Cemetery

NEW ORLEANS / / The little band of cemetery tourists couldn't resist the delicate, ghoulish question: After Hurricane Katrina, did any of the bodies float? It was a humid, gray autumn day in New Orleans, almost cool, and our tour group had meandered through the French Quarter, past the "Make Levees Not War" banners, across alcoholically aromatic Bourbon Street, and finally over to Basin Street and St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. "You'd have been ankle deep in water here," our guide had said, pointing to the waterline, a shadowy gray stripe on the white paint along a cemetery wall.

An African-American church in Westminster has asked state legislators and preservationists to help save its historic cemetery from ruin.On a tour Friday of Ellsworth Cemetery in Carroll County, Richard B. Hughes, chief of the Office of Archaeology for the Maryland Historic Trust, pledged technical support but stopped short of offering money for restoration of the final resting place of veterans, former slaves and many of Carroll County's African-American leaders."Money...

Work-release inmates from the Baltimore County jail had an unusual cleanup job last week -- a graveyard.They tidied up a tiny family cemetery near the center of Towson, where founding members of the community are buried. Over the years, it has fallen into disrepair as vandalism, trash and weeds have claimed the forgotten plot.But a recent Sun article describing the problems sparked several offers of help -- from individuals as far away as Pennsylvania and Anne Arundel County.After reading about the litter, James M. Dean, director of the county Bureau of Corrections, sent three prisoners, accompanied by a corrections officer, to the Shealey cemetery the next day to tackle the project.

Historic cemetery buffs are a tough bunch to sell on the beauty of Mack trucks engraved in headstones. But Dennis Montagna gave it his best shot yesterday as he addressed a standing-room-only crowd at a cemetery preservation workshop in Annapolis. After decades of markers designed with easy mowing and uniformity in mind, he said, the "death-care" industry is pushing personalization. "Trucks are big," said Montagna, who directs monument research and preservation for the National Park Service, as he clicked through slides of shiny new headstones for dearly departed truck drivers.

Union Memorial Baptist Church in Westminster seemed to be losing the battle to save its 150-year-old cemetery from time, the elements and vandals, until others joined the effort. A $5,000 donation from the Westminster High School student senate is paying part of the cost for stonemasons to restore and reset more than 100 markers at Ellsworth Cemetery. Many of the students also donated time to clear weeds and brush from the 1-acre site on Leidy Road, north of Route 140. The restoration of more than 100 tombstones is arduous and painstaking but worthwhile, said George Murphy, an Eldersburg resident who has helped preserve several cemeteries.

A project begun last year by Patapsco Middle School eighth-graders, who wanted to restore a historic cemetery, has turned into a continuing quest to preserve cemeteries -- not only in Howard County, but across Maryland."

The Cockey family is finally at rest.After being usurped by a Bob Evans restaurant, the remains of 31 family members -- including a Revolutionary War patriot and a founder of Cockeysville -- and 102 slaves and servants are now reinterred.Grand marble headstones and humble weathered stones line a new cemetery in Texas about a half-mile from the family's former, 257-year-old graveyard off West Padonia Road."From our standpoint, now we know where they are and that they will be preserved," said Joshua F. Cockey of B, 72, a 10th-generationCockey who uses the formal designation "of B" for "son of Bennett Cockey."

An African-American church in Westminster has asked state legislators and preservationists to help save its historic cemetery from ruin.On a tour Friday of Ellsworth Cemetery, Richard B. Hughes, chief of the Office of Archaeology for the Maryland Historic Trust, pledged technical support but stopped short of offering money for the restoration of the final resting place of veterans, former slaves and many of Carroll County's African-American leaders."

For almost a century, they were the forgotten ones: nearly 2,000 African-American men, women and children buried in the cemetery of Crownsville Hospital Center, their lives marked only by the anonymous stones that dot the grassy, secluded graveyard. Yesterday - beneath a cloudless blue sky - a crowd of more than 100 state officials, community leaders, mental health-care workers and historians gathered on the grounds of the former psychiatric hospital to dedicate the cemetery as a historic site.

KUWAIT CITY -- At the Rigga Cemetery 18 miles south of Kuwait City, the narrow mounds of dull gray dirt stretch solemnly toward a row of wind-swept evergreens. In the background, four thick plumes of burning oil darken the azure morning sky.This is Saddam Hussein's legacy to Kuwait, the resting place for many victims of his ruthless seven-month rule of this tiny country.But these are not the graves of faceless victims.Shakir Mohammed saw to that.For months the cemetery caretaker kept a Polaroid camera hidden in a light fixture.