Tawnee Day shows visitors a Brookfield Township Cemetery headstone dedicated to “Aunt Sarah.”
Cemeteries are not just repositories for the dead. They can be time capsules, places for contemplation and reflection, local history centers and even a picnic site.
Officials of the Brookfield Branch Library of the Warren-Trumbull County Public Library touched on all of these aspects at an Oct. 19 walk through Brookfield Township Cemetery.
Throughout the history of cemeteries, symbols on headstones have been popular. These days, those symbols tend to signify groups or organizations the deceased were members of, but that was not necessarily so 100 hundred years ago. Symbols often told something about the deceased person’s stage of life at the time of death, how devout they were religiously or the thoughts of those left behind.
The lamb is one symbol seen throughout Brookfield cemetery, particularly on older graves.
“Lambs are super common for unmarried single women, tiny humans – kids – and/or just for religious symbolism with its ties to Christianity and Jesus himself,” said children’s librarian Tawnee Day. “Sometimes, super-religious people might be close to the lamb. There’s quite a few lambs here, which is either super sad or super great that they were devout, depending on the age of the person.”
Other symbols common at Brookfield cemetery are weeping willow trees, which express grief; urns, which exemplify the soul; and hourglasses, representations of the passage of time.
Day showed the attendees a child’s stone lavishly adorned with willows and curtains.
“They either loved this child or were slightly middle class or higher to carve all that in for him,” she said.
The text used on headstones can change over time, such as the use of the word “consort” on some old stones instead of “wife.”
“Early in the 1800s, when people were first starting to be buried here, a lot of the sayings and symbolism came from what was popular in New England at the time,” said Brookfield library Branch Manager Amanda Murphy. Many early settlers came from New England.
The design of headstones also has evolved. The single tablet of older stones – rounded tops often signify the deceased served in the military – is rarely used, replaced by a shorter stone that covers more surface area on the ground. The sloped face of modern stones carries water away and weathers better. Marble, limestone and sandstone are avoided now because they don’t hold up well to decades and centuries of rain, wind and sun.
“Some of these stones, the really pretty white ones, are going to be almost impossible to read because they are marble,” Day said. “It doesn’t hold up as much.”
Murphy added that stones with smooth tops have given way to those with jagged surfaces.
“That was their attempt to prevent you from sitting on graves because it (cemeteries) used to be a popular picnic spot.,” Murphy said. “It was less eerie and less taboo to hang out in a graveyard, so they tried to make your stone as uncomfortable as possible to keep people from hanging out on it.”
The tour passed the graves of James McMullin, Brookfield’s first settler; the Montgomery family plot, an early settlement family; and John Tribby, one of several Revolutionary War soldiers buried here.
“I thought it was very, very interesting,” said attendee Wendy Setterberg, Masury, who admitted she had not spent much time in the cemetery.
“It’s in your own hometown. Unless you’re visiting loved ones, you don’t stop and think about wandering around and looking at the style of headstones and the symbolism that they have and the years and the sentiment that may be on the headstone, the style of them.”
Setterberg said she would like to come again and take a more thoughtful stroll around the cemetery.
Barb Haines of Sharon said she has four generations of family members buried in Brookfield cemetery, and suggested future programs focus more on individuals buried in the cemetery.
“It would be nice to have it more expanded the next time they do it, so I’m looking forward to them doing another one,” Haines said.
“It was a beautiful day to be out here,” said Lana Thomas of Sharon, Haines’ daughter. “I appreciate the effort that the ladies went in to doing this.”
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