Never anything So Solemn: An Archaeological, Biological, and Historical Investigation of the Nineteeth-Century Grafton Cemetery

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Summer 2002 by Barnhart, Terry A

Never Anything So Solemn: An Archaeological, Biological, and Historical Investigation of the Nineteenth-Century Grafton Cemetery. Edited by Jane E. Buikstra, Jodie A. O'Gorman, and Cynthia Sutton. (Kampsville, Illinois: Kampsville Studies in Archaeology and History No. 3, Center for American Archaeology, 2000. Pp. xiv, 277. Tables, Illus., Appendices, Bibliography Paper, $20.00.)

Historical archaeology is a way of knowing the past. It is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that stands upon a distinct set of theoretical and methodological approaches, and that utilizes both documentary and archaeological sources. Archaeological evidence can interrogate the written record, and the latter can create social and cultural context for the former. Never Anything So Solemn by Jane E. Buikstra et al. is an example of historical archaeology at its finest. Buikstra was the principle investigator for the project, Dr. Jodie O'Gorman (Michigan State University) the project director, and Daniel Goatley and Dr. Joseph F. Powell the field directors. The work applies the method and theory of archaeology biology, and history to the study of the original cemetery at Grafton, Illinois, which served the community from circa 1834 to 1873. Never Anything So Solemn is the first detailed account of a cemetery excavation of a middle-class population in nineteenth-century North America. Most of the historic cemeteries previously excavated in the United States were associated with poorhouses, institutions, or African American communities.

Opportunities to systematically excavate cemeteries are rare and usually only occur under salvage conditions involving the relocation of graves. Such was precisely the case with the Grafton cemetery. The devastation wrought at Grafton by the "Great Flood of 1993" (the town was also flooded in 1844 and 1943) prompted the citizens of Grafton to relocate the community from its perilous position on the floodplain to the higher ground on the crest of the adjoining bluff. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) sponsored the Grafting Relocation Project, requiring that a cultural resource evaluation first be made of the proposed relocation area-the site of the original Grafton cemetery. Archaeological investigations were conducted in the area in 1994 in compliance with Section 106 of the amended National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. It was then that the location of the original Grafton cemetery was rediscovered and excavations conducted under contract with the City of Grafton. The excavations were sponsored by the Illinois Department of Commerce and Community Affairs and supported by FEMA.

The relocation of the cemetery presented the investigators with an opportunity to "rediscover the history of Grafton" (xiv). No tombstones remained upright and visible to mark the graves of Grafton's earliest EuroAmerican residents. The cemetery served as the community burial ground from circa 1834 until its abandonment in 1873, when it was then planted in corn and the locations of the graves forgotten. Previous to the excavations of 1994, local tradition held that the grave contents at the Grafton Cemetery had been removed to the new Scenic Hill Cemetery. The tradition appears to be based entirely upon the fact that at least twenty-nine grave markers from the old Grafton cemetery were moved to the new one sometime after 1872. It was assumed that the contents of those graves were removed with them. Archaeological evidence, however, suggests otherwise. Most, if not all, of the graves within the cemetery site contained human remains and associated grave goods. Investigators located 252 grave shafts within the Grafton cemetery. Unfortunately, written documentation regarding the cemetery and the alleged relocation of graves is non-existent. The records of the old cemetery perished during fires at the Jerseyville courthouse and the Scenic Hill Cemetery in the early twentieth century. The absence of legible grave markers and written records make it impossible to positively identify individuals, or to know which, if any, of the pre-1873 gravestones located at the Scenic Hill Cemetery denote actual grave removals from the Grafton Cemetery or merely the movement of headstones from the old burying ground to the new. Only six exhumations from the Grafton Cemetery could be identified archaeologically, suggesting that more than 97 percent of those buried in the old cemetery remained there after the opening of the new cemetery in 1873.

Analysis of the material culture recovered during the excavations represents one of the volume's most significant features. The shape, material, and hardware of coffins and the articles of personal adornment found within them have diagnostic characteristics. Specialists analyzed buttons, beads, rings, coins, costuming, hairstyle, textiles, vulcanized rubber combs, handles, escutcheons, hinges, and nails. Such materials are datable, thus establishing a site chronology in the absence of written records and grave markers. Some coffins and grave goods are expressions of socio-economic status, while skeletal remains recovered from the Grafton Cemetery provide significant information about demography, health, diet, and the inherited attributes. In Chapter 8, Powell and O'Gorman discuss the spatial and temporal patterning of graves within the Grafton Cemetery in relation to nineteenth-century socio-economic patterns and cultural traditions.