Preservation

Preservation in Centre County
How To's of Preservation
State and National Policy


"The character of a place of burial, the consideration or neglect it receives, the nature of the attention bestowed upon it, are all intimately connected with the state of the public mind on many important subjects."
Susan Fennimore Cooper, Rural Hours

Susan Fennimore Cooper takes notice of the deteriorating conditions of the churchyards in her rural area of New York in the year 1850. Though she was commenting merely on the aesthetics and sentiment of cemetery deterioration, it was not long afterward that people began to notice that a historical deterioration was going on as well. In 1927, Harriette Merrifield Forbes begins the historical cemetery study and burial site preservation movement with her small book entitled, Gravestones of Early New England and the Men who made them: 1653-1800. Since then, more and more people each year become attracted to the history, genealogy, art, and general atmosphere of old graveyards and the tombstones in them.

What people like Cooper were noticing also occurred here in Centre County, and about the same time period. Cemeteries, and the entire cult of death, have changed quite a bit in rural Pennsylvania since 1680. The way our tombstones look, the way our cemeteries are shaped and designed, the way we look at death have all changed dramatically over the past 250 years. Culture is never stagnant and these changes in the rituals which center around death are a reflection of the various mass cultural changes that America has experienced since its beginning.

One of the primary functions of the cemetery, as a historian, is its existence as a primary source of documentation. Like a birth certificate or a death certificate, a tombstone serves as a documentation of a specific point in time, in this case the document concerns the end, and is constructed often of stone rather than paper. Much of the work of the Centre County Genealogical Society revolves around this function of the grave marker. Often it is a tombstone's inscriptions and location which gives one a pointer to a distinct family line. A cemetery exists on one plane as a file cabinet filled with vital dates and names and at times other information on the individuals who once settled the county.

Tombstones also serve as a recorder of our tastes in art and style. Though one would expect the motifs which center around death to remain fairly consistent over time, they actually change more dramatically than our tastes in housing styles or pottery. Whereas houses and other consumables can be used over and over, and often are passed on from generation to generation, a gravestone style tends to reflect the specific tastes of the generation which is interred underneath. With the exception of very few family grouped plots and certain ethnic groups, an individual in Centre County rarely chose to be buried under a stone which was identical to one which presided over the grave of an ancestor. Styles were allowed to change over time, and is seen in even a fairly casual examination of any yard with more than ten stones.

The shape and sizes and placements of cemeteries as a whole tell us something about the culture which created them. In his M.S. thesis in Geography in 1979, Ronald Gerbers analyzes the patterns in the cemeteries of Penns and Nittany Valleys. In his thesis, Gerbers concludes that five definite shifts in the cultures surrounding these two rural valleys can be seen merely by examining these cemeteries and burial sites. People were settlers, burying their families close by and often on their own land. They became a community and began burying thier ancestors on the grounds of the church. Some were assimilated and lost the language of the immigrant ancestors. They became more urban and gathered their deceased in larger community cemeteries. They loved the Victorian sentiment of the garden and landscaped their cemeteries as though it were a garden park. This is quite a bit of information to obtain considering its source, the cemetery, is so often ignored and forgotten about.

When examined carefully and placed in the historical context of the county, the burial sites of Centre County still have much to reveal. But the cemetery as cultural resource is only applicable as long as the burial sites are still around to examine, or at the very least recorded and surveyed in a fashion which will allow their study well into the future. In order to accomplish this we must examine the general characteristics of the existing cemeteries in Centre County and the hurdles that a preservation program will have to face.