A Grave Is the Only Stop That Cannot Close

Everything else in this index is provisional.

A museum built by one person closes when that person dies. A fibreglass giant gets sold to a collector in another state. A themed motel is repainted, a cave tour loses its insurance, a roadside attraction is bulldozed for a slip road. Work on an index like this for long enough and you develop a low-grade anxiety about whether anything you listed last year is still standing.

Then there are the graves. Sixty-five of them, in twenty-one states. Every one will be exactly where it is now in fifty years, because in almost every American jurisdiction moving a burial requires a court order, next-of-kin consent, or both.

What ends up in one

Dr John Pemberton is in Linwood Cemetery in Columbus, Georgia. He invented Coca-Cola, sold the rights for a sum variously reported as somewhere around two thousand dollars, and died in poverty two years later. The company he started is one of the largest on earth. The grave is a modest stone in a municipal cemetery, and the city's public works department is the authority you contact about it.

Chang and Eng Bunker are buried at White Plains Baptist Church in Mount Airy, North Carolina. They were the conjoined twins from whom the phrase "Siamese twins" came, they toured for decades, then bought farmland, married two sisters, and between them had twenty-one children. They are in a single grave because they died within hours of one another.

Charles Stratton — General Tom Thumb — has a monument in Bridgeport, Connecticut that is considerably larger than he was, which was the point, and which his employer P. T. Barnum would have understood perfectly.

And then the ones that make no sense at all

In Middlebury, Vermont there is the grave of Amum-Her-Khepesh-Ef, an Egyptian child who died around 1883 BC. He arrived in the nineteenth century as part of a museum acquisition, was eventually found in poor condition, and was given a headstone and a burial in a Vermont cemetery by people who decided that was the decent thing to do.

In Suttons Bay, Michigan there is an Archduke of Austria. In Lambertville, New Jersey there is George Coryell, whose entire claim is that he was one of the men who lowered George Washington's coffin — a fact recorded on a marker because it is the only thing anybody knows about him.

And in Chardon, Ohio, Ettore Boiardi is buried under the name the label spelled phonetically so Americans could pronounce it.

Why they accumulate

A grave becomes a destination through a particular sequence. Somebody is briefly extremely famous. The fame decays. The buildings associated with them are sold or demolished, the objects go into private collections, the business changes hands and drops the name.

What survives is the one object nobody has the authority to remove. So the grave, which was never intended to be a monument to the interesting fact, ends up being the only place the interesting fact is still attached to.

This is not a morbid kind of tourism. It is closer to the opposite — it is the last physical index of a person, in a country that is otherwise very willing to knock things down.

If you go

They are almost all in working cemeteries with other people's recent grief in them. Go quietly, in daylight, and do not move anything that has been left.

Rubbings damage stone. A photograph does not.