Brunswick Cemeteries
Learning Activities
Materials needed: each student will need a notebook, pen or pencil. He/she will also need some butcher block paper and a wide-leaded pencil which you can find in an educational supplies or artist supplies store. (This is for the activity suggested on the gravestone webpage.)Ask the students to see if they can identify the areas in Palmetto where people of different ethnic groups, i.e. Jews, Greeks, Anglo-Americans, etc. are buried. They should, with a little help, see that there are separate sections for various ethnic groups. The existence of segregation explains the separate Black and White cemeteries. But, why would Jews and Greeks be buried in separate areas from Anglo-Americans in the same cemetery? (Hint: religious differences matter; marketing practices matter. How are cemetery plots sold?) Ask them to see if they can see any differences between gravestones and crypts.
Gravestone rubbings
Part of this tour involves making a rubbing or two of a gravestone. You do this so students can see how we can treat an otherwise illegible gravestone so that we can read the inscription and study any decoration found on it.The tour
The field trip will cover four cemeteries. We suggest you visit them in the following order: Laurel Grove, Brunswick Memorial Gardens, Greenwood and Palmetto. Ask each student to select four graves in each cemetery. They should take careful notes about the grave markers, what they are made of, artistic decorations, how they are placed at the graves, a word-for-word transcription of the inscription (or as much of it as possible), etc. They should also note the names, birth and death dates (or age at burial) for each grave.Before the tour ask each cemetery if they can provide a guide and give a talk about the cemetery, its history, how things are done there, visitors, anecdotes suitable for children, etc.
Ask each student to prepare a brief report on what they learned about cemeteries and burial customs. You should have data on 400+ burials. This should be enough to draw demographic graphs for each cemetery showing how long people lived in various periods. [Hint: Be sure NOT to mix data from widely varying time periods.]