Adventures of a tombstone tourist
Mike Brown recovers sunken gravestones at Hamilton Cemetery one at a time. So far this year he has found 33 in a graveyard estimated to have thousands swallowed by the ground.
IF YOU SEE a 50-something man in a Tilley-style hat digging in Hamilton Cemetery, don’t be alarmed.
He’s not a grave robber or someone taking part in a pagan ritual for Halloween. He’s actually a mild-mannered fellow named Mike Brown, doing a bit of a public service.
“I’ve got an unusual, and unusually relaxing, hobby,” Brown says. “I search the grounds of our local cemeteries for gravestones that time has seen fit to bury.”
He uncovers gravestones that have sunk into the ground or been overtaken by grass and soil. He walks around the Hamilton Cemetery with a sturdy, black plastic tool box looking for oddities in the terrain that might signal a lost grave marker.
He finds it calming amid the stones, but his interest in preserving local history keeps him coming back. He chronicles his exploits on a Facebook page Adventures of a Taphophile (someone with enthusiasm for graves) and he has an Instagram page @heymikebrown.
Brown has uncovered 33 “forgotten” stones this year — a mixture of flat markers and toppled headstones.
It can be difficult to read shallow, worn letters, engraved so many years ago. To make them clearer, he performs a kind of “earth rubbing,” brushing soil into the engravings then using a plastic scraper to remove excess dirt to reveal the etched names and dates.
There are more than 69,500 people buried at Hamilton Cemetery according to the city, which owns the graveyard.
Brown, 53, believes thousands of those graves have had their stones swallowed by the ground. But Clorinda Pagliari, a spokesperson for the city’s Superintendent of Cemeteries, says there is no way to say for sure. As Brown finds concealed stones he adds them to findagrave.com.
“So if there’s somebody who is looking for their family, they’ll be able to find them; and even if nobody is looking for them at least they’re recorded now.”
Brown’s interest in gravestones started when researching the family tree. His wife, Lisa, has ancestral roots in the Hamilton area dating back to the 1790s. It was while tending to her relatives’ burial sites that he dragged his foot across the ground, revealing part of a forgotten marker.
“I got on the ground and uncovered the whole thing by hand, and thought that was pretty cool,” he explains.
He looks for indentations in the turf that can signal buried stones. His recovery process involves marking the spot with a knitting needle, then outlining the area with wooden kebab skewers. The area is then dug out using his hands and a trowel. Grass trimmings are placed in a bucket, which he brings with him to the cemetery and then disposes of, to avoid making a mess.
Cemetery workers didn’t know what to make of him at first. But they are fine with what he does as long as he follows the rules: He must be careful not to damage markers, and he mustn’t move them in any way. That means if he finds one that is blank, he can’t turn it over to see what’s on the other side.
“It’s horribly disappointing,” he says of the ones that are downturned. “But I can’t lift them.”
Pagliari says that “uncovering or trimming of grass from around the marker can be performed by family, friends or others as long as the trimmings are removed and disposed of and no damage is caused to either the marker or the surrounding turf.”
Brown hopes some day he can convince someone to hire him to do the work, but for now he will continue as a volunteer. He says he is “currently unemployed;” but to friends and family he’s an emerging artist. The stones sometimes make it into his daily sketches; he creates characters out of the names he finds.
“A lot of people think I’m coming here and searching for particular gravestones, but I’m not. I have no idea what I’m going to find.
“The coolest I’ve found so far is Catherine Ferrie, whose maiden name is Beasley. She has a tiny headstone. I looked her up and she is the daughter of Richard Beasley — the first farmer in this whole area.”
Another uncovered stone reads: “George Dewitt, son of James and Sarah Nash, died April 11th 1855.”
“So that thing’s been sitting there for 162 years,” he says. “He was only 19.”
Robin McKee, who hosts weekend tours at the cemetery from May to November, praised Brown’s efforts.
“I’ve been trying to get the city to begin an organization called the Friends of the Cemetery,” he says. “These are the kind of volunteers we need …. He clears the stones so that people can read them. Then you can do family research ... historical research.”
In an email, Pagliari said there is no current issue with upright markers being buried, but flat markers can sink or be overtaken by grass and soil.
“As Hamilton Cemetery consists of thousands of flat markers we have in the past (raised them) based on requests from families. Moving forward, we are going to be proactive and utilize our seasonal staff to begin raising and uncovering these markers.”
But for now, at least, it looks like Brown is on his own.