent resident of the town of Elmira, NY was the author Mark Twain. Twain married Olivia Langdon, a woman from a prominent local family, and they summered here for more than twenty years. Twain, who died in 1910, was buried in Elmira alongside his beloved wife and children, and his memory is honored throughout the year by visitors to his gravesite in Woodlawn Cemetery. "On Thursday, April 21, 1910, Samuel Langhorne Clemens died at his home, Stormfield, in Redding, Connecticut. Beside him on his bed lay a beloved book – Carlyle’s The French Revolution: A History – and near the book his glasses, pushed away a few hours before. He was in his seventy-fifth year. His daughter, Clara, and her husband, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, and the humorist’s biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, had been by the bed waiting for the end. The following day, Clemens’ body was placed in a mahogany coffin Is here he lay overnight in the library at Stormfield. On Saturday, April 23, the hearse was brought to the Brick Church, where a simple service was offered by the Reverends Dr. Van Dyck and Dr. Twichell. Three or four thousand people passed in review. The coffin was then brought to Elmira by rail." (from The New York Times, April 22, 1910). Under a tent on the grassy slope of the Langdon plot in Woodlawn Cemetery, with rain beating fiercely against the canvas cover, a little group of mourners silently watched as the body of Samuel L. Clemens was lowered into an evergreen-lined grave beside those of his wife and children. Rev. Samuel E. Eastman, pastor of the Park Church and a close friend of the dead humorist, conducted a brief but simple service, and Mark Twain’s first pilgrimage was at an end. Tonight he lies sleeping under a grave piled high with flowers, the tributes of loving friends from far and near." (from the Elmira Advertiser, April 25, 1910).

The Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow is a 17th-century stone church located on Albany Post Road (U.S. Route 9) in Sleepy Hollow, New York, United States. It and its five-acre (2 ha) churchyard feature prominently in Washington Irving’s "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow". The churchyard is often confused with the contiguous but separate Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. It is the second oldest extant church and the 15th oldest extant building in the state of New York, renovated after an 1837 fire. Some of those renovations were reversed 60 years later, and further work was done in 1960. The building itself is a rectangular structure with a three-sided projecting rear apse on the east end. It has two-foot–thick (60 cm) fieldstone walls. They give way to clapboard above the roofline, within the fields of the Flemish-style gambrel roof, with its lower segments flaring outward like a bell. On the west end of the roof is an octagonal wooden open belfry. Within it is the original bell, with an engraved verse from Romans 8:31, "Si Deus Pro Nobis, Quis Contras Nos?" ("If God be for us, who can be against us") and "VF", Frederick Philipse’s initials. The latter monogram is also on the wrought iron weathervane atop the belfry. To the west a stone retaining wall raises the church above grade level. A few shrubs flank the stone steps that lead up to the main entrance, paneled wooden double doors recessed within a Gothic archway. Above it is a glass transom with curved, intersecting muntins. It is set within a brick surround. The north and south side elevations have double-hung sash windows, as do the two side facets of the apse. At the roofline is a molded wooden cornice. The interior has its wooden pews, with two side aisles, arranged so all can focus on the pulpit. The pulpit is located on a raised platform in the rear, directly opposite the main entrance. A balustrade with turned wooden posts, open at the aisles, sets the platform off from the rest of the wide-planked floor. Behind it is a table, with a lectern on the north and an enclosed pew along the south side. The ornate wooden pulpit is raised further above the table level; access is provided by a short spiral stair. A pipe organ is located at the rear. Frederick Philipse I, Lord of Philipse Manor, owned the vast stretch of land spanning from Spuyten Duyvil in the Bronx to the Croton River. After swearing allegiance and later being granted his Manorship from the English, he chose to establish his country seat at what was then known as North Tarrytown, where Pocantico Creek flowed into the Hudson River. A small community had already been established there when he arrived in 1683, with 50 burials in the small cemetery. He built the first church for them at the southern end of the cemetery. Philipse’s wife died in 1691, and he soon remarried. His second wife urged him to build a more permanent stone church for his tenants, and later in the decade he obliged her. A marble tablet in front of the church gives its completion date as 1699. It was placed in the 19th century, however, and it is seen as more likely that the church was finished by 1697. The congregation was organized that year, the same year the first pastor began serving. The early history of the church and its members was recorded by Dirck Storm, in his book Het Notite Boeck der Christelyckes Kercke op de Manner of Philips Burgh. It continued to serve as the church of Philipse Manor through the Revolution, when the family’s lands were confiscated by the state for siding with the Crown. At that time the special pews for the Lord of the Manor were removed and the plain oak benches for the tenants were replaced with pine pews. Thereafter it continued without the patronage. Washington Irving, whose Sunnyside estate was a few miles to the south, made the church famous when he gave it prominent mention in his early 19th-century short story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow". He later gave yellow bricks from the church to outline the construction date on the wall above the door at Bolton Priory in Pelham Manor, New York. In 1837 a fire damaged the church. During the repairs some significant changes were made to the building. The main entrance was moved from the south facade to its current location on the west, the windows and door entry were changed to the Gothic arches then in style and given brick surrounds. Inside, the north gallery was removed and the west one enlarged. The original ceiling beams and pulpit were replaced. Sixty years later the church was renovated again for its bicentennial. That work reversed the 1837 renovations by restoring the original ceiling and reproducing the original pulpit. The Tarrytowns had grown through the 19th century, and a branch church had been built in Tarrytown to minister to the expanded congregation. Eventually that church became the main church, and the original building was used only for special occasions, a practice that continued until the most recent renovation in the 1990s. It is still the property of the Reformed Church of the Tarrytowns, which holds summer services there, as well as on special occasions such as Christmas Eve.

On January 9, 1874, a state-of-the-art psychiatric hospital opened on the Ridges in Athens, Ohio. Originally named The Athens Lunatic Asylum, the institution featured grandiose buildings surrounded by elaborate landscaping with ponds, fountains, and parks. The theory was that patients’ health would be improved, if not altogether cured, by the beautiful setting. Unfortunately, mental health care during the time was not nearly as advanced as it is today, and once admitted, most patients remained until their deaths. The hospital soon created its own cemeteries to serve as a final resting place for patients who were not claimed by their families. With few exceptions their graves were marked only with a number. Over the past several years, a group has worked to identify the men and women buried in the graves and contact descendants. Some families have opted to give their relatives more appropriate headstones with their names and birth and death dates.

The Ridges was a formal mental health hospital and it has a place were they buried the deceased patients. Locals say that there are two or three asylum cemeteries at the Ridges. Yet the most famous of them is the one located at the rear corner of the grounds of the asylum. It is the only part of the Ridges that is still in the property of the state Department of Menthal Health. What is extremely strange about this cemetery is that the gravestones bear no names, but numbers instead. Very few of them have been substituted with some stones that are engraved with dates and names. This only happened when some relatives of the deceased decided to bear the expenses for the gravestone. The state only offered the deceased persons a white stone with a number and that was pretty much all that was on it.The hospital records keep the record of the names that are connected to each number and this is the reason several unmarked stones have some metalic veterans’ plaques.

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