The University of North Carolina Press

News Bytes

October/December 1998


Writer Finds Soul of North Carolina in Graveyards


Old North Carolina cemeteries hold many forgotten people and forgotten names. It was their names that initially drew me to their stones, then I stayed to admire the stones themselves. The subtitle of this book, "Three Centuries of North Carolina Gravemarkers," deliberately avoids the term "gravestones" because this term does not begin to encompass the rich diversity of shapes and materials in Tar Heel cemeteries. Gravestones are only one of a number of ways that North Carolinians marked their graves since initial European settlement.
- Ruth Little, from the preface to
Sticks and Stones: Three Centuries of North Carolina Gravemarkers

Although North Carolina's old graveyards seem mysterious, the gravemarkers they contain have much to tell about the state's families, traditions, and culture. M. Ruth Little of Raleigh, author of Sticks and Stones: Three Centuries of North Carolina Gravemarkers (University of North Carolina Press, $39.95 hardcover), calls the study of gravestones the best way to understand the soul of North Carolina.

While graveyards and gravemarkers have long been recognized as vital elements of the material culture in New England, Sticks and Stones is the first book to consider the full spectrum of gravemarkers in a southeastern state. Little argues that gravestones are not only artifacts of material culture, but are also useful genealogical tools and keys to ethnicity.

Sticks and Stones covers the rich collection of gravemarkers, plain and fancy, from the coast to the moutains. In researching the state's gravemarkers, Little explored 550 graveyards in 34 North Carolina counties. Sticks and Stones is beautifully illustrated with more than 230 duotone photographs of these works of art, including 120 stunning shots by Charlotte's Tim Buchman, whose work also appeared in the award-winning North Carolina Architecture (UNC Press, 1990).

Gravemarkers can be found in North Carolina that date back to the days of settlers who came from England, Scotland, Germany, and Africa. Sticks and Stones documents markers from the early 1700s when imported stones marked the graves of wealthy coastal settlers to the mid-twentieth century when mass-produced granite monuments began to coexist with homemade markers. Little shows that within these three centuries of settlement and change, the form of the gravemarker has varied based upon the culture, economic conditions and raw materials available. North Carolinians have used everything from cedar boards to seashell mounds to homemade concrete headstones to mark their graves.

Little presents gravemarkers from each of three geographic regions of North Carolina: the coastal plain, piedmont and mountains. Markers found in the coastal plain range from the fashionable, imported stones of affluent families to the humble pine of cypress headboards used by subsistence farmers. In the piedmont and mountains most people were buried beneath head- and footstones cut of native stone through most of the late 19th century.

Little traces the traditions of three groups of gravemarker artisans: the backcountry carvers who crafted headstones of native materials; the metropolitan stonecutters who created a series of marble monuments; and the African-American community's largely twentieth-century legacy of wood and concrete markers.

Exploring the cultural, economic, and material differences that give rise to such trends was a labor of love for Ruth Little. She felt drawn to attempt to record the history of gravemarkers in North Carolina after an incident in October 1974:

I was surveying an antebellum house near the Cape Fear River in Harnett County, one of the counties where thousands of Highland Scots had settled in the eighteenth century. In the family graveyard nearby stood a tiny headstone, crudely cut out of thick reddish-brown sandstone in the abstract shape of a human figure, with a large nose and lips, small eyes, and a large heart. The inscription was illegible, but the lettering indicated that the stone was very old, perhaps eighteenth or early nineteenth century. There were other jobs to do that day, and I didn't even take a photograph of the stone. But it would not let me go. After several weeks of being haunted by the memory, I returned one weekend to photograph the stone and found that it was gone. In that brief time, someone had removed it from the graveyard, whether to save it or to destroy it I never learned.

Little writes that the Scottish face on the headstone gave her two gifts: an understanding of the perishability of old gravestones, and a hint of their significance as artifacts of material culture. While old houses speak of the mainstream economy, Little writes, "the graveyards speak with the accents of the homeland." Sticks and Stones: Three Centuries of North Carolina Gravemarkers is an attempt to protect and preserve those voices.

During twenty-five years documenting architectural history for the State Historic Preservation Office and as a private consultant, M. Ruth Little, an art historian, has worked to record, understand, and preserve the material culture of North Carolina. Tim Buchman is an architectural photographer whose work also appeared in the award-winning North Carolina Architecture.

Sticks and Stones, a volume in the Richard Hampton Jenrette Series in Architecture and the Decorative Arts, is available at bookstores for $45.00 (hardcover) or from the University of North Carolina Press. Toll-free credit card orders: 1-800-848-6224. Say you saw it on the internet.


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