The oldtimer and the tree

The tree lived for 217 years and the man who kept it alive has now died at a little less than half that. Frank Knight (pictured above in 2009 with "Herbie" behind him and in 2010 after the tree was cut down, video here) had been the tree warden of Yarmouth, Maine, for more than 50 years. "Frank’s passion for the town, its trees, and his kind and gentle manner was an inspiration to all those who knew him," reads a statement from the Maine Department of Conservation on Frank's passing at the age of 103. Dutch elm disease was killing trees by the hundreds when Frank began as a volunteer, so he focused his efforts on one giant elm that at 110' could be seen from miles away. With pruning and pesticide, he was able to nurse the tree through 14 rounds of the disease, until it finally had to be taken down 2 years ago. At that time, Knight - by then a legend among schoolchildren and forestry workers - said, "His time has come. And mine is about due, too." At the request of his family, and without Frank's knowledge, custom furniture maker Chris Becksvoort built a simple casket from wood of the tree which had been set aside. The centenarian will be laid to rest in it after dying in hospice on Monday. "To have them together like that is a wonderful thing. I feel like Frank took good care of Herbie. Now Herbie will take good care of Frank," says friend and successor Deb Hopkins.

"It's been a beautiful tree. I'm sorry to see it go. But nothing is forever....And it's just a fact of life that life is going to end. And that's for people, for trees, for everything. I thank the good Lord every day that we had him in his glory and beauty for so long."

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Plenty of previous posts about trees:

Chêne chapelle

"These things are enormous"

Senator no longer stands

Tempting tree trunk

World's largest treehouse(s)

Cut down

2 morbid mysteries

600 years apart

Leaves don't leap...

Tyburn tree

Tree mummies

Dendochronology

New acquisition

A couple of weeks ago, I went with my Mom and Sue to the Lake Eustis Museum of Art, drawn by a death-themed exhibit that included an homage to the late Julia Child (1912-2004) in the form of a coffin that looked like a piece of cherry-topped cheesecake (see 2nd photo here). It wasn't until I rolled through the door that I realized a) the size scale of the piece and b) that it was one of a series of well-conceived and beautifully crafted little sculptures! There were more than 30 on display (2nd image, museum volunteer Carrie Bow preparing them for exhibit) and I looked at them closely, deciding which I like best. They are the work of American artist E. Sherman Hayman, who talks about them in this interview. A few more minutes at the show and I knew I had to have one: Sigmund Freud, André Le Notre*, or Frank Lloyd Wright (1st image). After contacting the artist, I decided Frank - the architect of such visionary houses as Fallingwater (3rd image) - was the most appropriate choice, since I had toured the Dana-Thomas House and Wright's Oak Park, Illinois, neighborhood, blogged about him, and have a Wright-inspired stained glass window (similar to the 4th image) hanging in my "museum." I'm pleased to say that, although I did not get a chance to meet the artist, I am now the proud owner of an original Hayman!

*He designed the gardens at the Palace of Versailles.

2 morbid mysteries

Fisherman and photographer Scott Owens came upon an empty casket a few weeks ago in the woods near Slidell, Lousiana. “At first I thought it was junk, a refrigerator.” Reasoning that it may have been unearthed from a nearby graveyard that was flooded during Hurricane Katrina, he brought it to the attention of a local news reporter who notified authorities and aired a story about the discovery. Within a couple of days, the coroner's office determined that the grave had been flooded by a 12' to 14' surge that swamped Brookter Cemetery, a family graveyard. The woman who had once rested in the casket had been reburied without being identified, even through DNA analysis, but her casket was abandoned at the rear of the private property. Owens had succeeding in ensuring that the woman's family had not been paying their respects at an empty tomb.


Artist John Lankenau found a gravestone a few years ago on the streets of New York City. It was leaning against a fire hydrant in Manhattan on East Fourth St. between Avenues C and D, and he was afraid it would be defiled by a dog lifting its leg (he was walking his own at the time). “It once meant something to somebody. I just couldn’t imagine someone’s life sitting on the street.” Although it was 2 1/2' tall and weighed several hundred pounds, he carted it home for safekeeping. Besides the name of the deceased and the date of death, most of the writing on the tombstone was in Hebrew. Over the years, Lankenau canvassed local synagogues, called Jewish genealogical societies, and even ordered a copy of a likely birth certificate, but to no avail. The details of her life were finally pieced together by a New York Times reporter, the city's records commissioner, and a genealogist. Hinda Amchanitzky was a widow who had emigrated from Russia c. 1895 and had died in New York in 1910 at age 60. The stone, however, had never marked her grave at the local United Hebrew Community, although there are now plans to install it. It had been removed from a nearby building that once contained a monument maker’s workshop. Artist Andrew Castrucci found it and deliberately propped it up outside the townhouse - which housed an artists' collective, a burial society, and a small synagogue for Ukrainian immigrants - owned by fellow artist Dorothea Tyler and her husband. “It was late at night, and I put it in front of Dorothea’s building as a surprise.” But the biggest surprise is that the woman commemorated on the stone wrote the 1st book of Yiddish recipes to be published in America. “It’s so cool that I would find the stone of a woman who wrote a cookbook,” said Lankenau, who is himself a part-time cook.

Compare and contrast

These two weird news stories surfaced a week apart last month:

Medical students at Rende Medical College in Taiwan undergo a lesson intended to give them an insight into death. They each write a will, dress in a funeral shroud, and climb into a coffin which is lowered beneath the floorboards (2nd image). Professor Qiu Daneng explained, "Although it's just 10 minutes, the effect is equal to real death." Student Xiao Lin concurred and said that it taught her that every second counts in life.

Medical students at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden recently underwent a life lesson. When they began their first clinical autopsy, described as an intense and trying experience, they learned that the cadaver they would be working on was the body of their former instructor. Although the name had been told to the class in advance, it did not register with the students until they read it on the corpse's toe tag. The tension rose and the group whispered among themselves, but nobody spoke up when the autopsy technician got to work. The incident did weigh on them afterward. "The first autopsy is very emotional and we autopsied someone we knew," said a student. "It was extremely unfortunate. This is the first time I have encountered something like this," said Birgitta Sundelin, the professor of the course. "It is really terrible, but it is part of education sometimes. Unfortunately, they must deal with it," said Tina Dalianis, the head of the department. The president of Sweden's Medical Students Association, however, was outraged by the school's response, a reaction echoed by a medical student at another university: "Very unfortunate. Students should not have to feel uneasy during their education. It is important that an autopsy truly be the educational opportunity that it should be. The question is how much these students learned from the situation."

A little too close for comfort?

Fisk funeral

There is a funeral being conducted today - and everyone at the local Historical Society is very excited about it. "You don't get to throw those words together every day," writes Wright, the reader who told me about the event and will be present. "It is even more rare these days to boast of attending a burial for a genuine Revolutionary War hero." Lt. Col. John McIntosh (1748-1826), who commanded Georgia's Fort Morris, reemerged from his grave 4 years ago. The metal burial container (1st image) that surfaced near the Sapelo River was at first mistaken for a fuel tank, but was soon identified as a Fisk coffin (2nd image, examples). Named for its inventor, Almond D. Fisk of New York City, the Fisk coffin (3rd image, patent) is known for its mummiform shape, its viewing window, and its tight seal - which sometimes preserves 19th c. remains intact to this day. An anthropologist at Colonial Williamsburg writes, "The intent was to preserve the remains of people who died far from home more or less intact until such time as they could be brought back home for the family funeral. And it worked, as I was to discover one afternoon....Called by Colonial Williamsburg security to a trench being dug behind the site of the Public Hospital, I was shown one of Fisk's patent cases hanging half out of the side of the excavation. A backhoe had snapped off its feet. The operator had sent his assistant into the ditch to see what had fallen out. He was last seen heading for Newport News." Preservation is not a certainty, however. When a Fisk casket was found already occupying a newly dug grave in Lexington, Kentucky, in 2007, the remains of the occupant consisted of "mostly bones, with some teeth, hair, fingernails and pieces of clothes." But a Fisk coffin found at a construction site in Washington, D.C., in 2005 revealed the shrouded body of a 13-year-old boy in hand-sewn clothes with enough soft tissue to determine from adhesions on the lung and calcifications of the lymph nodes that he had an infection and likely died of pneumonia.

The Fisk coffin containing the body of Col. McIntosh had rolled out of the riverbank onto the edge of the marsh in 2006 due to the natural erosion of the soil. It was turned over to the McIntosh Co. Coroner's Office and stored at Darien Funeral Home, where the soldier's body has been examined and analyzed. "The body inside was somewhat preserved having been buried with charcoal, a burial practice to absorb bodily fluids and perhaps control odor," explained Matthew Williamson of Georgia Southern University, who excavated several members of the McIntosh family - generations of whom have resided near where the Colonel made his reappearance - to prevent them from suffering the same fate. As I finish this post, the committal has just gotten underway at Mallow Plantation to rebury Col. McIntosh and 3 of his grandchildren: 30-year-old Maria, 25-year-old Maizie, and Catherine, who died in infancy. They will be laid to rest (again) after a ceremony including bagpipes, a color guard, and traditional Scottish last rites.

Ulysses S. Grant, postmortem

The 1st photograph shows American Civil War general and 18th president Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885) in the prime of life and the 2nd photograph shows him at the end of his life, penning his memoirs. He had withdrawn to a cottage in Saratoga County, New York, after learning he had throat cancer, and died just days after finishing his well-received autobiography. Here is what happened to his body.... Grant died, medicated against the pain and emaciated by the illness, on a July morning. The sad news began spreading by telegraph within minutes, after which expressions of sympathy began pouring in - including one from President Grover Cleveland - and dense crowds formed around the cottage. The mayor of New York wired an offer of a site in any of the city's parks for a tomb. The doctors in attendance asked his family twice about performing an autopsy, but they refused on both occasions. Sculptor Karl Gerhardt was on hand 20 minutes after Grant's demise to make a death mask. Local undertaker Ebenezer Holmes was summoned and arrived within hours to prepare the body until clergyman and undertaker Rev. Stephen J. Merritt could arrive from New York City. Holmes placed Grant's remains on ice in the corpse cooler that he had patented in 1878. Grant had left explicit instructions before his death that his body should be embalmed, so that it would not decompose in the summer heat before the funeral could be arranged. Holmes therefore carried out the relatively new procedure of arterial embalming over the next two days. The body - said to look very natural by some of the estimated 300 people who viewed it - remained at the cottage, guarded by the military, for 2 weeks, when a local funeral service was held. A polished red cedar coffin had arrived from Rochester on July 29th and in it the remains were transported by train to Albany, where Grant lay in state in the state capitol for 3 days and 2 nights. By then, conflicting accounts described the body as discolored, deteriorating, and somewhat disheveled from the journey. The press criticized Holmes' work, and there Grant was touched up by Merritt. Grant was taken by train to New York City, where he was viewed by some 250,000 people as he lay in state in City Hall. More than a million people attended and 50,000 participated in the day-long funeral parade in New York City on August 8, 1885. A public burial service was held, and Grant's body was deposited in a temporary vault in Manhattan's Riverside Park until it could be transferred to Grant's tomb, which was completed and officially dedicated in 1897.

Festival of the Shrouds

A curious festival takes place every year on July 29th in Las Nieves, Spain. In the "Festival of the Shrouds," those who have escaped death during the year lay in caskets and are carried by solemn family members to the small church of Santa Marta of Ribarteme. A mass is said at noon to thank God for keeping them alive and broadcast on loudspeakers, since the church is too small to contain the large crowd that gathers by 10AM. The participants in the "mock funeral service" tell the stories of their near-death experiences. After the mass, the caskets are borne in procession to the cemetery as the church bells ring, and then return to circle several times around the church. Penitents chant, "Virgin Santa Marta, star of the North, we bring you those who saw death," and a statue of the saint - sister of Lazarus and patron of resurrection - is also held aloft, decorated with flowers and outfitted with a small box to accept offerings. The sobriety of the pilgrimage then gives way to a typical Spanish fiesta with street musicians, street vendors, street food, and an evening display of fireworks. The custom dates back to the Middle Ages and was an attempt by the Catholic Church to integrate traditional teachings with the pagan beliefs of the Galician residents of northwestern Spain.

Sarah Bernhardt

French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1944-1923) was mentioned yesterday as an early example of celebrity eccentricity. The "Divine Sarah" became famous for her stage performances - particularly her death scenes (although this one in her film debut in 1900 is said to be rather restrained). She was known to embellish the truth when talking about her own life, but her peculiarities have been documented by many biographers. She was entranced by skulls and bats. She loved wild animals and at one time had a pet lion and 6 chameleons. Early in her career, she purchased and began sleeping in a coffin to better understand her tragic roles. In fact, she preferred roles in which the character dies at the end. (When she played one such role before a boisterous American audience, she said, "If they don't keep quiet, I'll die in the second act.") She played both male and female parts, and was in fact openly bisexual. She acted without a prosthetic limb after her leg was amputated in 1915 (and refused an offer of $10,000 to exhibit the severed limb as a medical curiosity). She loved chairs and filled every house she ever lived in with them. She married Greek actor Aristides "Jacques" Damala (1855-1889), and after his early death always signed her name as "Sarah Bernhardt, Veuve [Widow] Damala." Bernhardt was recorded by Thomas Edison, photographed by Nadar, and friends (and sometimes lovers) with the luminaries of her day. She wrongly believed she would die young, but attained the age of 88. She died of uremia and is buried at Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

Plague coffin

Steve and I were talking about common graves the other night (yes, such a topic is not atypical at my house!). He was curious when I told him that during the Great Plague, the dead were carried to the common grave in a coffin with a hinged end, so that the body (wrapped in a winding-sheet) could be slid into the pit and the coffin reused. I have come up with the photo above, courtesy of a great site I discovered recently, Curious Expeditions. And I also found two references, one in Buried Alive By Jan Bondeson and the other in The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England By Paul Slack.