Headstones Hand Carved Or No
Name
Page
Two
Copyright © 2005-2006 by
Jean Leeper
These were all dug out of ground
in 2005. These stones appear to be hand cut or out of a river. They
were found in rows spaced about three to four feet apart. Thus we
believe that they some how marked a grave site. We did not know what
to do with them so decided to try to mount in cement and place
upright as we feared if mounted in cement poured in the ground the
mower would soon break them. Some are not very thick. You will see
one thin one has decided to fall off. Will need to try epoxy to see
if it will stay on. I used acrylic additive in the cement to make it
less porous.
Many of the stones we dug up had
no writing on them or sometimes just an initial. But they were spaced
about three to four feet apart so we believed they were used as
headstones or else laid on top of the grave to mark the site.
Many early Quakers in North
Carolina did not use headstones to mark their graves so I feel this
idea may have come to Iowa with them. In Penn. they still require all
headstones to be the same size. They believed that we are not
superior to another person in life nor in death.
"Funerals
and burying grounds of the Friends were taken care of by a special
committee. For a long time Quakers were generally opposed to any
marker on a grave. Many of the older burying grounds in Indiana were
merely field stones and some are unmarked. The burying grounds were
usually kept fenced." from http://www.centertownship.org/quaker.html
Then you take the lack of money
or availablity of someone to make the headstones, thus they did what
they were able to do to mark the graves.
Shows some of them after they
were dug up. See how they are spaced?
Close up trying to show the <
then D H, there is also a hole in the stone.
