New funeral museum!

Sadly, the Museum of Funeral Customs in my hometown of Springfield, Illinois, closed in 2009, but a new museum has opened in Russia* to join an exclusive group of funeral museums operating around the world. The Museum of World Funeral Culture in Novosibirsk (photos above and here) was created by Sergei Yakushin, founder of the city's crematorium (photos here). Thousands of exhibits related to 19th and 20th c. memorial culture include mourning dresses, antique prints, historic hearses, embalming books, funeral ephemera, dioramas, and life-size installations. “The concept of our museum...is tactful and detailed account of the forms of remembrance, reverence for the forms of their ancestors. By and large, it is a museum of cultural memory,” says the museum’s director Tatiana Yakushina, who plans to arrange traveling exhibitions in other cities in Russia and abroad.

*Thanks for the news, Angie!

__________

Related posts:

Helen Sclair

Edward C. Johnson

Funeral museums

Field trips

My museum

Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday

Today, as you may have heard on the news, is the 200th anniversary of the birth of our 16th president, Abraham Lincoln. There have been celebrations of his life across the country - including the one in Springfield, Illinois, attended by President Barack Obama - so let me tell you a few things about his death...

The photo of Lincoln lying in an open coffin is the only one that exists. It was taken by photographer Jeremiah Gurney, Jr., on April 24, 1865, as the president's body lay in state in City Hall in New York. It was immediately confiscated by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (1814-1869) and was hidden away for 87 years until it was discovered in the Illinois State Historical Library in 1952, by then 15-year-old Ronald Rietveld, who was researching the papers of Lincoln's personal secretaries.

It was purported by some that President Lincoln's assassin, actor John Wilkes Booth (1838-1865), survived being killed by federal agents in Garrett's barn. Booth lived on for years, it was said by showmen drawing crowds to see several versions of the "mummy of John Wilkes Booth" (like the one to the left), as they circulated in carnival sideshows.


When Lincoln's body was deposited in this temporary tomb in Springfield's Oak Ridge Cemetery during construction of a permanent monument, thieves were caught in the act of stealing it and holding it in exchange for the release of an imprisoned counterfeiter! The story is told in the book Stealing Lincoln's Body by Thomas J. Craughwell.

When Lincoln's Tomb was renovated in 1900, the president's coffined remains were encased in more than 4,000 lbs. of concrete upon orders of his son Robert. At that time, 23 people viewed Lincoln's face and found the features totally recognizable. In 1928, Mr. J.C. Thompson described the experience: "As I came up I saw that top-knot of Mr. Lincoln's - his hair was course and thick, 'like a horse's,' he used to say - and it stood up high in front. When I saw that, I knew that it was Mr. Lincoln. Anyone who had ever seen his pictures would have known it was him. His features had not decayed. He looked just like a statue of himself lying there."

The Museum of Funeral Customs in Springfield exhibited a reproduction of Abraham Lincoln's coffin, scale models of Lincoln's railroad coach, and a ceremonial funeral arch erected for Lincoln's Chicago funeral. Most unfortunately, the museum - which I have visited and blogged about - closed as of December 31, 2008.

Italy itinerary

When my plans to travel to Italy in 2002 got cancelled, I had already put together the following itinerary:

BOLOGNA

• Chiesa della Santa--incorrupt body of St. Catherine of Bologna

FLORENCE

• La Specola--anatomical waxes
• Università degli Studi di Firenze--teratology specimens
• Museo di Storia della Scienza--Galileo’s finger
• Monastery of St. Teresa--incorrupt body of St. Theresa Margaret of Sacred Heart

ROME

• Crypt of Santa Maria della Concezione--bone decorations
• Protestant Cemetery--graves of Keats, Shelley
• Il Gesú--arm of St. Francis Xavier

PALERMO

• Catacombe dei Cappuccini--catacombs w/more than 8,000 mummies

NAPLES

• Pompeii and Herculaneum

I have not yet seen my share of mummies and incorruptible saints...

Funeral Museums

Among my favorite interests are museums and things morbid, so it is particularly gratifying when I can kill birds with stones (as opposed to "releasing two birds with one gesture," which I was once told was more politically correct). Such is the case at the Museum of Funeral Customs in Springfield, Illinois. I tour it whenever I am in town, admiring the Victorian hairpiece that dwarfs my own , coveting the embalming instruments, and gazing intently at the items associated with the funeral of Abraham Lincoln. It was during the Civil War when embalming began (above left) and almost 50 years earlier when the first museum in the U.S. was established (above right).

Here I am at the funeral museum, which is next to Oak Ridge Cemetery, the location of Lincoln's Tomb (more killing of birds with stones). But if you can't get there physically, you can still visit. The Museum of Funeral Customs and the National Museum of Funeral History in Houston each have a multi-media web presence. You can take a virtual tour of the former, and the latter offers an on-line tour of a turn-of-the-twentieth-century casket factory.

Field trips

I get around in my van, affectionately dubbed the "Mother Ship," which is equipped with hand controls, but I don't go far because I have no sense of direction and a fear of getting lost. I have enlisted friends and family to accompany me on my field trips, either in the Mother Ship or by air (in which case I use the manual wheelchair rather than my scooter "BeBe"). Here is a list of some of those companions and adventures:

Jody Arlington went with me to the Library of Congress to see an anthropodermic book (more about those later); to a local taxidermist to learn how his craft would apply to the human body; and has taken me to many cemeteries, galleries, and museums in the Washington, D.C. area.

Cris Hastings has gone to West Virginia, Maryland, and Tennessee with me to see mummies; North Carolina to meet a carnival showman; to the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia many times; and to Paris to see the catacombs, Musee Fragonard, and Pere LaChaise! She and my mom Donna Gritman drove me from Connecticut to Vermont to see the largest granite quarry in the world...

Maddy Biggs flew with me to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History to see one of the premier documented human skeletal collections in the U.S. Katina Stockbridge and Janice Lane took me to a funeral museum and crematorium in rural Virginia. Chris Sweeters has accompanied me to the National Library of Medicine and the National Museum of Health and Medicine.

My sister and brother-in-law Melissa and Nicholas Heilweil brought me to the San Diego Museum of Man when I visited them in Santa Monica--and Melissa gave me a copy of Death in Yellowstone during a family trip, turning that into a field trip, too!

My dad and stepmother Jim and Sarah Quigley have accompanied me to Illinois to see Dickson Mounds, BodyWorlds, and the Museum of Funeral Customs; to Florida to see a forensic lab; to a funeral home in Indiana to see a mummy; and to Boston to make a presentation.

Thanks, everybody! And thanks to those I may have inadvertently forgotten~