The Culture of the Folk Cemeteries

Although the reference book I have pertains to Southern and German Texan Cemeteries, our oldest Texas Czech Cemeteries were either originally German Texas ones or laid out the same due our similar cultural experiences in Europe.

The following information is excerpted from the book, Texas Graveyards, A Cultural Legacy, by Terry G. Jordan, and published by the University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas, in 1982.

“…the Germans had an Old World heritage of burial in sanctified ground. Throughout rural Germany, as in most of Europe, cemeteries often occupy the yard surrounding the church building,…Even if the burial ground is not adjacent to the village church,…it still normally religious sanction…Within the traditional continental European graveyard, family plots and private ownership of grave sites are virtually unknown, ad it has long been the common practice to reuse the site after a few decades have passed.

Internal Spatial Arrangement

In most respects of internal arrangement, many Texas German cemeteries differ markedly from southern Anglo-American and Mexican graveyards. Such southern traditions as wife-to-the-left burial, bordered family plots, and feet-to-the east internment are often not adhered to by the Germans….In many places the grave axes are aligned with adjacent roads or streets rather than facing east…[some] face a central walk way, causing some to be feet-facing west burials. Even the German Methodists occasionally depart from the Wesleyan veneration of feet-to-east interment…(Jordan, pages 93 and 94)

Basis of Feet-to-East Burials

The origin of the traditional southern burial orientation is found in Europe. One finds in Great Britain both the preferred feet-to-east position and the punitive north-south alignment for wrongdoers, notably suicides…Preferences of the east may well have a pagan antecedent in the sun worship cults once widely spread in Europe. The sun god Sol Invictus was widespread in the Roman Empire at the advent of Christianity and lent to the new faith both this god’s holy day, Sunday, as the Christian Sabbath and his birthday, the winter solstice, as Christ’s nativity date. He could have also have provided the traditional Christian burial position. Perhaps an echo of this origin is heard in the claim by a minority of rural Texans that the feet to the east burial allows the dead to face the rising sun. (Jordan, 30)

[Also, if you study the really old cemeteries, they looked to the rising sun to determine where was east. So, many of the markers are turned at slightly different angles due to the differences in the time of year when people died! This is true, I have noted in the very old Irish Texas cemetery I documented.}

Husband and Wife--Positions

Husband and Wife also have traditional positions in the southern folk cemetery. The man is supposed to be buried to the right, or south of the woman. Almost every Texas folk cemetery offers exceptions to the rule, but generally over two-thirds, of the married couples are interred in this arrangement…Other Texas ethnic groups, including German, Czech, Poles, and Mexicans, do not employ this custom. Husband-to-the right burial apparently derives fro a British Christian folk belief that Eve was created from the left side of Adam…(Jordan, pages 30 and 31)

…A universal trait of the southern folk cemeteries in Texas us the subdivision into family plots. Family ties are clearly a very important factor in the spatial arrangement of burials. In fact the majority of traditional southern cemeteries began as private graveyards…Often fences, curbing, or rows of bricks mark the confines of the family.  (Jordan, page 31)

[It appears to me, although I have not actually documented this, that the Praha cemetery started out by individuals being buried in an area without relation to a family plot. Over me, the custom changed and now there are numerous family plots indicating a change from the German to southern folk custom.

At the same time, I talked to a distant relative who said her parents were buried “over and under” in the same location because there wasn’t enough space for them to be next to each other.--SRH]

Scraping

[In true Southern folk cemeteries ALL the ground is scraped, there is no grass anywhere.]

“The first glimpse of such a cemetery truly startles the unsuspecting visitor. Throughout the burial ground, the natural grasses and weeds have been laboriously chopped or “scraped” away, revealing an expanse of read-orange East Texas soil or somber black prairie earth, sometimes decorated with raked patterns, At each grave, this dirt is heaped in an elongated mound, oriented on an east-west and anchored by a head and foot stone. (Jordan, page 13)

…Perhaps no feature of the southern folk cemetery begs more for interpretation than the practice of scraping. I have at several “workings” asked men who were laboriously chopping out grass and weeds from their family plots why they did so. Most paused, leaned on their hoes and appeared to consider the question for the first time in their lives. Some opined that it was “customary” or “looked nice” and few saw it as a practical way to eliminate mowing, seeming oblivious to the fact that scraping was more work. My own grandmother, a woman with ancestral roots in Alabama and the Carolinas, merely declared that grass on a grave was “disrespectful to the dead.” Folklorist Fred Tarpley got a similar answer when he asked the same question in Northeast Texas: ‘Grandpaw killed himself keeping the weeds out of his cotton, and we are not about to let them grow on his grave now.’…The origin of scraping and most other practices related to the traditional southern cemetery was much to ancient to remain in the memory of present- day practitioners. The reasons had been forgotten countless generations ago in faraway lands.

Archival evidence was more helpful. It pointed to Africa as the likely source of grave yard scraping. Near equivalents to bare earth cemeteries can be found in the traditional practices of the West African slave coast…I believe the scraped wrath cemetery is an Africanism and goes hand-in-hand with the typically southern and African swept-earth yard surrounding dwellings. Indeed southern folks typically refer to their cemeteries as ‘yards.’ Grass, in Africa and the South, was an unwelcome intruder. Respectable people kept it chopped out of yards, fields, and burial grounds. Some rural Anglos in Texas even refer to scraping as “plowing.” The Ultimate African reasons were possibly the danger posed by grassfires and the proverbial snake in the grass. Removal of the grass also kept loose livestock from grazing (and defecating) in yards and cemeteries. Or, perhaps, scraping came south across Africa to the slave coast long ago with Islam. In that case, the laborious scraped Texas graveyards could be an effort to re-create, in a humid climate, the long-forgotten desert desolation of the Sahara and Arabia, where Moslem dead lie beneath the bare sand. (Jordan, page 14)

The large majority of southern folk cemeteries are enclosed in a fence, in contrast to Midwestern, New England, or even Kentucky graveyards…The lack of such an enclosure, or its poor repair, can be an embarrassment to the local community or the family, and fund-raising drives are often held to build or improve fences. Even individual graves or family plots within a typical southern cemetery in Texas are sometimes fenced. This compulsion to enclose the burial ground apparently derives from the British tradition, for enclosing walls are ancient to Britain possibly dating to early Celtic Christianity. The Church lent its support to the custom in 1229, when an English bishop required all cemeteries to be walled and forbade the grazing of livestock in the church yard. I have observed the same revulsion towards animals in the cemetery among rural Anglo-Texans.

Also common both in Britain and Texas is the Anglo-Saxon lichgate, or “corpse gate,” a ceremonial entranceway to the cemetery spanned by an overhead arch. The funeral procession passes beneath the lichgate, while everyday visitors to the graveyard enter by way of smaller, unarched gates. In Britain the lichgates are often rather elaborate, containing a gabled rood but in Texas and the South they usually consist of a steel or wooden span or wooden span, to which is normally affixed a sign showing the name of the cemetery. The original reason for employing a lichgate is unclear, but they be symbolic of departure from the world of the living . Among the Georgia coastal Blacks, the funeral procession stops outside the gate while the leader asks the dead for permission to enter. (Jordan, pages 38 and 39)

[In the Praha Cemetery, we have a fence, a lichgate, and several smaller gate entries. These are all characteristics of the Southern Folk Cemetery. Inside, the rows of graves face the center of the cemetery where a statue stands in the center. This pertains to the German lay-out of the cemetery. I believe that there is also one section that faces East.

There are no plot fences within the cemeteries; however, most all the older graves have curbing. Also, I did not see signs of fresh scraping but there is a lot of concrete and grave covering graves.

I stopped by the St. John cemetery before I went to the Praha cemetery. There, many of the graves were freshly scraped and the soil mounded in the center of graves.

I find it of great interest how different each cemetery is.--SRH]

Traditional Flowers, Plants, and Trees

“…the traditional southern cemetery is adorned with a variety of flowers, plants, and trees, most of which bear an ancient pagan symbolism. The Mediterranean mother goddess is represented by several such symbols, perhaps the most notably the rosebush. So common are roses in southern cemeteries that even the names of the graveyards often derive from this plan; one finds numerous “Rose Hills” and “Rose Lawns” and Jasper County boasts a cemetery named “Rosebloom.” I have found rose bushes growing in the majority of southern folk cemeteries in Texas, both along the surrounding fences and on individual graves. For example, rose bushes appear in all twenty-seven traditional cemeteries inspected in Cass County.

The link of the rose to the mother goddess is well known, for this flower appears in many surviving depictions of her. Demeter or Isis are often shown riding on a rose-wheeled cart, while in Rome the Magna Mater’s attendants were garlanded in roses. We still associate roses with motherhood, particularly on Mother’s Day, when offspring wear them to church. The Virgin Mary inherited the rose symbol from her prototype and is herself the Rose of Sharon. Often in paintings the Madonna is shown in conjunction with roses. Not surprisingly, then, the rosebush became the typical cemetery plant, particularly in the provinces once ruled by Rome, including England.

The lily, derived according to Mediterranean mythology from the milk of Hera and later well established as a symbol of the Madonna, is also a common southern cemetery plant. It seemingly made a transition from paganism similar to that of the rose. Lilies grow in over 40 percent of the Cass County graveyards, probably a representative proportion for all traditional southern cemeteries in Texas.

In the face of such diverse symbolic evidence, it is difficult to deny that the Magna Mater occupies a prominent, if forgotten, place in the southern folk cemetery. Her cult was the last to give way to Christianity in Rome, and her worship was particularly strong among the common folk. The early church fathers renounced the Magna Mater, forcing her to hide, to fashion disguises, to adopt aliases. They thought they were done with her, but popular, millennia-old deities do not die so easily. All these centuries she remained among us, and our cemeteries provided one of her secret refuges.

By no means do the rose and the lily complete the list of typical southern cemetery plants. Evergreens, irises, crape myrtles. Gardenias, azaleas, and nandinas all abound, and occasionally one sees holly, yews, and magnolias. Of these, the evergreen, represented in Texas by the cedar or juniper, appear most consistently. For example. Evergreens are planted in seventeen of eighteen rural cemeteries inspected in Montague County, in twenty-one of twenty eight in Tyler County, in twenty-four of twenty-seven in Cass County. The same is true across most of the eastern United States and western Europe. “evergreen” is the fourth most popular cemetery name in the United States and ranks first for graveyards established before 1914. The origin of this symbolism may also lie in the ancient Mediterranean, where the cedar was known as the abode of death, a tradition derived from the Osiris legend. Osiris’ coffin was hidden in a cedar in Lebanon, where the mother goddess Isis discovered it. Another possible source of the custom is the pagan Germanic veneration of the needle leaf evergreen as a symbol of eternal life, the same veneration gave us the Christmas tree. In either case, the evergreen custom is clearly pre-Christian, and its presence in the cemeteries of Texas represents another remarkable survival of an ancient custom…

The custom of placing flowers or flowering scrubs or trees in cemeteries seemingly comes from the ancient Mediterranean and Mid East. Flowers were found, for example, in King Tut’s tomb. Deeply ingrained in the southern cemetery custom, the use of flowers has spread to new varieties over the years. The traditional rose and lily have been joined by the gardenia, magnolia, azalea, bluebonnet, crape myrtle, nandina,, and a host of others.

…The iris, especially common in southern cemeteries, is perhaps best interpreted as simply another representation of the traditional flower custom. It possesses the added advantages of helping hold the scrape earth in place and requires little car. However, some Texas rural folks ascribe a Christian symbolism to the iris. Growing in clusters, they say its pointed blades collectively resemble palm fronds, symbolizing Palm Sunday and Christ’s last journey into Jerusalem. Too, some identify the iris with the Nile reeds that hid the infant Moses. The flower of the iris was an ancient Egyptian regal symbol but seemingly had no funerary significance.

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