Among the Graves in Ohio’s Cemeteries

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Show Notes

Halloween is right around the corner, so grab your pumpkin spice lattes and join us as we explore Ohio’s cemeteries with Ian Adams, Randall Lee Schieber, and Robin L. Smith, the photographers and author, respectively, of This Place of Silence: Ohio’s Cemeteries and Burial Grounds. Our guests discuss the process of photographing and writing about cemeteries in every county in Ohio, cemetery art and architecture, the history and evolution of the American cemetery, unique gravestones and monuments, famous figures put to rest in Ohio’s burial sites, the literary inspiration behind the book’s title, and a lot more.

Ian Adams has twenty-one photography books and more than sixty-five Ohio calendars to his credit. He conducts nature and garden photography seminars, workshops, and slide programs throughout North America and taught digital photography at Ohio State University’s Agricultural Technical Institute in Wooster from 2010 to 2019.

Randall Lee Schieber is a professional photographer based in Columbus, Ohio. He specializes in editorial, architectural, location, and travel photography and has published eight books and fifteen calendars. His work has appeared in a variety of local and national publications.

Robin L. Smith is the research director at Columbus Business First newspaper. She is the coauthor (with Randall Lee Schieber) of Columbus: A Photographic Portrait and Ohio: Then and Now, and the author of Columbus Ghosts: Historical Haunts of Ohio’s Capital and Columbus Ghosts II: More Central Ohio Haunts.

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Excerpts

Transcript

Laura Maylene Walter (00:00):
"Remember me as you pass by. As you are now, so once was I. As I am now, so you must be. Prepare for death and follow me."

Ian Adams (00:10):
Let me add a little piece to that, Laura, because there's often a rejoinder that you find to that particular poem, which goes as follows: "To follow you I won't consent, until I know which way you went."

Laura Maylene Walter (00:22):
Welcome to Page Count, presented by the Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library. This podcast celebrates authors, illustrators, librarians, booksellers, literary advocates, and readers in and from the state of Ohio. I'm your host Laura Maylene Walter, the Ohio Center for the Book Fellow and the author of the novel BODY OF STARS.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:52):
Today we're taking you on a walk among the graves as we explore some of Ohio's 17,000 cemeteries. We're joined by Ian Adams, Randall Lee Schieber, and Robin L. Smith. The photographers and writer respectively of THIS PLACE OF SILENCE: OHIO'S CEMETERIES AND BURIAL GROUNDS out now from Swallow Press at Ohio University. This book full of gorgeous full color photographs of cemeteries from across all 88 counties in Ohio. While the text illuminates the history and evolution of American cemeteries, along with their art and architecture, symbolism, natural environments, traditions, and more. We'll learn about the burial sites large and small in Ohio, some of the famous figures buried in them, how the writing and photography for this book came together, and a lot more. Ian, Randall and Robin, thank you so much for being here.

Ian Adams (01:45):
My pleasure.

Robin L. Smith (01:46):
Happy to be here.

Randall Lee Schieber (01:47):
Thank you, yes. Our pleasure.

Laura Maylene Walter (01:47):
I'll say up front that I'm probably the target market for your book because I am extremely fond of cemeteries. I have always been drawn to them, and I've always admired their beauty and their mystery and their meaning. So to read your book and take in its images and now to get to speak with all three of you is a real treat for me personally. So thank you. I want to point out that in the preface, Ian, you wrote that readers might naturally wonder why cemeteries as the topic for this book. So I thought, why don't we start there. Can you tell us how this book got its start and why did you want to focus on cemeteries?

Ian Adams (02:24):
Randy and I had already collaborated on one book before, back in 2017, Laura. It was a book called OHIO IN PHOTOGRAPHS, and it was done partly at the instigation of then Governor John Kasich. And as part of that book for the first time, we decided that we would challenge ourselves to visit all 88 counties of the state. And so that sort of became the model for the book. When the book came out and as Covid started to hit, Randy and I had a long phone conversation, as I mentioned in the book, trying to decide what else we might do as a book project that would allow us to photograph landscapes in all 88 counties of Ohio. Randy had done a coffee table book. He was the lead photographer for a beautiful book on Spring Grove Cemetery back in 2009, which is one of the largest and most prestigious garden cemeteries in North America. And I had had a lot of experience photographing at places like Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland for various book and calendar projects. So we decided cemeteries would be a great place to try to put together another book. We decided to approach Ohio University Press. I put together a proposal. They agreed to publish the book, and the rest is right in front of you, Laura

Laura Maylene Walter (03:49):
And Robin and Randall. What is it about cemeteries that drew you to this subject matter?

Randall Lee Schieber (03:55):
What drew me to cemeteries? My late good friend Mary Cirelli had recommended that I go down to Spring Grove, particularly in the spring when they have a fabulous spring bloom. So I did, and that's really what started my interest in photographing cemeteries. And as you can see from the book in some of those images, Spring Grove is one of the most prestigious cemeteries in all of North America and well known for its Lawn-Park design. That's kind of where that originated. And so the landscapes were just fabulous down there as a landscape photographer initially, that's what drew me to going down to Spring Grove and then taking pictures of many other cemeteries, which led to the book. And then of course, you know, the art, the history, the stories that the architecture and the gravestones tell us about.

Robin L. Smith (04:46):
I've loved cemeteries since I was about 11 years old, the year my grandmother died. I spent a lot of time at the cemetery where she was buried and my grandfather asked me if I would like to see some of the older cemeteries where the rest of the family was. And what really fascinated me was to look at these old gravestones and realized that those were my family. All of those people had stories and it not only started me off on cemeteries, but it started me off on family research. Randy and I collaborated on a book a number of years ago called OHIO: THEN & NOW. And I actually brought up the idea of doing a cemetery book then, but nothing came of it for quite a few years. It just kind of kept popping up and kept popping up. And then when Ian and Randy got together and had this conversation, it all just finally kind of came together.

Laura Maylene Walter (05:41):
Yeah, and one thing you wrote in the preface, Robin, that I really liked was whether cemeteries are large or small, cared for or neglected, what they all have in common is stories.

Robin L. Smith (05:50):
Exactly.

Laura Maylene Walter (05:51):
Yeah. The people who live there or the towns or the art and architecture. I think that's part of the reason I'm drawn to cemeteries too. And writers who are listening cemeteries are a great place just to do research or to get some inspiration, I would say. I was thinking about that a lot when I was reading this book. There's a section about the unusual or old names that you can find on gravestones. So writers, if you're looking for names of characters, you might want to head to an older section of cemetery and find names. Like, I'm trying to think of some of the ones in your book like Cicero, and it looked like Rosemany, not Rosemary, Rosemany.

Robin L. Smith (06:24):
Yeah, Rosemany.

Laura Maylene Walter (06:25):
Which is great.

Robin L. Smith (06:27):
Nimrod was another one that I found that's a very old biblical name. And there are some really unusual ones out there.

Laura Maylene Walter (06:34):
Yeah. And you can get stories just from the gravestone sometimes based on the year of death or who might have died at the same time or who might be buried, you know, in the same plot. So there's a lot in there for writers as well. But speaking of literary influences, I want to point out that the book's title and the epigraphs at the beginning of every chapter have a literary influence. So can one of you speak to that? Where does THIS PLACE OF SILENCE come from and how did this literary work influence the book?

Robin L. Smith (07:08):
SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY is a book of free verse that was written in 1915 by Edgar Lee Masters. And I don't know whether this is still true, but when I was in school, it was frequently performed as a stage play, which is where I saw it first. And the theme of the book is each one of the poems tells the story of someone who is buried in the small town cemetery in Illinois. And you know, it goes back to the stories that are found in cemeteries again. And I thought that just made a really appropriate reference to use for epigraphs and for the title. I've had this title picked out since way before I thought I'd ever get to do a cemetery book. But that's where that came from. It is actually a book of stories told in free verse about the inhabitants of a cemetery.

Laura Maylene Walter (08:02):
Yeah, I love that. And we'll get into a few more literary details later, including some literary figures buried in Ohio cemeteries. But I love that writers...I think a lot of writers listening might know that feeling of having a title picked out maybe years before you even begin working on the project. So sometimes you just know how you want to frame something. So, speaking of the history of cemeteries in Ohio, or more broadly the American cemetery, can you talk a bit about how cemeteries have evolved over the years over the centuries in America and maybe how some of that is reflected in some of Ohio's cemeteries?

Robin L. Smith (08:40):
We start with Native American burial mounds, which of course were here long before European settlers got here. But at the European American cemeteries that first were generally very simple. They might be a plot of land on a farm where that family and maybe some of the neighboring families would be buried or a churchyard or sometimes a town or city cemetery. But they were all laid out very simply. It was usually just rows of graves and they were dug as they were needed. That all changed in 1831 when Mount Auburn Cemetery in Massachusetts opened. And there were a lot of reasons behind the changes that were made. There were a lot of concerns over health problems with having a lot of people buried in a city cemetery close by to houses and water supplies. The older cemeteries and cities were getting crowded and they were honestly not very well kept up.

Robin L. Smith (09:41):
Some of them were pretty deteriorated, and honestly, sometimes the business people just wanted that land to use for other things as the cities for growing. So Mount Auburn changed that by giving an example of a cemetery that was opened on a plot of rural land far outside the city center. And they were actually businesses rather than a public graveyard or a church graveyard. And they supported themselves by selling lots. So that was a huge difference. They were also deliberately used as parks, and it gave people who lived in the city a place to go outside of cities which were not notably green then and see actual nature. And there were some problems with that model right away because the way it was set up, people who bought large burial lots could decorate them any way they wanted. They could use any kind of monument, they could use any kind of planting, and if they didn't take care of their lots, the cemetery didn't have any recourse to make them do that.

Robin L. Smith (10:50):
And that was a problem in a business where the appearance of the cemetery was very important to making sales. So in 1855, Spring Grove in Cincinnati hired Adolph Strauch to redesign their cemetery and he did a couple of things. He opened up a lot of large lawn areas, which some of the old rural cemeteries didn't have, and he kind of reigned in the completely natural areas. But probably the most important thing he did was to convince the cemetery board to put restrictions on what kind of monuments could be used and whether families could use fences around their lots and what kinds of plantings they could have. And they put the maintenance of the cemetery into the hands of professional staff for the first time and started charging a fee for maintenance of the grounds. So that was kind of a sea change in the way cemeteries were running. That was called eventually the Lawn-Park model. And most cemeteries in the U.S. Had gone over to that model by about 1870. And then in 1913, there was a third kind of evolution of cemeteries when a man in Glendale, California came up with what he called the Memorial Park model. It was way less nature, way more lawn, and he changed it so that the markers were extremely unobtrusive, usually flush to the ground. That's the model that's probably still prevalent in the U.S. now. Most older cemeteries are kind of a mixture of the three.

Laura Maylene Walter (12:30):
Yeah and thinking of the markers being flushed to the ground makes me think of all the photographs of all kinds of grave markers in this book. So Randall and Ian, I'd love to ask you about some of the photographs and either symbols or gravestones that struck you most of all. Maybe we could start with symbols. You have some fabulous pictures in this book of some of the common symbols that will be seen either engraved onto a gravestone, willow trees, doves, lambs, angels, spheres. When you were taking the pictures, were there certain cases that especially struck you that are memorable for you that you'd like to mention?

Randall Lee Schieber (13:08):
Some of those symbols and some of that iconography, yes, I was struck by. The small cherub heads, the weeping willow tree that was prevalent on so many markers. The draped urn, angels, you know, the symbolism of the angels, different types of angels and cherubs, the cherubs themselves. I became very much interested in particularly one cemetery St. Joseph's cemetery in Lockbourne where there was just one section when I came upon it, it just took my breath away because it was marker after marker, these cherubs topping them off. So it was like a whole section and it was really striking. And that cemetery, I ended up going back to photograph many, many, many times. Sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset. I mean, the beauty was, it was so close, it was open dusk to dawn, and actually I could go in there and stay for about 20 minutes after dusk. Most of the larger cemeteries, even though by law I think they're supposed to stay open, most of the cemeteries like Greenlawn, Spring Grove, they generally close either at five or seven. So you miss out on some of the most beautiful light and then of course, sunrise and sunset. But the cherubs were just, you know, very striking in this one particular cemetery.

Ian Adams (14:30):
I look at it a little bit differently, Laura, to be honest. When I think of the things that strike me when I go into a cemetery like Lake View, it's not the symbols, they're there, but you have to look very, very closely to see a lot of them. When you go into Lake View, the first thing that you notice is the topography of the land. It's very, very hilly. All sorts of ravines. You've got a stream going through, you've got a waterfall there if you know where to find it. And you've got these incredible burial structures, the buildings, the structures themselves, everything from the Garfield Memorial, which is 300 feet high, to huge mausoleums, wonderful statues, angels of various descriptions. And these are the things that stand out to me when I first go into a cemetery, at least a garden cemetery like Spring Grove or Lake View or we've got at least a dozen other major garden cemeteries in the state of Ohio.

Ian Adams (15:30):
As you look a little more closely, you certainly notice a lot of the symbols. I chuckled a little bit because when all of the photographs were done, I captioned all of my photographs and then basically sent them in and they went to Robin. Well, you know, Robin must have photographic vision like Superman because she came up with improvements to all of my captions. And in many cases she had looked very, very closely at the actual iconography on the gravestone that I had not even noticed when I was taking it. I was looking at the overall landscape and the way that the graves lined up from a compositional point of view. I hadn't looked at the detail, but Robin looked at it and found all sorts of iconography there and then expanded my caption. So yes, the iconography is really important, but as a landscape photographer, that's not what I notice. First, when I go into a garden cemetery, I notice the lay of the land. I may notice beautiful trees and shrubs because that is very, very significant to cemeteries and that's why we devoted an entire chapter to that in the book.

Laura Maylene Walter (16:40):
Yeah, and we'll get back to the symbols in a minute, but speaking of the landscapes and the plant life in cemeteries, I really enjoyed reading about and looking at the pictures of champion trees, some of which reside in cemeteries. Can you tell us what champion trees are? It looked like there were a few photographs of them in the book, maybe discuss some that might be in the book.

Ian Adams (17:03):
We have nothing in the way of spectacular trees like the Redwoods or the Douglas firs out in the Pacific Northwest, but we have some pretty impressive trees in Lake View. For example, we have some trees that were around i.e. Alive in 1796 when Moses Cleaveland founded the city of Cleveland. And there are still about seven or eight of those trees alive today. Some of them are oak trees, one of them is a tulip tree, one of them is a beach tree. The state of Ohio also keeps track of Champion trees through the division of forestry. There's a lady who keeps what's called the Big Tree registry in Ohio. Basically whether a tree is a Champion or not is a function of how many points it has accumulated on what is called the big tree scale. And we explain this in the book. Basically you take the height of the tree in feet, the width of the tree in inches at about chest height, and then you measure the crown spread from one side of the tree to the other.

Ian Adams (18:09):
And you have a formula for plugging in those three numbers and that gives you a number. For example, we have a sycamore tree in Ashland County, which is the National Champion Sycamore tree. And it scores about 570 points on the big tree scale. We have an Eastern Cottonwood Alum Creek Park north of Columbus that scores about the same number. I don't think there are any National Champion trees in cemeteries, but there are certainly one or two state Champion trees that we put in the book. There's also, for example, a tree in a cemetery in Logan, just north of the Hawking Hills that may be 600 years old, according to work that's been done by the Ohio Division of Forestry. And if that's the case, it would actually have been 50 years old by the time Christopher Columbus sailed for the Americas in 1492.

Laura Maylene Walter (19:05):
That is amazing. Amazing. Robin, I want to return to you briefly about symbols if there's any additional context you'd like to provide. I will just say a detail that I found fascinating that I did not know was for military personnel on their graves, they can have an emblem of belief engraved on their stones. And of course, in addition to the major world religions, there are also symbols for things you might not expect necessarily, like an atom for atheism or the circle in pentacle for the Wiccan faith. So I found that really interesting, but what else would you like to tell our listeners about the symbols that can be found on gravestones?

Robin L. Smith (19:42):
The emblems of faith fascinate, me too. And there are so many of them. I think there are 98 current symbols that are available, but the VA will consider other symbols if you want something else. And they're not all necessarily religious. Some of them are kind of generic symbols, like you can get a heart, you can get kind of a generic angel, you can get a landing eagle. There's just such a range of them. And you're right, some of them are religions that you might not expect to find in the U.S.. I know there's at least one symbol for Zoroastrianism and there's the Wiccan and you can get the hammer of Thor. Quite a few other things. But symbols in general is something that fascinates me because I have an academic background that includes a lot of religious studies, both Christianity and comparative religion and the history of religion. So I've been exposed to a lot of the symbology that is used in cemeteries. And it just fascinates me to see those things in gravestones and know what they mean. I mean, there are whole books that are written about this, that I just find the breadth of the symbology in cemeteries to be really, really fascinating.

Laura Maylene Walter (21:03):
Speaking of imagery and maybe unusual imagery, this book includes photos of some gravestones that are maybe not your typical gravestones that you would expect to see. I'm thinking of the clamshell, the rocket ship, and a few others. So were there any particular unusual gravestones like that, that you would like to point out to listeners?

Randall Lee Schieber (21:26):
One that I had in there, which I thought was hilarious, was one of the slot machine <laugh> that that was just...We had obviously a section where we kind of highlighted those, calling them unique markers, but Ian came across a lot more of those than I did. So I don't know if you wanted to speak more.

Ian Adams (21:46):
Well, actually I went out of my way to try to find stuff like that. I really did. I found it quite fascinating. And when I went into a cemetery for the first time, particularly the smallest cemeterieswhich we needed to include because we had to come up with at least one cemetery photograph from all 88 counties. And most of the counties that I was working on were rural counties. They were only a smaller number that were cities with large garden cemeteries. And so a lot of these places, particularly out west, they're tiny little cemeteries. They may or may not be surrounded by a fence. They typically don't have striking monuments. Most of them don't have mausoleums. Most of them don't have buildings like chapels example. So you're looking for something that's different other than simply an upright gravestone. Here's an example. Williams County is the penultimate county if you're going west on the Ohio Turnpike, just before you cross into Indiana, you go through Williams County. And the county seat is a little town called Bryan. Well, I had to come up with a cemetery photograph for Williams County. So of course I Googled, you know, I spent an enormous amount of time googling all of these counties and trying to find cemeteries, which Google maps is usually a very easy way to get started. But I found in this particular case that a gentleman by the name of Denver Henderson, who's now the assistant director of the Williams County Public Library based in Bryan, was such a historian that he had spent two years producing videos on all 63 cemeteries in Williams County. He went out with a drone and every little piece of the video, most of the videos are 15 to 20 minutes long.

Ian Adams (23:40):
He took an overview of the photo with, with a drone, but then he went in closer and he actually did the heavy work there by locating a lot of the significant monuments and gravestones. So I watched every single video. It took me an entire weekend to go through them. But when I finished, I had a sheet of yellow sheet with some wonderful monuments that I knew I needed to visit. For example, one was a rocket ship, 12 feet high, weighing hundreds of pounds, erected in the memory of a gentleman who worked in the space program. One of them was a very large example of a tree monument. And tree monuments, we devoted a double page spread of those to the book. And you know, I love trees. I'm actually working on a new book on trees with my own photography that'll probably be out later in the year.

Ian Adams (24:33):
But I love trees. And so artificial trees, trees that are monuments rather than living trees, I found quite fascinating and went out of my way to try to find things like that, to photograph. And, you know, motorcycles, there aren't very many motorcycle monuments, but when laser etching came along in the monument business, it became much easier to actually inscribe a Harley Davidson on a piece of rock. And so, you know, I, I went out and deliberately tried to find some of these things because I thought that, you know, they're interesting. In some cases they're amusing. Down in Uhrichsville Cemetery in Tuscarawas County, which is very, very hard to find. It's hidden in the town. It's actually a caboose because the gentleman worked at the local train station. So I just thoroughly enjoy when I'm going into a new cemetery. I drive around just looking for interesting things other than your typical upright gravestone.

Robin L. Smith (25:37):
My favorite unusual headstone in that book is the one, and I think this is one of Ian's photos, because it's in Geauga County...It's the one of the sofa.

Laura Maylene Walter (25:46):
<Laugh>, I forgot about that one

Robin L. Smith (25:48):
With the throw pillow and the remote control.

Laura Maylene Walter (25:50):
The remote control!

Ian Adams (25:52):
I was going to mention that because I, again, I took the photograph, I captioned it, but Robin just took my caption, which basically said, here's a sofa, <laugh>, and Robin's caption basically said, you know, I've seen a, I've seen a lot of sofas, but rarely have I seen one that rises to the level of a throw pillow and a remote control <laugh>. And so there I take my hat off to Robin. I thought I was pretty good at writing captions until Robin got hold of my captions and improved many, many of them.

Robin L. Smith (26:24):
That marker made me laugh when I looked at it <laugh>.

Laura Maylene Walter (26:27):
I don't think I noticed the remote control. My eye was drawn to the throw pillow and the graceful shape of the stone sofa.

Ian Adams (26:34):
Look on the other arm.

Laura Maylene Walter (26:34):
Yeah. And then I read the caption and I thought, oh my gosh, there is an actual remote control on the other arm. Amazing, amazing.

Robin L. Smith (26:43):
And you know, I, I think that those unusual monuments are easier to find in smaller cemeteries because there aren't as many rules.

Laura Maylene Walter (26:51):
Yeah, I want, so I want to ask about the rules quickly. You had mentioned this earlier, Robin, of restrictions of what could be allowed in a cemetery. One section of the book references that people were putting some Egyptian imagery, Egyptian revival motifs in gravestones, and sometimes that caused controversy. But you very briefly alluded to a more recent controversy about whether or not to allow SpongeBob Squarepants marker. So I really need to know about this. What can you tell us about this? And did it happen? Was it made?

Robin L. Smith (27:23):
I don't know a great deal about it except that it happened at Spring Grove and yes, I think they were approved. Randy, do you know?

Randall Lee Schieber (27:30):
The Sphinx Monument? The Lawler Monument...that was very controversial initially when they put that up. They rejected actually the idea that for some time and then they finally, it got approved by the board. So cemeteries go through that all the time. Still. One of the examples that Robin and I both came across was the SpongeBob one. I would say spring row would be more restrictive than, than some of the other ones. Like some of the smaller cemeteries that Ian was talking about visiting. But Spring Grove being kind of the birthplace of eliminating some of the things that don't conform necessarily to the, the beauty and, and the overall structure of the landscape and stuff. That's going to be controversial. So.

Laura Maylene Walter (28:11):
You're saying SpongeBob would interrupt the beauty of the landscape <laugh>, if it happened, I'll need to visit. And check it out.

Randall Lee Schieber (28:18):
I don't think it out. If it did, I would probably have visited I'm sure. I'm sure it got rejected.

Robin L. Smith (28:23):
No it didn't, Randy.

Randall Lee Schieber (28:24):
No, really? Well then I got to go visit it.

Robin L. Smith (28:27):
I just found a report on Channel Five. They apparently installed them, uninstalled them, and then they installed them with some changes. But it doesn't go into detail here, but they have a picture.

Randall Lee Schieber (28:40):
Yeah, I sort of recall that, that they went through a process, but I don't know that it exists the way they wanted to.

Laura Maylene Walter (28:47):
Right. Their original vision for SpongeBob might have been a little bit compromised.

Robin L. Smith (28:53):
Exactly <laugh>.

Laura Maylene Walter (28:53):
Listeners, I will definitely link to that article. I'll link to some of these cemeteries as well that we've been speaking about. We've talked a lot about Lake View, which is here in Cleveland. Gorgeous, gorgeous. Well-Known cemetery. Spring Grove down in Cincinnati, which I have actually not been to yet. It's at the other end of the state. But after reading the book and hearing you talk about it today, I definitely want to make a trip and visit it. So I'll link to these and others that do have websites. Of course, they don't all have websites, but I thought that might be a good transition into just some of your favorite cemeteries in general. And I can start because actually a lot of my favorite cemeteries were mentioned in your book. Of course, being in Cleveland, Lake View is the big famous one. I also really love Riverside here in Cleveland.

Laura Maylene Walter (29:39):
I actually recently led a mini tour thanks to help from the employees at Riverside to take writers to some literary grave sites in Riverside. So I thought that that's a beautiful cemetery as well. Erie Street Cemetery in Cleveland, which has a really interesting history that, that maybe I'll ask Robin about in a minute. That it's the oldest cemetery in Cleveland. The Cholera Cemetery in Sandusky. I visited that. That's really fascinating. I got my MFA at Bowling Green State University and there's a gorgeous cemetery that cuts kind of right through the campus that I spent many an hour walking through, and that's pictured in the book. So yeah, there's just so many, so many great cemeteries and so many more that I need to explore after reading this. Robin, I don't know if first you want to comment on any of the ones that I just mentioned, or if all three of you would like to share some of your favorite cemeteries, either from the process of this book or just in general, anything you'd like to shout out?

Robin L. Smith (30:33):
Well, I also have never been to Spring Grove, but I'm going to remedy that later this month with Randy. But I would say just off the top of my head, that probably Lake View is my favorite in Ohio. It is an amazing cemetery. It's worth going there just for the chapel.

Laura Maylene Walter (30:51):
With the Tiffany glass, right?

Robin L. Smith (30:53):
Yeah, the whole interior of it is Tiffany mosaics and it's got that huge Tiffany window. It's just gorgeous.

Randall Lee Schieber (31:01):
Spring Grove is on the top of my list, obviously. Another one that I would mention would be Calvary, our Catholic Cemetery in Dayton. They have an event called Angel Night that they do every year, 1st of December, and they light up about 20 or more different Victorian angel statues. That cemetery is pretty impressive because of the terrain and all the Victorian angels and so forth. And then of course, one of my favorites, the St. Joseph Cemetery in Lockbourne, Ohio.

Laura Maylene Walter (31:32):
And Ian, what about you? I know you've mentioned Lake View. I'm assuming that's one of your favorites. Are there any others that you'd also like to mention?

Ian Adams (31:39):
Well, Lake View would certainly be top of the list. I've spent more time there than any other cemetery in the state. This book was my 23rd photography book on Ohio. So I've traveled about 1.5f million miles around the state in the last 45 years. I wrote a couple of books on Ohio photography guides with about 300 of my favorite places. And so when I'm doing slide programs, which I do two or three times a month on various subjects, I get asked this question a lot. What is your favorite place to visit in Ohio for photography? And let me give you my standard answer now. My standard answer is this, wherever I happen to be at the time. That's my answer. Because wherever you go in Ohio, I could do a book on any county in the state if I needed to, if my life depended upon it.

Ian Adams (32:30):
Some counties will be much harder than others because they don't have so much there in terms of beauty or trees or natural areas or, or manmade structures. But it's the same with cemeteries. You have to look, you have to look hard when you go into a cemetery. At first you may see nothing at all. So you've gotta drive around. You've got to commit some time to it. And as you do that, I find myself constantly looking for anything in the landscape that looks unusual, different, something I haven't seen before. When I first started photographing cemeteries, it was tree monuments. I started seeing all of these tree monuments and they, they're all cut off trees with various decorations and a lot of have ferns, and some have little squirrels sitting on the arms of the trees. But I got fascinated by these tree monuments. From that point on, every time I go to a new cemetery, I would be looking for tree monuments.

Ian Adams (33:28):
And then the same thing with angels. I just don't think I have any favorites. I can think of a couple of Amish cemeteries down in the Amish country that are full of interesting monuments. Right in my own hometown here in Cuyahoga Falls, we have a beautiful little cemetery called Oakwood. I must have driven through Oakwood 50 times in the last few years because it's on my way to and from my favorite diner at East Diner. So twice a week when I go to have breakfast, I often do a quick pass around the cemetery. This cemetery did not appear in the book. Why? Well, if you are going to have all 88 counties in the book, you can't have too many photographs from any one county. Laura, do you know how many cemeteries there are in Cuyahoga County?

Laura Maylene Walter (34:18):
No, but please tell me.

Ian Adams (34:20):
90.

Laura Maylene Walter (34:20):
Wow.

Ian Adams (34:21):
Ninety cemeteries, according to a book that I'm looking at right now, CEMETERIES OF NORTHEAST OHIO by Vicki Blum Vigil, a late author, but that's what I use to find a lot of the cemeteries. So how do you decide which of the 90 to go visit first?

Laura Maylene Walter (34:38):
Right.

Ian Adams (34:38):
It's a real challenge,

Randall Lee Schieber (34:40):
A number that they've come up with if you take a couple of different sources and extrapolate a little bit, and I think we put that in the book.

Ian Adams (34:47):
17,000.

Randall Lee Schieber (34:48):
Yeah, 17,000 cemeteries. So I mean, every county, not just Cuyahoga, but Franklin, my guess is it has well over a hundred, probably 200 or 300 cemeteries itself. And that was one of the challenges of the book. And then of course, putting it together was just as big a challenge as what to include. You know, both Ian and I had well over 800 or so images. Well, we have many more images than that, obviously, that we took. But I think both of us narrowed it down to ones that we would send to the publisher to about 800 and some images. And then we ended up sending the publisher, what about 300,

Ian Adams (35:28):
About a couple of hundred a piece, I think.

Randall Lee Schieber (35:29):
And so then they had the chore of picking out which images to use in the book. Just a huge challenge when you think about how many cemeteries there are and how you go about figuring out what to photograph.

Laura Maylene Walter (35:40):
Yeah, it's a huge undertaking. And I actually made a note, Randall, of what you wrote, referencing those likely more than 17,000 cemeteries in Ohio's 88 counties, and you wrote as a parenthetical, perhaps if we'd known this ahead of time, we would not have been so inclined to take on this project, which really made me laugh. It actually made me think, again, connecting it to the writing process, how many times I've heard aspiring novelists, you know, say the same thing. Like, if I knew how much work or how hard it would be, would I have started? Which is a good thing to not really know the, the extent of it before you start. So you do get started. So with the photographs, you two split the county, so you each did 44 counties and as you said, each had to narrow down your photos and send them to the publisher. Were you communicating with each other in terms of trying to vary the types of photographs you were sending to the publisher? Or how did the content, did it sort of work out based on the different cemeteries that you chose? How much were you collaborating before you sent in the pictures?

Randall Lee Schieber (36:41):
Probably, I would say what, at least two or three times a week.

Ian Adams (36:45):
Two or three times a week, we had up to a one hour phone conversation.

Randall Lee Schieber (36:49):
So we were both very aware of what each of us was photographing and so forth, but we made our own decisions as to the images that we liked and that we were going to submit. So yeah, we had a lot of very good feedback on what we were doing. And so, yeah, no, we definitely influenced each other by seeing what we were doing. But then, you know, we came up with our own images that we really liked and sent those separately to the, the publishers.

Ian Adams (37:17):
Actually Robin was very helpful, I think, to both of us in the sense that she had spent a lot more time studying and visiting cemeteries probably even more than Randy and I had because she was specifically interested in cemeteries and she provided us with, I think it was about a 10 page list of cemeteries in Ohio that really got me started. Okay. I mean, some of them like Lake View were there. I think Mound Cemetery was probably there, so I had already been to some of them, but there were a whole bunch of cemeteries that Robin included in her list that I'd never heard of. And that really got me started before I started doing my own research. So thank you Robin, for heading us in the right direction.

Robin L. Smith (38:02):
You are most welcome.

Laura Maylene Walter (38:03):
<Laugh>. Yeah. I wanted to ask Robin about the writing process and how that worked with the photography. Were you writing completely separately from their photography? Were you seeing some of their selected images as you were writing? How did it come together, the text and the photographs?

Robin L. Smith (38:19):
Well, the three of us had talked quite a bit before anything started about how we wanted to divide the book up and what we were going to cover in the chapters. So once we had that determined, I really wasn't involved in the photography at all, but I knew the themes that we wanted to do for each chapter. So I was doing the research mostly on my own. And this was during Covid, so I wasn't going out and doing a lot outside of my house. Most of this was done online. It was kind of interesting because during most of the process of creating this book, I was also working a full-time day job. So this was my side gig <laugh>. So it was a little challenging, but I think that it ended up going together surprisingly well, considering that, you know, I really had very little information about the kinds of shots they were taking, only the themes that we wanted to cover.

Ian Adams (39:18):
I like to capture my own pictures because I'm also a writer and have written the text for quite a few of my 23 books. And I enjoy that. I actually find it more challenging than the photography in many ways. I don't feel that I'm as naturally gifted to writing as perhaps I am in terms of the photography. And so to me, researching a caption and putting it together and trying to make the caption as informative as possible is an important part of adding value to the photograph. I'm not the kind of person that just likes to stick a photograph out there and not even say what it is. I don't work that way. I want people to know exactly what it is. And if there are any particular things that I think I want to point out, I do that in the caption. Although, as I say, in this case, I was amazed at Robin's ability to go in with a magnifying glass and look at some of the iconography in my pictures that I had not even seen, and then come up with some additional information in the caption. That was sort of amazing. Well,

Robin L. Smith (40:19):
My goal with those captions was to have at least one unusual fact about each one of them. And I think I got most of them <laugh>.

Randall Lee Schieber (40:30):
She did, she did. But I think her structuring the chapters was really, really important to divide it up into the six chapters. And then of course, as Ian had mentioned, I think there was at least 44, 50, or more cemeteries that Robin provided us a list of that got us started. But I think Robin hit it right on the nose with the structuring of those chapters. And then I think that helped Ian and I as we went out and photographed to keep that in mind what she had initially structured the book.

Laura Maylene Walter (41:04):
Yeah, the power of collaboration is on display in this book, which is great. Well, we're starting to run out of time, so I'm going to start wrapping up. I just have a few final things. Listeners. We didn't have time to get to a lot like pet cemeteries or cemeteries like the one at Wright State University that has a special burial place for those who donated their bodies to the school of medicine. So there's, there's a lot of interesting things in this book. I did want to quickly call out some of the famous figures, including literary figures that are mentioned or their graves are shown in the book. Paul Lawrence Dunbar, mostly known for his poetry, but he's one of the first black writers to gain national recognition. Louis Bromfield, who was a bestselling novelist in the twenties and won a Pulitzer in 1927. Harvey Pekar, the comic book writer, author of AMERICAN SPLENDOR, he is in Lake View and anyone in Cleveland who has visited his grave knows that people put pens into the ground as a tribute to him. I mention Annie Oakley just because even though she's not literary herself, we had an episode a few episodes back with Sarah Moore Wagner, the poet, who wrote a poetry collection about Annie Oakley. And by the way, in that episode she says Annie Oakley is not in her grave that she might be buried in ashes at the shoulder of her husband in his coffin, but she says that Annie Oakley is not actually buried there, which would make her gravestone a cenotaph. Would someone quickly like to share what that means?

Robin L. Smith (42:34):
It's a memorial marker for someone who is not buried on that site and one that we show in the book is a cenotaph for a man who went down on the Titanic.

Laura Maylene Walter (42:44):
Yeah, fascinating. And Eliot Ness as well, correct?

Robin L. Smith (42:47):
Exactly. Because he's floating in the lake. [ETA: Ness was cremated; his ashes were scattered in the lake/pond at Lake View Cemetery.]

Laura Maylene Walter (42:50):
Yeah, yeah.

Randall Lee Schieber (42:52):
All those notables that you mentioned, I'm pretty sure we did represent those with a photograph in the book.

Laura Maylene Walter (42:58):
Yeah. So listeners, if you want to take a look at their graves, you can do so in this book. And there's also things that we didn't get to discuss are the materials that gravestones could be made of. There was a trend for a while when graves were actually made out of hollow metal that had this blue gray tinge to them that some cemeteries ended up not allowing because they thought they looked, I suppose, cheap compared to stone, but they actually held up better than stone. So I found that fascinating. And the reason I'm thinking about that as we wrap up is one of my favorite cemeteries I've stumbled across was somewhere in, I think Lorain County by a shopping mall. And it's just this little preserved old cemetery where the stones are all marble. And as many of you might know, the marble stone tends to wear off a lot more quickly and it becomes harder to read. But it was there that I first saw a grave with a verse that is actually was quite common and quite popular to be put on gravestone. So many people listening have probably seen some version of it. But I'll read one of the versions: "Remember me as you pass by. As you are now, so once was I. As I am now, so you must be. Prepare for death and follow me."

Ian Adams (44:10):
Let me add a little piece to that, Laura, because there's often a rejoinder that you find to that particular poem, which goes as follows: "To follow you. I won't consent / until I know which way you went." <laugh>

Laura Maylene Walter (44:23):
<Laugh>. I like that. Well, as my last question, and it's a personal one, so it's up to you if you want to answer or how much, but thinking about cemeteries for so long, it's hard not to think about our own futures when we're no longer here. So I'm wondering if working on this book, visiting cemeteries, writing about cemeteries, has changed at all the way that you might want to spend eternity. I can go first and just say that I've always been attracted to the green burial movement, which is referenced in the book, a much more natural without really a grave marker or a noticeable one. You're just kind of left naturally in the ground. I'm curious if any of you would like to share thoughts that you've had about your own future resting place.

Ian Adams (45:07):
I personally think that the idea of cremation and having one's ashes scattered in a place that is very meaningful to you during your life is a better way to end it all. And not wishing to leave monumental expenses for the foreseeable future to one's family with regard to things like monuments and upkeep of just regular gravestones that many cemeteries charge for. So my preference is going to be cremation.

Robin L. Smith (45:34):
I would concur with pretty much everything Ian said there. My only regret about that is that I do family research and I get so much information from gravestones that I'm kind of sorry that I won't be leaving one <laugh>.

Randall Lee Schieber (45:53):
Well, for me, it certainly has made me think more about it, but I still actually am not sure when I want to end up in the ground or as ashes in an urn or spread out somewhere that I'd like them to be spread out to. Well, we did have a little section on natural burials, and that seems to me maybe the way I would prefer to go. Yeah, it's one of those things that, you know, you don't like to think about.

Robin L. Smith (46:17):
Yes. But Randy, when you get to be our age, you have to think about that <laugh>. You have to, or else you're going to stick your family with it. <Laugh>

Laura Maylene Walter (46:29):
Well, for listeners who are interested in the realities of what can happen to our bodies after death, I always recommend the book SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES by Caitlin Doughty. You know, we're in the Halloween season; if people want to read more about this, I will recommend that. But in the meantime, it's time now to put this episode to rest and allow it to rest in peace. Please go out and buy this book and then go take your own walk among the graves. Ian, Randall, and Robin, thank you so much for being here.

Ian Adams (46:57):
Thank you.

Robin L. Smith (46:58):
Thank you.

Randall Lee Schieber (46:58):
Thank you so much.

Laura Maylene Walter (47:04):
Page Count is presented by the Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review for Page Count wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more online or find a transcript of this episode at ohiocenterforthebook.org. Follow us on Instagram @ohiocenterforthebook or find us on Facebook. If you'd like to get in touch, email ohiocenterforthebook@cpl.org and put "podcast" in the subject line. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back in two weeks for another chapter of Page Count.

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