Twilight at the City Cemetery in Nashville, Tennessee
Is it weird to seek out a quiet hour on Christmas Eve and find myself in a cemetery? I can see some of you nodding. “Yes, Laura, it is kind of odd.” I’ve got to admit that when I got in the car and left my family – not in a huff, my family’s great – with Google map in hand, to drive to a part of Nashville I’d never seen,(after twenty years of visiting for the holidays), I wondered a little myself.
But when I found the City Cemetery and got out to walk around, that familiar sense of peace settled over me and I knew that at least for an hour, I was in exactly the right place.
It’s a beautiful, old cemetery with some really interesting stones. Like this one. Does anybody know the story here? The plaque reads, Ann Rawlin Sanders. She was 21 when she died. No, wife-of or beloved daughter. It was 1836. It would have been quite a feat to move a boulder this huge. It crossed my mind that the rock is a natural feature of the spot, the tip of the iceberg so to speak. But then how could they bury someone under it?
There were three great angels.
Erosion had washed away details on this last one, leaving rather more to the imagination than the sculptor probably intended.
The second shot shows the outline of a wing better, giving the sense of the angel carrying off the dearly departed much better than the first shot – in which I got the wrong idea all together.
This was an interesting marker. It reads, Thomas B. Coleman, Mayer of Nashville, 1842. Really? The mayor with a misspelled, plain, wooden plank? There’s got to be a story here too.
January 5th, 2013 at 6:30 PM
That boulder is amazing. Surprised to see a wooden marker in TN – lots of them out west in the desert.
January 5th, 2013 at 6:39 PM
That big boulder looks like it has a lot of water wear on it; as if it had been in a stream or under a water fall. Maybe that was enough of a statement to move that beloved boulder into the cemetery and it didn’t need any explanation to the ones who knew her. Just a thought.
January 5th, 2013 at 8:28 PM
An interesting thought. That’s one of the things I love about cemeteries, they get my imagination flowing.
January 6th, 2013 at 1:14 PM
Love your page! Have you ever gone to Hugo, Okla. where the cemetary is full of interesting circus performers stones? If not, I highly recommend that you go!
January 6th, 2013 at 6:22 PM
I’ve seen some great pictures, but I’ve never been. It’s definitely on my must-visit list. Glad you like the page!