I know things have been as dead around here as the people whose graves we take pictures of, and I really am sorry. Graduate school is intense! (Not too intense for you to update your new blog, The Star Wars Librarian, now on WordPress . . .) (Shut up.) But I do have a cemetery for you, the last Indiana one we visited before gas prices shot up and before we got afraid to leave the apartment (oh, yeah, it’s been drama over here. Lots of drama). So let’s get started on this one, because it’s actually very interesting and has a lot of history.

Allen's Creek: 8 Cemeteries in One

The Eight Cemeteries

Allen’s Creek Cemetery (Monroe County, Indiana) is a really neat little place. Actually, it is made up of eight cemeteries that were relocated from the 10,750 acres that Lake Monroe now occupies. According to a sign located in the cemetery itself, when construction on Lake Monroe began 1962, “all houses, barns, fence lines, power lines, trees and eight cemeteries were cleared or moved.” Sexton Wilbert of Bloomington saw to this relocation, which was completed in 1965. These eight cemeteries were Blackwell Cemetery, Cutright Cemetery, Daniel Fox Cemetery, Goodman Cemetery, Hughes Cemetery, Mary W. Malott Cemetery, Mitchell Cemetery, and Shields Cemetery.

We visited in November of 2010 on a very warm and sunny day. This was about two months before everything in the world fell apart and we still thought it was safe to drive aimlessly around the way we do in Ohio looking for boneyards.

View from the front

Some work had recently been done, we could see as soon as we drove up. The stairs and walkways were pretty recently poured and kind of stuck out oddly against the otherwise highly natural and haphazard arrangement of the place. The two cement blocks have the plaques on them that I quoted earlier–on the left, the 23 Psalm, and on the right, the list of cemeteries and story about how they got here.

Stones on the Hill

The cemeteries were unidentified but kept separate, with pretty clear wide aisles between each cluster. The eight individual cemeteries mainly seemed to be small family clusters; this picture shows one of them as well as the surrounding woods.

The Unusual Headstone of Lonzo Eads

And naturally in any case where you have more than one cemetery occupying a single area, there is bound to be more than the usual individuality displayed. This stone for Lonzo Eads is a somewhat creepy specimen if you ask me–homemade-type grave stones are always a little peculiarly creepy in their own unique way.

There were lots of these

Frankly, I just like this picture! This was a really brilliant idea. Of course when they dug up the cemeteries and relocated them, they discovered lots of graves that had been hitherto unmarked. Unable to identify whose remains they were but desiring to mark them anyway, they got these generic-type stones that say simply “UNKNOWN” with numbers. These were pretty much everywhere.

Sometimes headstones are inadvertantly funny

I just threw this one in because . . . well, come on! How did no one see this at the time?

A tree behind a tree

When I first came up to this one, I thought that it was an actual tree stump hiding behind a tree. Then I approached and realized it was a tombstone. A tombstone with a giant spider on it, actually.

Some stones in the ground

When stones can’t be repaired, it’s common to embed them like flat markers. The chief downside is they erode even quicker and get overgrown rapidly, but it does tend to preserve the stone if it’s otherwise cared for. This is a particularly legible example.

Another interesting one

This is just another one with some personality. Sarrah here was the wife of George Pate, a Civil War vet; they had married on May 5, 1856, in Bloomington, IN. He died nine months before she did, and I don’t remember seeing his grave there, but interestingly she received his pension of $8 each month there until her death.

A faded one on the hillside

Like I said, a lot of variety and history in a cemetery like this, where old and new mingle. Very new-fashioned stones were situated a few feet from very old ones like this, where most of the inscription has been eroded away by the harsh Indiana weather. I think the cemetery caretakers do a really good job of keeping the place neat, tidy, and in as good a shape as possible, and given that this is the kind of project nobody wants to embark on, the relocation of these cemeteries was handled pretty well.

As usual, see the rest of the pictures (here)!