Thursday, February 18, 2010
Mysteries Where Is This Cemetery??
Posted by Vance Lauderdale on Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 11:51 PM
- Mystery Cemetery
It's almost more than I can handle, which is probably (though doctors can't say for certain) why I spend my nights crying myself to sleep, in my little cot in the basement of the Mansion.
Anyway, now that I've got THAT off my chest, I thought I'd share with you just what I'm talking about. Somebody (oh, I won't name names) picked up this nice old photograph at an estate sale, taken (as you can see by the name in the lower righthand corner) by the noted Memphis photographer, C.H. Poland. It shows a cemetery with what appears to be a freshly covered grave, considering the piles of flowers.
And the question is: Just where, exactly, is this cemetery?
We really don't have many clues. There's no date on the photo (front or back) and no obvious landmarks in the picture. I can't even make out any names on the tombstones. It's clearly a rather large graveyard, and it looks a bit hilly, but that doesn't really narrow it down much, since Elmwood, Forest Hill, and Calvary all have hills and dales.There are a few distinctive gravestones in the background, including several topped with a cross, and there's some unusual stonework in the foreground.
It also seems a bit cluttery and unkempt, doesn't it? The tombstones don't stand completely straight, and the grass looks high.
But I'm stumped. I suppose I could drive around all the cemeteries in the area — assuming that, since this is a Poland photo, this is even a Memphis graveyard — looking to see if I could spot an area that resembles this. And in fact, that may be what I'll end up doing.
First, though, I thought I'd see if anybody else recognizes the place. Before I go to all that trouble, you see.
Comments (5)
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I don't know, but when I enlarged the pic, I could only think Calvary. If the pic was taken where I think it was taken, it would have been along/near the southern edge, shooting roughly WNW - Elvis Presley Blvd would be to the right and Person would be behind and fairly close to the photographer.
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You may be right about Calvary, critter42, but I still can't find the exact location.
I drove there today and noticed quite a few places that looked similar to the topography in the old photo (which seems to be generally looking uphill), and also found a few monuments and borders that look like the few stones you can see in the picture. In the immediate foreground of the old photo, for example, is an odd little six- or eight-sided post, and quite a few families at Calvary used those to mark their plots.
At the same time, even though I found several individual pieces of the puzzle, I drove all over the place, looking this way and that, and never could find anything that exactly matched this view. Every time I came across one of those border stones, for example, I did a 360-degree view, and nothing else seemed to match up.
Of course, we have to remember that if this photo was taken, say, in the early 1900s, well there are a heck of a lot more gravestones there now, and all the trees would have changed drastically. Still, I'm not giving up. Not yet, anyway.
If you look in the top right corner, you can see that the cemetery is quite large, so it's probably not a churchyard. Also, there appears to be a road or path in the right-side middle distance.
Still, I think you'd have more luck trying to contact the dead to find this cemetery than driving around looking for it.
I'll probably be up at Calvary sometime this week and I'll see if I can match up where I think it is.
