As Father Pitt has mentioned earlier, Ridgelawn Cemetery preserves its stone-fenced family plots, once a feature of every “rural” cemetery, more perfectly than any other cemetery in the area. Here we have a typical plot, except for its unusual shape: a main monument in the rear center is surrounded by various smaller monuments for individual members of the family, and the stone wall breaks for an entrance inscribed with the name of the patriarch of the family.
A rustic stone cross with a very good flower-dropping angel standing on a rock, and the family name spelled out in twigs on the base. It probably dates from about 1905, when John Yunker was buried here.
The 1840s were a time when the old art of tombstone-cutting was dying out, and new styles came into vogue—styles that, in many ways, imitated the styles of engravings of the era. Here is a good example: a large tombstone from 1848 that looks very much like an engraved title page of the same era. It no longer has the handmade look of even the best local craftsmen’s work, and it is executed in more expensive stone that turned out to be much less permanent. With some difficulty, we can make out most of the inscription except the epitaph:
JAMES McKOWN
DIED
Feb. 25, 1848
In the 60th year
of his age
The surname “McKown” is damaged, but there are several other McKowns buried in this graveyard, so there is little question about the reading.
A marble recording angel whose businesslike attitude suggests to Father Pitt that she is checking boxes on a printed form. There are no inscriptions on the monument and no Bayer grave markers near it, so Father Pitt cannot date it except to say that it looks like the sort of thing that would have been put up in the beginning of the twentieth century. It is even possible that the plot was never used; we have seen examples of families that bought cemetery plots and put up monuments to themselves, and then moved elsewhere.
A certain strain of romanticism is common in monuments of the 1800s, but few go to such extremes of romanticism as this. The profusion of vine-covered vines overwhelms the composition so much that at first it is hard to make any visual sense of the thing. How many different kinds of vines can you identify? Father Pitt finds at least passionflowers, morning glories, and ivy, and the top may be roses, although the erosion makes it hard to tell. If the enormous urn-flower at the foot end came from a vine, it was a vine that wants to eat you.
If there was ever an inscription, it is illegible now; but since the monument occupies a space in the Lewis family plot, we may presume that it belongs to some Lewis or other.
