Wednesday, July 15, 2009

We took a little vacation

down south recently and of course, I made sure we stopped at a few cemeteries. If it had been up to me we probably would have stopped at every one we passed, but unfortunately my husband doesn't share my fascination with cemeteries to the same extent as I do so we had to compromise.

One of the biggest surprises was the cemetery in Asheville, North Carolina that we stopped at, just by chance. As I was walking around this huge cemetery, I came across the graves of Thomas Wolfe and O Henry. I found it interesting that both headstones were relatively small and neither was adorned except for some small stones and other items that visitors left. Does anyone know why people leave stones on graves?


Here is Thomas Wolfes





Just a short distance away is O Henry! It’s a good thing they had a sign pointing it out because I would not have recognized it by his real name. Again, quite an unimpressive stone.



What a coincidence to find the graves of two famous people without even trying!



I found that cemeteries down south have some similarities to those up here in Michigan. For instance, they like plastic flowers.





And they like to over decorate.



The differences? Well, they tend to mound the graves.



They hyphenate when needed



They fence them in to protect them from ????



They use stones that have fallen to create sculptures and build bridges




It was a fun time. I can't wait to get on the road again!

1 comment:

Taneya said...

wow! that's cool! I grew up in Greensboro, so always new O'Henry was from there, but I didn't know that he was buried in Asheville. May I use your picture of Wolfe's & Porter's headstones on the blog for the ncgenweb project? (giving you full attribution of course).