Learning about Evergreen Cemetery

[About.com]: Why Evergreen? What makes this cemetery special?

[Gregory Vogel]: The short answer is that Evergreen is located immediately adjacent to the main grounds of the University of Arkansas, and we could walk from the classroom to the cemetery in under five minutes! There are other reasons that make it ideal, though. It is a fairly old cemetery for the region (the earliest interments we know of date to the 1840s), and has seen almost continuous use since then, so it has a great diversity of features.

Evergreen also has a strong connection to the University of Arkansas and to Northwest Arkansas as a whole. Most of the people who have buildings named after them at the university, for example, are buried at Evergreen, as are many previous professors, college presidents, and famous politicians. Evergreen began as a private cemetery in the 1830s or 1840s but was soon opened up to most other town residents, so there is a greater diversity of religious symbols, stone types, and other features that may be more homogenous in church cemeteries.

Have you learned anything interesting about it since your students have been involved?

We've learned a great deal about the cemetery since we began the project, and we're still learning more as we finish the recording and put all of the information together (over 2,000 recording forms completed so far, so this is a big task!).

There is a very interesting demographic shift in the cemetery, for example, after about 1950. Prior to this time the burials consisted of a representative cross-section of ages, but after this time burial ages have steadily increased, and there are very few recent burials of children or young adults. I think this may be common at many cemeteries as the grounds begin to fill up. When family plots run out of room, the younger generations either move away or begin using a different cemetery, and the burials at the older cemetery are mostly the husbands or wives of people already buried there.

What kinds of projects have your students developed to date?

Most of the student projects are drawn directly from information in the cemetery database. These projects are generally a quantitative analysis of one or more of the recorded variables. Several students have constructed seriations, for example, of different gravestone types or motifs.

One student graphed out the occurrence of different gender terms used on the gravestones and found that most paired terms (son vs. daughter, father vs. mother) were used about equally, but that "wife of" was used far more frequently than "husband of". This is very interesting--why would a wifely status be more important than a husbandly status on gravestones, but a motherly status not be more important than a fatherly one? Of course, this particular project was conducted on a fairly small sub-set of the gravestones, so it will be interesting to see how it looks when all of the stones are recorded. Maybe the use of gender-specific terms changes through time?

I've posted the results of a few student projects on-line, and I will be putting more up later this fall or winter.

Previous

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4

Next