The Gravesite

The Christian cemetery is a memorial and a record. It is not a mere field in which the dead are stowed away unknown; it is a touching and beautiful history, written in family burial plots, in mounded graves, in sculptured and inscribed monuments. It tells the story of the past, not of its institutions, or its wars, or its ideas, but of its individual lives,--of its men and women and children, and of its household. It is silent, but eloquent; it is common, but it is unique. We find no such history elsewhere; there are no records in all the wide world in which we can discover so much that is suggestive, so much that is pathetic and impressive.

Rev. Joseph Anderson (1836 - 1916)

Welcome to the GraveSite! We hope you enjoy looking at our pictures as much as we enjoyed taking them.

My daughter and I travel all over the Midwest to visit cemeteries to photograph them. This all started in the summer of 2002 with a trip to Algona, Iowa to visit the “gypsy cemetery”. It is actually a small fenced off section of Union Township Cemetery. I won’t go into the whole legend here, the story is easy to find on the net for anyone that is interested. Anyway, for some reason, my daughter was fascinated by this and we had to go. Since this was a 2 ½ hour drive from where I live I thought I had better see what else was around there to visit and maybe take pictures of. Since the theme of the day seemed to be cemeteries I decided to check out the others near this particular one. We found Ramsey Township Cemetery on the top of lonely hill in the middle of a corn field. I have seen it described elsewhere on the net as something straight out of a horror movie but we loved it and found it beautiful. We were hooked after that. We visit many places a year but especially try to find the lost and abandoned cemeteries. Many are neglected and some destroyed by farming, the incessant wind here on the prairie and just plain apathy. Families move away, churches disband, and many times no one is left to care for the small country cemeteries. These are the places we are drawn to, the places we try to photograph before they are gone forever. I am not sure what else draws us to these places, maybe the history, definitely the absolute respect we have for those pioneers who traveled out here in the early 1800’s looking for a better life. They faced incredible hardships and yet they stayed.

Every stone, every cemetery has a story. The history of our country can be found in these places, whether its one of the huge cemeteries in Minneapolis or a tiny one of 2 or 3 stones in the middle of a corn field in Iowa. We are and always have been a diverse nation and so it is with our cemeteries……

TheGraveSite is (c) Valerie Lafrenz, Jen Johnson 2011 All rights reserved. All written material, photographs and images (unless previously public domain), are copyright protected and may not be used, reprinted, retransmitted, or altered in whole or in part without express written permission. Submissions by individual contributors remain the property of each individual, but by submitting contributions, they have given permission to post those contributions on TheGraveSite website.