I did not intend to go to Riverside Cemetery today. Rather, I'd planned to go and kill some time photographing a newly-built shopping district that has fast become the answer to downtown in my area of the city. However, when I stepped outside and saw how harsh the light was today, I considered that when photographing buildings you're all too often aiming the camera upward and often into the sun. I thought perhaps a better idea would be to go someplace where you would be aiming the camera down. And off I went to the graveyard.
Located in a Victorian neighborhood called Montford, Riverside is Asheville's largest cemetery, and the remains of more than 13,000 people are interred here. The graves tell so many stories. I saw a monument to a woman who had outlived at least three of her children. Their graves were next to hers. I saw entire rows of graves belonging to people who died in the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918, which hit Asheville especially hard; that must have been a terrifying time to live here and see the whole city around you sick and dying. I saw -- and photographed -- graves of people from other states and other countries, and wondered how they'd come to sleep beneath the ground here in Southern Appalachia, hundreds (sometimes thousands) of miles from their homes.
Shall we explore?
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First off, let's consider the irony that a big cemetery is located at the end of a dead-end street.
Thomas Wolfe was one of the authors who helped put Asheville on the map. Others were short story writer O. Henry (aka William Sidney Porter), Carl Sandburg, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In recent years, authors such as Gail Godwin, Charles Frazier, and Ron Rash -- among many others -- have lived in or worked in Asheville.
There were a lot of people in the cemetery tending to graves, seeing the sights (including a couple of tourists who stopped me to ask where some of the more famous graves were located), mothers pushing strollers, joggers, and even what appeared to be couples out on dates. I can relate to that. My boyfriend and I came here on one of our first dates and went for a stroll.
What -- you don't go to cemeteries when you're out on a date?
I'm going to guess that someone either threw something at this mausoleum, or slung paint on it that had to be scrubbed off. Vandalism seems to be a problem in Riverside, after a long and peaceful hiatus. I noticed quite a few gravestones toppled over, and they didn't get that way without help.
However, once upon a time, Montford -- the neighborhood where Riverside Cemetery is located -- was once an extremely bad neighborhood and thugs would regularly wander in to do some damage. The result nowadays is that most of the statues are missing their heads or limbs or, in the case of one, was broken off at the ankles and carted off altogether.
This was a bit strange. This gravestone was dedicated to two men with differing last names who had both died in the 1950's. I couldn't help but wonder if perhaps they had been a couple.
For a little Southern city in the Appalachian Mountains, Asheville's Jewish community has a long and proud history.
There's a veterans' cemetery inside Riverside Cemetery. Most of the gravestones are marked with the state the veteran was from. If the veteran was foreign, the country is marked. There were several Austrians buried here, and people from most every state. This begs the question of why, and how they ended up here, of all places. Most of them died young and in the 1920's. If I recall my history, there wasn't much going on war-wise in the world in the 1920's, but I'm no expert.
When I was a kid, my mother and I loved nothing more than to visit cemeteries and go off in search of gravestones that told how the person had died. And my mother wonders how I managed to grow up so morbid.
Those are the tall buildings of downtown off in the distance. Back to the land of the living...
And in case you found this collection of pictures to be depressing, let me cheer you up with a picture of a cat sleeping on some Montford resident's front steps.
And also with a picture of a fat squirrel encountered in a tree in the cemetery.
