‘Reading cemeteries’ reveals clues about past and present, University of Iowa professor says

IOWA CITY — The dead don’t need garbage cans or sidewalks or benches under oak trees.

“It’s designed to hang out in,” University of Iowa Professor Brandon Dean said about cemeteries, the amenities they offer and any notion they’re too spooky for the living — pointing specifically to Iowa City’s historic Oakland Cemetery as a prime example.

“This is what they call a rural cemetery,” he said. “It’s designed to be a space where both the living and the dead coexist.”

Dean said the only thing that scares him at Oakland, crafted with a “park atmosphere” welcoming both dog walkers and deer, are the birds.

“The only thing that worries me among the tombstones is that I might accidentally disturb a blue jay’s nest,” he said. “And then I’ll get pecked.”

In his 14th year at the UI — where he earned his doctorate in religious studies and has been a visiting professor since, focusing on American religion and its intersection with popular culture — Dean has become an expert in “reading cemeteries,” even leading a pre-Halloween cemetery walk through Oakland for the last two years.

Q: What kind of turnout did you have for this year’s cemetery walk?

A: “They tell me about 100. I was more interested in speaking than counting. But it was a fair-sized group. We had 50 last year and about 100 this year.”

Q: What did you do on the walks?

A: “I took them through the cemetery and we read it like a book — sort of walking through history.”

Q: What can cemeteries tell us about history and a community’s history?

A: “When you start at the beginning of the cemetery, at the oldest parts, you are sort of at the beginning of Iowa City. You are in the 1840s. And they are going to think and act like people from the 1840s, if you read these tombstones correct.”

Q: What can you tell about Iowa City in the 1840s from the oldest grave markers?

A: “They have a different relationship with death. We die in hospices or in hospitals. They died in homes. We give our dead over to the funeral homes and the morticians, whereas you would be responsible for preparing your own dead bodies. You'd be preparing your own loved ones for burial. They would rest in your house . … That’s where we get the idea of a funeral parlor, it's actually the parlor of a house. … So these people have a much more intimate relationship with death than we do. We've outsourced it, we've medicalized it, we’ve sanitized it. They were the ones who needed the flowers at the funeral because of the smell of decomposition, they needed something to cover that up.”

Q: How can you see all that on tombstones?

A: “There are symbols,” he said, pointing to veils as an example. “The veil is actually symbolic of when you had the body in the parlor in your house, to make sure that you knew this was being used for a different space, you would put black curtains and black veils and black cloth all around the parlor. So when you see that sort of veil covering in the cemetery, it's actually a reference to the actual wake and the mourning rituals they were doing that we don't do anymore.”

Q: What can you tell about a community’s population from grave markers?

A: “When you start off, you see all these different Anglo and Germanic names. And then, as you move through them, you start seeing the Czech names and the Polish names and the Asian last names and all these different ethnicities and waves of new peoples coming to Iowa City, just by the names on the tombstones.

“You also can see how we went from centering our identity on our families — we had family plots where the grandma, the grandpa, the mom, the dad, the kids were all buried in the same space — to individual graves, where its now just the couple. Just the man and the wife.”

Q: What is unique about today’s head stones?

A: “You see actual photographs of people. … They have their face engraved in lasers on their tombs. … And as the technology improves, and as the United States becomes more and more focused on individualism, you can see individual expression come out. So now we can read more about somebody’s life. They were a card player. They visited the Eiffel Tower. That’s on their grave stone — things they want us to know.”

Q: Are head stones becoming more informative?

A: “In the beginning of the cemetery, all their life was placed in that hyphen — the entirety of their life was in between those two dates, and the hyphen was all we had. Now we have all these different pictures and references.”

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Q: Iowa City’s Oakland Cemetery is known for its “Black Angel.” Can you tell us the history behind that?

A: “We have Teresa Feldevert. She's the lady responsible. She's an immigrant from Bohemia, and she and her son come over, and her son Eddie Dolezal dies relatively young, at the age of 19, from tubercular meningitis. And then she has him buried. And his original gravesite was not at the Black Angel. She has him moved. But the tree you see to the left, that's a tree monument designed to symbolize a life cut short.”

Dean said after Dolezal’s death, his mother moved west and found a husband, who also died, leaving her his fortune.

“In today’s money, she became a millionaire,” he said. “So she commissions a Chicago artist to construct a bronze statue of an angel to watch over the graves of her husband and her son. So she has them moved and interred in the same place. It cost her $5,000 in 1912 money, so it’s a good chunk of change. And then she goes through her life and she dies in 1924 — although there’s no end date on her tombstone.”

Q: Why not?

A: “Between 1912 and 1924 she donated the vast majority of her fortune to her village in Bohemia to help out with orphans and people in need,” Dean said, explaining she simply ran out of money.

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Q: Do you think that lack of end date to her life adds to the lore?

A: “That’s the joke I use when I get there,” he said, “I go, and notice she doesn’t have an end date … because she’s still alive.”

Q: What are some of the rumors and legends around the angel?

A: “One of them is that she was evil, and that's why the statute turned black — she was a witch. … And them some of the rumors aren't even based on her at all. It's that a husband’s wife died, so he got an angel that he wanted to look over her grave, but then she was unfaithful in life, she had cheated on him, so the angel turned black as a sign of her sin. … And then the other one is that there was a surgeon who buried his son under the angel, but it turns out that the surgeon had actually murdered his son. And the angel turned black for the father's sin.”

Q: What kind of message does the actual story send, in your opinion?

A: “The true story is a story of love — this is a mother's love for her son,” he said. “But then it becomes something else because of the oxidation, and the statue itself is not the rounded, sort of classical Greek statue. It's got those weird angles and weird marks and stuff on it. The lines are all harsh and brutal. So that combined with the oxidation just allowed for all kinds of stories.”

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Q: Where do you see cemeteries and burial moving in the future? What trends are you watching for?

A: “I think the eco-burial movement is going to start taking off — the idea of being buried with a seed and then becoming a tree. I think that's a continuation of these grave markers, but instead of the marker itself you become this biological entity that stretches from the ground to the sky, but in a way that gives life and gives shade and gives a shelter.”

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com