At the Foot of the Trail

by: Eric Miller

Cemeteries are the last place people would think to spend a vacation. Still, the numbers of tourists visiting cemeteries and searching for the graves of interesting people and stories continues to grow every year.

And they're visiting cemeteries for other reasons too.

• Concerts in a Bronx, New York cemetery draw thousands of jazz fans to hear the sounds of Duke Ellington and Miles Davis.

• Visitors to Mount Auburn Cemetery in Boston rent an audio cassette guide of the grounds and wander through the past at their leisure.

• Lawyers and Congressional aides regularly meet for coffee in Washington's Congressional Cemetery.

• And last year more than 5,000 people toured Cleveland's Lake View Cemetery stopping by the graves of Elliot Ness, John Rockefeller and President James Garfield.

The Cemetery Trail  is about sharing some of the stories preserved in cemeteries around America. There's more than enough about what we might think of as ordinary cemeteries to make them a stop for tombstone tourists.

• A cemetery in Gallitzin, Pennsylvania is filled mainly with children who perhaps died in an epidemic.

• One Pittsburgh cemetery contains the grave of a famous gambler and people visit to place lottery tickets on the grave several times a year.

• At lakeview Cemetery in Cleveland, Ohio people visit John Rockefeller's grave daily and leave behind dimes. Rockefeller had become known by his habit of giving dimes to children.

• And a visit to a Harmonite cemetery will seem curious, as the religion forbade the use of grave markers.

Some cemeteries have been surrounded by commercial development and are unable to provide the security and maintenance necessary to ward off vandals who steal stained glass, urns and figurines and sell them to restaurants and gardeners, unaware of, or ignorant to their origins.

Please join us over the next few months as we make our way along The Cemetery Trail.

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