Mt. Hope and Roselawn Cemeteries
The cemetery we’re visiting is actually two or more burial grounds. Mt. Hope Cemetery
was founded before the Civil War, in 1856 and Roselawn (or New Mt. Hope), at the 4th and
Pennsylvania end where we are entering was started in 1906 by another cemetery
association. Mt. Hope is not the earliest cemetery in Champaign County; it was established
by local people following the Rural Cemetery movement for a “new” kind of burying place
for city people.
Beginning in New England, this kind of park-like cemeteries began to replace the older
Euro-American church and family burying grounds of the 18th and 19th century mid-west
frontiers. (An example of an older burying ground would be Clements Cemetery in Urbana,
near Brownfield Woods.) These new cemeteries were considered modern and fashionable,
compared to the old plain ways of burying people you’ve read about in Jordan. They were
places of resort – for walks and picnics and family reunions and visits.
These newer cemeteries were also non-sectarian – that is, they were relatively inclusive by
religion. For example, Champaign-Urbana’s Jews seem to have bought and maintained
their own burying ground within Mt. Hope ( it is near the Civil War memorial and the
mausoleum). It is not clear whether the cemetery was segregated by race. By custom, the
north side of many traditional cemeteries were reserved for slaves, free African-Americans
and “outsiders.” You can see that the north-west edge of Mt.Hope (along Pennsylvania)
seems somewhat separate and set aside.
The cemetery does have a class/income dimension: it’s early platting has a space for
indigent burials, and Champaign County kept at least one “potters field” or poor people’s
burial ground – at the site of the Brookens County offices on East Washington and Lierman
in Urbana. The graves were unmarked.
On your walk around, please be respectful of graves, gravestones and grave decorations.
Don’t disturb them.
Do take notes and try to understand how the cemetery and the markings on graves
communicate with the living:
Think about materials (what materials are being used, if you can tell?)
Order of graves and orientation?
East/West? North/South?
Think about groupings: family? Occupational? Ethnic? Religious? Veterans?
Style of the monument? (see attached sheets)
Symbols on the monuments?
How do the graves – or grave decorations – communicate ideas about death, love, after-life,
connections, relationships with the living?
Do the graves say anything about the person’s/families activities in life?
Other questions --- what’s the oldest grave or area you can identify? The newest area?
Do the contours of the graveyard communicate anything about class/ status/ prominence?
What about plantings – for those of you who know something about plants and botany. Do
you see particular choices in the materials people have planted near their loved ones’
graves? Trees?
Imagery and Symbols you may see, with thanks to the Association for Gravestone Studies:
Hands are found on many gravestones. It may be the hand of God pointing downward
signifying mortality or sudden death. The hand of God pointing upward signifies the
reward of the righteous, confirmation of life after death. Praying hands signify
devotion. Handshakes may be farewells to earthly existence or may be clasped hands of a
couple to be reunited in death as they were in life, their devotion to each other not
destroyed by death.
Clam shells, scallop shells, and other types of shells are a symbol of a person's Christian
pilgrimage or journey through life and of baptism in the church. In the middle ages,
Christians wore the scallop shell to indicate that they had made a pilgrimage to the shrine
of St. James of Compostella in Spain. Placing a shell on a gravestone when visiting the site is
an ancient custom and may in fact have several different meanings depending on the
cultural background of the people placing the shells. The idea of crossing over a body of
water to the promised land or crossing the River of Styx to the afterlife, the final journey to
the "other side" is also part of the symbolism of the shell.
Broken trees, sawed-off tree stumps: Woodmen of the World derived from the
Modern Woodmen of America, a fraternal group which was founded in 1883. Fraternal
scholar William Whalen describes it as an insurance society with some fraternal lodge
features. Woodmen advertised themselves as an organization for the "Jew and Gentile,
Catholic and Protestant, the agnostic and atheist." The Woodmen of the World emblem is a
sawed-off tree stump, often with a mallet or beetle, an ax, and a wedge: the motto "Dum,
Tacet Clamat" (Though Silent He speaks") usually appears somewhere on the
border. These Woodmen emblems are found throughout the United States, but the largest
concentration is in the South and Midwest.
FLT stands for Friendship, Love, Truth, three degrees associated with the Independent
Order of Odd Fellows. The Odd Fellows, first organized in the US in 1819, is a popular
fraternal/benefit organization. The emblem of the Odd Fellows is usually shown as three
links of a chain. A number on the stone is the local lodge number.
FCL stands for Fraternity, Charity, and Loyalty. These same letters were also used by the
Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War and a similar hereditary group called the
Ladies of the Grand Army of the Republic.
The obelisk is, to quote McDowell and Meyer in The Revival Styles in American Memorial
Art, one of the "most pervasive of all the revival forms" of cemetery art. There is hardly a
cemetery founded in the 1840s and 50s without some form of Egyptian influence in the
public buildings, gates, tomb art, etc. Napoleon's 1798-99 Egyptian campaigns, the
discoveries at the tombs of the Pharaohs, and our new Republic's need to borrow the best
of the ancient cultures (Greek revival, classic revival, the prominence of classical studies
and dress, etc.) led to a resurgence of interest in the ancient Egyptian culture. Obelisks
were considered to be tasteful, with pure uplifting lines, associated with ancient greatness,
patriotic, able to be used in relatively small spaces, and, perhaps most importantly, obelisks
were less costly than large and elaborate sculpted monuments.
Direction and Orientation: In many, but by no means all, early New England burying
grounds the graves are positioned east/west. This east/west orientation is the most
common orientation in other parts of the country and world as well. The earliest settlers
had their feet pointing toward the east and the head of the coffin toward the west, ready to
rise up and face the "new day" (the sun) when "the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall
be raised" or when Christ would appear and they would be reborn. If the body was
positioned between the headstone and the footstone, with the inscriptions facing outward,
the footstone might actually be facing east and the decorated face of the headstone facing
west. If the headstone inscription faces east, the body would most commonly be buried to
the east of it. Much depends on the layout of the graveyard -- if there was a church or other
building in the center of the burial site, where the high ground was located, the location of
access roads, etc.
Sometimes a hilly site will have stones facing all four directions. With the coming of the
Rural Cemetery Movement in the 1830s and 40s, an entirely new style of burial became
popular. The ideal of winding roads and irregular terrain dictated the orientation of the
monuments to a large degree.
There’s more: see the next sheets.