The Mystery of the Tomb House: Why the Building Is Lined with Tombstones

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Petersburg is one of the small towns in the US state of Virginia. Among its attractions there is one unusual house, built in 1934. At the same time, its walls have preserved the memory of the civil war in the United States, which took place more than a century and a half ago. And all because instead of bricks in the construction of the building they used … tombstones.

In 1934, the Petersburg National Funeral Home came up with an original way to save money on the maintenance of the territory of the cemeteries. It was supposed to uproot those memorial plaques, which had already been erected in memory of the deceased, and put them on the ground. Thus, the size of the lawns near the graves will be significantly reduced, and maintenance will be less costly.

More than 2,000 tombstones were removed from the Petersburg cemetery to bring this plan to life. They were cut to the required size and shape, and the administration of the cemetery had to decide where to put the stone "scraps". Oswald Young, one of the residents of the city, offered to buy hundreds of stones for only $ 45. He used these stones to decorate his house and to build a fireplace. Because of this, the house received the name of the tomb house.

The graves that suffered from such "amateurism" did not belong to ordinary residents of Petersberg. These were the graves of heroes who fell during the siege of the city, which lasted for a whole year. The soldiers were buried mainly near the battlefield, most often in mass graves. Most of the graves were unnamed, only a few of the soldiers were buried with wooden name plates.

In 1866, Colonel James Moore began looking for a site for the Petersburg cemetery. His choice fell on the territory of one of the farms south of the city. During the war, the Gothic Cathedral Poplar Grove stood on this site, which is why the name of the cemetery was given the same. As soon as the cemetery project was approved, specialists began to carry out reburials, examining every meter of the earth. Archaeological work was carried out until 1869, in total they managed to find 6700 thousand remains, 2139 of which were identified.

Unfortunately, the cemetery began to collapse very quickly. A couple of times a year, they cut the grass here and hung out national flags; they did not carry out any other work. Due to the rainy climate, the slabs that were lying began to sag. The relatives of the dead soldiers demanded that the cemetery be repaired, as this was the highest degree of disrespect for the memory of the heroes. Then the government launched a program, under which from 2015 to 2017. 5 thousand tombstones were replaced. They were placed vertically again. There are small, unnamed square slabs on the graves of the unknown soldiers. Now the appearance of the cemetery corresponds to what it was more than a century ago.

The Americans took the case of reusing tombstones to decorate the house as an act of vandalism, but in Romania, perhaps, they would simply laugh at this. After all, it is in this country that there is a graveyard with funny drawings and sarcastic verses.