Newsletters
Fall - Winter, 2002 Newsletter
Volume 8 Issue 2
Sandy Stumped by Stump
Tombstones
In a talk delivered
at the Page Farm and Home Museum on the campus of the University of
Maine in Orono, October 2, 2002, Sandy Ives confessed that he could
not explain the specific meaning of five stump tombstones found in a
cemetery in North Vienna, Maine. Stump tombstones are burial
monuments carved to resemble stumps. They are often very detailed
replicas, including roots, bark texturing, and annular rings on the
sawn-off top. In many cases the number of rings corresponds to the
age of the deceased.
Sandy first became
interested in the stones in 1981, when a friend mentioned their
existence. He stopped by the cemetery and photographed them at that
time, but the project was put on hold until his retirement in 1999.
In his recent lecture, Sandy described his search for answers. As a
folklorist, his first question was whether there was a local story
to explain the stones, but he was not able to discover any general
local legend connected with the stones. His research into the
backgrounds of the people buried under the stones, local farmers
named Brown and Cook, and an African-American named George W.
Jackson, yielded no indication as to why they might have chosen such
burial stones. Sandy nonetheless gave impressive coverage of the
range of motifs found on the stones, as well as their relation to
motifs customarily found on "typical" stones of the period.
The markers found
in North Vienna are examples of a nation-wide
late-nineteenth-century tradition which included stump tombstones
and such variant forms as tree-bark covered rustic crosses. This
tradition seems to be far more common in other parts of the country
than it is in Maine. In his search for similar tombstones, Sandy
investigated every cemetery within a fifteen-mile radius of North
Vienna, with no luck. Then he spent two summers searching the rest
of Maine. Altogether he visited over 350 cemetaries state-wide, but
he found only 39 examples of the stump stones he was looking for,
none of them as elaborate as the North Vienna stones he was
interested in. What Sandy can say about the other stones he found is
that they are mostly from the late 1880s and 1890s, and that they
are generally small, sometimes only fifteen inches high. Most
included sawn-off stump branches, and some had a dead bird or a lamb
on the top of the stump, particularly on children’s tombstones. The
symbolism associated with stump tombstones seems obvious, but only
the stones in Vienna spell it out-those who rest beneath these
tombstones were "cut down" in the midst of life.
As far as Sandy can
tell, there is no link between the lumbering traditions of the state
and stump tombstones; nor did the Browns and Cooks of North Vienna
bring the tradition with them from their places of origin in New
Hampshire. Sandy remains confident that there is an answer. If you
know of similar tombstones to be found in Maine, or have a possible
explanation for these tombstones, Sandy would love to hear from you,
and can be contacted in care of the Maine Folklife Center.
- Betsy Hedler
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