GC Historical Society meeting on ‘Arkansas Burial Customs’
The Garland County Historical Society will present “Gone to the Grave: Arkansas Burial Customs,” a program by Abby Burnett, at its meeting at noon Tuesday at the Garland County Library. The meeting is open to the public.
Before there was a professional death care industry with funeral directors offering embalming and factory-made caskets, people across the state — and across the South — buried their own dead. The complicated, labor-intensive process was handled by the deceased’s friends and neighbors, who prepared the body for burial, built a wooden coffin, hand-dug the grave and conveyed the remains to the cemetery. These jobs, performed willingly, were governed by a variety of customs, superstitions and taboos.
Though these burial rituals gradually died out, in rural communities they remained the norm up through World War II. It has been possible to document the process through oral histories, letters, obituaries and folklore collections, not to mention a wealth of information found on early tombstones.
This talk follows the natural progression of events from death to burial, illustrated by museum artifacts and period photos. Some examples will be taken from Hot Springs, which served as part of the collection area for Burnett’s research into the subject. It is a subject rich with folklore, such as feather crowns and madstones and, occasionally, a bit of graveyard humor.
Burnett is an independent researcher who documents all aspects of burial across Arkansas, specifically in the Arkansas Ozarks. As seen in the Arkansas Education Television Network’s 2010 documentary, “Silent Storytellers,” she studies such subjects as long-lost funeral customs, unusual deaths, grave coverings, tombstone symbolism, epitaphs and the work of early tombstone carvers.
Burnett’s most recent book, “Gone to the Grave: Burial Customs of the Arkansas Ozarks, 18501950,” was published in in 2015. She is on the board of the Association for Gravestone Studies and was a lecturer at that organization’s annual conference in 2016 and has written for the AGS Quarterly. Burnett is working on a book about some of the most unusual tombstones and cemeteries found across the state of Arkansas.