Saturday, January 20, 2007

Day 2 of My Trip Home

Today, on the second day of my relaxation and research trip back to Lynchburg, I went to the Old City Cemetery, which is one of the most peaceful -- and one of my favorite -- places in the entire city. It's a very quiet area with a great deal of beauty, both natural and man-made (with the architecture of the 19th- and early 20th-century gravestones). The picture above is of the gravesite of one of Lynchburg's famous "madams" from nearly a century ago; her "business" was actually operated in a house not far from the cemetery gates. I really don't know what's worse: the fact that her grave is one of the first you see when you come into the grounds, or the fact that someone continues to immortalize her with the black cloth on the stone and the bed (complete with a fresh quilt and "R.I.P." on the headboard) right outside the fence?

Another interesting view that I found -- I was pressed for time, so I didn't have quite enough time to experiment with black and white photography, shading, etc. There are enough places there, though, that I can try some great things the next time I get back down that way.

4 comments:

SUSAN said...

Beautiful photos! I have always been drawn to old cemetaries.

Susan

my15minutes said...

LOL at the madam's grave....who on earth would keep doing that with fresh flowers??

karen said...

That madam's grave is wild. How weird. We have a very cool cemetary near us. I like to walk through it and say people's names out loud to remember them...

Anonymous said...

A few corrections:

The grave was of Agnes and Lizzie Langley, mother and daughter, both “bawdy ladies” and they lived at the corner of Tenth and Commerce Streets – quite a distance from the cemetery.

The black cloth is a Victorian mourning custom as is the “floral” bed arrangement. The cloth has nothing to do with “immortalizing” the Langleys or their occupation. If you look around the cemetery you will see other graves with the black mourning cloth on the monuments. The “floral” arrangements were sometimes done in other shapes, e.g. harp, chair, wagons, baskets, etc. Often the shapes indicated an occupation and this “bed” was placed here by the curator of the cemetery museum, more or less as a “tongue-in-cheek” item.