Finding Footstones

On our most recent Open Day, while seeking the shade of our trees on a blazingly hot day, a couple of our volunteers came across some footstones that had somehow become separated from their headstones but bore initials that might make it possible to identify them.  The result was some excellent sleuthing by Louise Kennedy, our TCPA Secretary and genealogical expert, and Nick McAuliffe, our Vice President and archeaologist.  And this is what they found...

First of all, what is a footstone?  Basically, it was just a small marker to indicate the end of the grave, and was placed at the opposite end from the headstone. It generally bore only the initials of the deceased, although occasionally it included the date of death. Footstones seem to have entered into common use in England in the 17th century, and many 18th century English cemeteries have them.  It is also thought that, in some places in England, footstones bearing only initials and placed at the foot of a burial without a headstone were used to mark the graves of felons.  But generally, they simply represented the termination of that particular individual's cemetery plot, and in fact, many of them were later removed to reduce cemetery clutter and make it easier to cut the grass.

Tolomato has a number of footstones, some of them nearly sunken into oblivion with only a tiny band of marble remaining, others with no identification at all on them, and a few others with initials but no identifiable headstones to associated with them.

And then there are the wandering ones, such as the one Nick discovered, blackened and mildew-covered because of its long exile at the edge of the cemetery.  The marker was found near the remains of the cast iron grave enclosure on the south side of the cemetery.  When the new fence was put in, workers removed a tree - which as you can see, wasn't easy, since it had "swallowed" some of the metal parts of the enclosure - and we think that the stone was half-buried in the ground behind or very near to the tree.

It was certainly not the most legible thing, and it took us awhile to discern the letters E.F.M.  They are in the dark part of the marker. At first we weren't sure if the footstone was dark from earth staining, having somehow been turned upside down and stuck in the ground with the inscribed part at the bottom. But it turned out that the white part had actually been the buried part, protected from the elements and the pervasive lichen and mold.

Initially we hoped that we had found something associated with the grave enclosure, since we have never found any hints as to the identity of the person or persons buried there.  But Louise hit on the answer:  the footstone belongs to the grave of Fr. Edward Francis Mayne, priest at what is now the Cathedral from 1827 up to his death in 1834.  The footstone had somehow ended up about 30 feet from the headstone.

As you can see, Fr. Mayne has an imposing marker, nearly 6 feet tall, with "shoulders." (Yes, we plan to have it straightened.) Perhaps it was given to him to compensate for his trials at the Cathedral, since he was the parish priest during the "Wardens Period."  This refers to a period during the transition of Florida from a Spanish settlement to an American territory, when the resulting changes of diocesan authority and delays in assigning priests let to the establishment of a group of church wardens to run the parish.  Unfortunately, they seem to have been a fractious group, and drove more than one priest out of the parish.

When the Irish-born Fr. Mayne was assigned in 1827, he became embroiled in a conflict with the wardens when one warden, Antonio Alvarez, tried to prevent him from doing the burial rites for Jose M. Sanchez on the grounds that Sanchez was a Mason.  Fr. Mayne felt that the decision was his to make, after which the wardens locked him out of the church and he was able to conduct only a graveside burial service at Tolomato for Sanchez (who had been a political rival of Alvarez for the position of Mayor of St Augustine). In fact, the wardens would not let him reenter the church and he was forced for some time to say Mass in a private residence.

The struggle over his authority went from bad to worse over the years, even ending up in the secular courts, and was finally resolved at the end of 1832 during a meeting with the French-born Bishop Portier, Bishop of Mobile and Vicar of Florida, when the bishop threatened to excommunicate the wardens.  They settled down, but poor Fr. Mayne lived little more than another year, dying in January of 1834.

The Latin inscription on his marker records that he died in the 33rd year of his life and that he was a faithful pastor, "gentle and humble of heart."  So perhaps some recognition of his trials came from the faithful of St Augustine, and his beautiful headstone - which we plan to reunite with its footstone - represents this.

But that's not all!  Yet another grave enclosure yielded another footstone to study and once again, Louise Kennedy went into action.

This enclosure is under one of our two huge oak trees, and is slowly being pulled out of the ground by the tree. It contains some fragments of stone, along with a footstone that didn't belong there but was put into the ground in the recent past just to keep it from being run over by the lawn tractor.  And while nobody knows the identity of the "owner" of the enclosure - a relatively small enclosure possibly for just one burial - the footstone bore the initials C. D. G.  And who else could that be but Charles Dominique Gobert, whose simple but dignified and well-preserved headstone is located about fifteen feet away from the grave enclosure?

Like Fr. Mayne, he had a dramatic and conflict ridden life, and Louise uncovered his story for us.

Charles Gobert was born in France in 1767 but emigrated to the new United States and became a naturalized citizen in 1794. He started his life in the US as a merchant in Philadelphia, marrying the daughter of Lewis Ogden, an important figure in the War of 1812, and eventually moving with her to Spanish St Augustine. Unfortunately, he lost his fortune as a penalty for his involvement in a duel with a Spanish officer and returned north, this time to New York, where he filed for bankruptcy.  He seems to have moved around to various positions and then was employed as a civil engineer at the Washington Navy Yard, during which time he ended up defaulting on a contract for producing musket balls, perhaps because he was too busy with his own invention: a "hydro-war-ship."

In this tense period before and during the War of 1812, Gobert tried to interest the Mayor of Newark and other authorities in his "Machines for public harbor Defense."  He even wrote to President James Madison in 1814, shortly before the end of the war, to describe his project and get support. And while he got a cash advance from Newark for this work, he never seems to have delivered the product.  In fact, no plans for it have ever been found and it is not clear what this "machine for blowing up Ships of War" looked like or  how it functioned.

Gobert took off again and ended up getting arrested for treason after it was found that he was dealing with and sending clandestine communications to the British in the Chesapeake.  Somehow he seems to have gotten out of this predicament, and was merely jailed, once again, for bankruptcy, this time in Washington.  When he was released, he bounced around a bit, pursuing interests and seemingly phantom opportunities in Baltimore, Havana and New York.

Finally, in 1816, President Monroe accepted his claims of innocence of the charge of treason and the State Department restored his papers.

And then at last, in 1821, we find a mention of him in the "Florida Territorial Papers," where he appears as a translator and interpreter of French and Spanish.  The other mentions of him are in a census and a couple of civic and property records - and, true to form, in records of a 1826 lawsuit over rental payments.

Louise cites the report of the New York Evening Post:  "Charles Gobert, native of France, resident merchant in New York City, for the last 9 years residing in St. Augustine, died 26 March 1830."

And all this information was found by Louise from the finding of that small, stray slab of marble that was the footstone installed at Tolomato Cemetery 137 years ago.  So even the humble footstone deserves its measure of historical respect.

The Fair West

Occasionally we travel beyond our humble one acre at Tolomato to view the spreading cemeteries of other countries - or, in this case, of our own American West.  And even though we spent several hours at the 285 acre Fairmount Cemetery in Denver, Colorado, which includes an enormous public mausoleum, seen below, we visited only a fraction of its monuments.

Fairmount Cemetery as such was founded in 1890, but was in use well before that as the City Cemetery, founded in 1858 and incorporating yet another cemetery, Mount Prospect.  Its first burial was James (Jack) O'Neil, who died in 1859 in unfortunate circumstances, shot to death in a gambling argument. This was the Wild West, after all. Note that his gravestone, below, proclaims that he was MURDERED.

Perhaps because of burials such as this, the City Cemetery developed an unsavory reputation, and, as boom-town Denver became more prosperous and home to some very wealthy people, city fathers urged the founding of a beautiful "garden cemetery" in the style inspired by Paris' famous Pere Lachaise.  A new cemetery was founded on the site in 1890.  It incorporated several other cemeteries, and some burials were moved to Fairmount while others were moved away, and some of the burials from Denver's earlier cemeteries were left in place - under land that is the site of the Botanic Gardens and various local parks.

A German landscape architect, Reinhard Scheutze, was hired to design it and created a vast, rolling park that now has some 3,800 trees and thousands of markers and monuments.  The style in 19th and early 20th century Denver, oddly, was very French influenced, and many of the mausoleums and markers of the prosperous reflect this or display a Classical theme.  Anybody who was anybody  in Denver is buried here, and the names - Bonfils, Cheesman, Boetcher, among others, can be seen on the streets and important buildings of Denver.

Burials from the 1920's and 30's are often Art Nouveau in style, while some adopted the "Egyptian" style made popular after the discovery of King Tut's tomb in 1922.

And then there was the mausoleum, with its hundreds of niches and vaults - and the largest collection of stained glass in Denver!  An interesting fact was that in recent times, people had decorated the niches of their deceased with little personal items, such as eyeglasses or some other favorite or typical thing. These are called "grave goods" by scholars, and now appear even in niches holding cremated remains.

There were a couple of "markers" of truly monumental simplicity:  huge boulders of rough pink granite from the Rockies, such as you see below:

However, one of the most interesting things was the marker and monument of J.A. Falkenburg, founder of the Western branch of that famous insurance and burial society, Woodmen of the World. You may know them from their tree-trunk shaped markers, which can be found in virtually any cemetery in the country.

You can read the rather complicated history of the Woodmen here at the blog A Grave Interest, but suffice it to say that none of it would have happened without Falkenburg, shown below. But no tree trunk!  It looked as if the front of his granite plinth may once have had a tree-trunk fastened to it, or at least a plaque featuring their slogan, Dum Tacet Clamat, "Though silent, he speaks," but it was obviously lost at some point in the past and only a few bolt-holes remain.

But all throughout the cemetery, trunks of varying sizes, styles and materials appeared, reflecting the many forms this enduring symbol has taken over the years. In addition, there were more graceful markers with the symbol of a bird and a trunk - for the women's branch, the Women of Woodcraft. Perhaps these form the best monument to J.A. Falkenburg.

 Fairmount Cemetery is open for visitors at any time, and in addition, has a full schedule of tours and events sponsored by their volunteer group, the Fairmount Heritage Foundation.