Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (45 page)

De Palm remains the most mysterious of the three. He introduced himself as Baron Joseph Henry Louis Charles De Palm, an affluent Austrian-born nobleman. Whatever wealth and status he once enjoyed in Europe, if any, apparently did not survive the journey to America; reporters discovered that he died bankrupt and nearly homeless. Although De Palm’s aristocratic persona was probably nothing more than a harmless exaggeration, it further linked all cremationists, in the eyes of the public, with foreign kooks and practitioners of “black magic.”

More than a year passed before LeMoyne had any other takers. Then, on February 15, 1878, he burned the body of Jane Pitman from Cincinnati, making her the first American woman to be cremated. Another cremation had occurred since De Palm’s, but Lemoyne wasn’t involved. Utah doctor Charles Winslow had been incinerated in a small crematorium hastily erected on a vacant lot in downtown Salt Lake City on July 31, 1877. Builders assembled the temporary structure in a matter of days and tested it by tossing a forty-pound bag of calf meat into the flames. It worked and, with the scent of cooked veal still lingering in the air, Winslow’s corpse went next.

Except for Henry Laurens, the first American to incorporate Christian rituals and readings into his cremation was Dr. Julius LeMoyne himself. Two days after he died from diabetes-related complications on October 14, 1879, LeMoyne became the third individual (out of an eventual forty-two) cremated in his own facility. To those already opposed to cremation, LeMoyne’s more traditional ceremony was undone by his request to have his ashes sprinkled under a rosebush. “The great difficulty [with] this reform,” the
Philadelphia Inquirer
editorialized with unabashed elitism after LeMoyne’s death, “has been the impracticable character of those persons who have been foremost in urging its adoption.… They [are] the very last class of men and women who should have been picked out to introduce a reform of any kind among a sober and intelligent people.”

The
Inquirer
might have been more impressed with Dr. Samuel Gross, cremated on May 8, 1884. The name wasn’t ideal from a publicity
standpoint, but Gross was an eminent surgeon and past president of the American Medical Association. That same year the nation’s first public crematorium was built in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and by the end of the century, two dozen were up and running in fifteen states.

Other highly regarded Americans began offering their support, although not always their bodies, to the cause, including Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, Harvard president Charles William Eliot, William Waldorf Astor and Andrew Carnegie (two of America’s richest men), sculptor Daniel Chester French, Rabbi Stephen Wise, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the abolitionist minister and literary mentor to Emily Dickinson. Distinguished religious leaders also stepped forward to present a theological defense of cremation, noting that there wasn’t one Bible verse forbidding it and that if being incinerated prevented resurrection, then every Christian martyr who had been burned at the stake was doomed as well. They also pointed out that God, being omnipotent and all, could just as easily reassemble a cremated body as he could a putrid corpse infested with worms and maggots.

Both religious and secular proponents harped on the relative tidiness of cremation compared with nature’s messier and more prolonged process. “Shall [bodily decay] be done in sixty minutes or less, through the influence of, and with all the grandeur, and beauty, and brilliancy, of the cumulative heat of an imprisoned and condensed sunbeam, with harmless and beneficial results,” one cremationist, C. N. Peirce, asked rhetorically, “or shall [a corpse] through a period of fifteen or twenty years moulder in the earth, polluting everything with which it comes in contact[?]”

This line of reasoning also resonated increasingly with Sanitarians, a formidable citizens group whose passion for encouraging public and personal cleanliness bordered on the obsessive-compulsive. These self-described preachers of purity crusaded against spitting in public, launched community-awareness campaigns on the importance of washing oneself with soap and water, and lobbied for better trash-removal services, street sweeping, and improved sewer systems.
And nineteenth-century America, to be honest, was in need of a good scrubbing. Horse and human waste streamed down city gutters. Rancid garbage piled up on sidewalks. Slaughterhouse butchers dumped bloody animal carcasses in open lots. And many urban cemeteries were run-down and emitted a revolting stench from improperly interred corpses. Sanitarians became convinced that this foul-smelling miasma, as they called it, harbored diseases and spread epidemics, a position that LeMoyne and his fellow cremationists had pushed for years. (Sanitarians probably would not, however, have allowed the pungent, bathtub-averse LeMoyne into their ranks.)

Frightening the masses with warnings about poisonous graveyard vapors was just one of several scare tactics used by cremationists. In speeches, letters to the editor, and their own publications,
The Urn
and
Modern Crematist
, they highlighted the many indignities suffered by those who opted for a regular burial. Stray dogs had been known to dig up and chew off limbs of the newly dead. Body snatchers and resurrectionists prowled cemeteries for fresh cadavers they could sell to medical schools. Ex-slaves, according to one (almost certainly apocryphal) story in
The Urn
, had chopped up the bones from a white corpse and carved them into gambling dice. Women also had to consider the possibility that their dead bodies might be defiled in unspeakable ways. Perhaps the most fearful specter raised by cremationists was premature burial, and a surprising number of people who chose to be cremated—including Henry Laurens—cited this as their primary reason for doing so.

“Wasn’t Laurens afraid of being buried alive ever since Martha was mistakenly pronounced dead as a child?” I ask Tom.

“Yes,” he says. “That experience haunted him his entire life, so he put it in his will that he had to be cremated.”

The logic of this escapes me. I can appreciate how terrifying it would be to wake up in a casket six feet underground and realize that you’re trapped and about to die a slow and agonizing death, but opting to be roasted as a precautionary measure seems extreme. I can think of any
number of less drastic alternatives I’d like to have tried on me first—several hard slaps to the face, smelling salts, a good tickling—before being set on fire. To each his own, I guess.

Cremations in the States surged from 16 in 1884 to 1,996 in 1899, a 1,250 percent increase. This represented a tiny sliver of Americans overall, but it was progress nonetheless. At the turn of the century, prestigious cemeteries such as Mount Auburn in Massachusetts started building columbaria for urns and setting up their own crematoriums.

In 1913 a small band of crematorium operators joined together and founded the Cremation Association of America, further legitimizing the movement, and by the early 1940s, 3.7 percent of the U.S. population was electing to be cremated, up from about 1 percent in 1920. That number held steady for twenty years but then dipped during the 1950s economic boom, as a “bigger is better” mentality prompted Americans to splurge on everything from fin-tailed Cadillacs to lavish burial arrangements. In an age of conspicuous consumption, few people wanted to be packed inside a measly coffee-can-sized urn for eternity when there were polished steel nuclear-bomb-proof coffins with plush satin interiors to be had.

That mind-set began to change in 1963, when Jessica Mitford, a British-born author living in California, published
The American Way of Death
. Mitford exposed how funeral homes guilted emotionally vulnerable family members into making excessive purchases well beyond their means. Some undertakers were committing outright fraud, charging for a host of services that were wholly unnecessary or never provided, such as “grief counseling.” Mitford also condemned the bereavement business for so overcommercializing death that it had cheapened the mourning process. Simplicity wasn’t just less expensive, she argued, it was more authentic.

Also in 1963, and this was the real watershed moment, Pope Paul VI reversed the Vatican’s ban on cremations. With conditions. Priests could not perform funeral masses for cremated remains (in 1997 this restriction was itself rescinded) or conduct services at crematoriums.
Although not exactly a full about-face, the change represented a huge shift that, virtually overnight, made it possible for millions of practicing Catholics in America to choose cremation over a traditional burial.

From the mid-1960s to the late ’70s, when the nation sank into a deep recession and thriftiness prevailed over profligacy, the trend line in cremations popped up dramatically. Today, approximately 40 percent of Americans are cremated. (To put this in a global context, it’s 69 percent in Canada, 72 percent in England, and 99 percent in Japan, the highest among industrialized nations.) The numbers vary widely within the United States; for Hawaii, Alaska, and Arizona, the rate is over 50 percent, while in Alabama and West Virginia it’s closer to 5 percent. The overall percentages are increasing every decade.

As are the number of businesses offering Americans unique and imaginative ways to transform their ashes or “cremains” into something memorable. Along with being pulverized into diamond jewelry by LifeGem, one can be mixed with concrete to create a realistic-looking coral rock and placed undersea by Eternal Reefs, ground up with gunpowder and packed into a shotgun shell by Canuck’s Sportsman’s Memorials, or “baked” inside vinyl plastic and pressed into a set of 33-r.p.m. records by the British company And Vinyly, which will also personalize the albums with whatever music or audio its customers request.

“I hope this isn’t too personal,” I say to Tom, “but have you decided, you know, when the time comes, if you’re going to be buried or—”

“Cremated,” he says. “It’s in my will. I’m dividing up my ashes into thirds, and some will be placed here and the rest in North Carolina and Teffont Evias, England, where my ancestors are from.”

That’s another advantage of cremation. You can spread yourself around. People have had themselves strewn along hiking trails, scattered in sand traps on their favorite golf course, or spread across the fifty-yard line of their college football field. Ten years ago the ashes of scientist John Kotowski were exploded over San Francisco Bay as part of a fireworks display, and the gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson went a similar route when his ashes were blown out of a cannon near his home
in Aspen, Colorado. Another writer, Mark Gruenwald, convinced his colleagues at Marvel Comics to stir his ashes into the ink used for a special printing of
Squadron Supreme
. Dr. Timothy Leary, the Harvard professor fired for promoting the psychological benefits (in his opinion) of LSD back in the 1970s, had his ashes distributed among family and friends, one of whom worked for a company that launches cremains into space. On April 21, 1997, seven grams of Leary’s ashes, along with bits of
Star Trek
creator Gene Roddenberry, were placed in a Pegasus rocket and shot into orbit, where they circled the earth for six years before burning up in the atmosphere. Planetary geologist Eugene Shoemaker one-upped them all when some of his ashes were sent to the moon aboard NASA’s unmanned Lunar Prospector probe. Sixty-nine years old when he died in a car crash, Shoemaker was a beloved figure in the space community for having helped train the Apollo astronauts. He is, to date, the only person whose remains are on the moon.

A light rain begins to fall, and I tell Tom I’m ready to leave whenever he is. Tom has been the epitome of a southern gentleman, ever since my first phone call to him months ago, and I especially appreciate his time because I’ve sensed from the start that he’s not thrilled I’m concentrating on this narrow aspect of Laurens’s biography. He hasn’t said this outright, but I’m guessing he’d prefer that Laurens be mentioned alongside America’s other Founding Fathers instead of some guys who had their ashes launched from a cannon or blended into comic-book ink.

I finish packing up my camera gear, and Tom says to me, almost as an aside, “You know there’s some question as to whether Laurens’s ashes are even here.”

“You’re kidding!” I exclaim.

“No, I’m not,” he says. “That’s the family lore at least.”

Far from disappointing, this is a welcome bit of trivia.

“That’s awesome,” I say.

Tom seems surprised by my response, and admittedly it was a poor choice of words. I quickly explain that I’m intrigued by the whole
subject of missing remains not due to some morbid fixation but because it relates to the accuracy of grave markers. Some sites claim to be the final resting place of prominent historical figures, when in truth that might not be the case. Laurens makes the sixth distinguished American I’ve now heard about who, possibly, isn’t buried where he’s supposed to be.

Number five is the whole reason I’m off next to Kentucky.

ALL I WANTED
, just to establish a basic understanding of Daniel Boone’s life, was to first nail down when and where the man was born. Timothy Flint’s 1833
Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone, the First Settler of Kentucky
is the earliest biography about the famed frontiersman and seemed a trustworthy resource to start with. “Different authorities assign a different birth place to Daniel Boone,” Flint writes in
his book’s opening sentence. “One affirms that he was born in Maryland, another in North Carolina, and still another during the transit of his parents across the Atlantic. But they are all equally in error. He was born in the year 1746, in Bucks county, Pennsylvania.”