Oakland Cemetery St. Paul, MN

On a recent Saturday afternoon I spent some time taking some photos throughout Oakland Cemetery's park-like grounds. Cemeteries have always held a fascination for me. As a child, my family and I would visit my grandparents in Albany Minnesota. We were the kids from The Cities and were easily bored. Our limited entertainments left us with either walks along the railroad tracks or playing in the town's two cemeteries. There was a cemetery for the Catholics and one for the Lutherans. Both of them were on the edge of town. The Lutheran cemetery didn't have much drama. Most of the headstones were of the same shape and height with the exception of a couple of large family plot markers. I think kids like to get creeped out by old cemeteries. I know I did.

In both cemeteries there are small porcelain pictures of the deceased and no matter where you stood the illusion was the eyes followed you. That was delightfully spooky and scary for a young boy with an over active imagination. Being parked in front of the television watching Leonard Nimoy's In Search of…probably didn't help. Every week my favorite television program began with "This series presents information based in part on theory and conjecture. The producer's purpose is to suggest some possible explanations, but not necessarily the only ones to the mysteries we will examine." Ghosts, UFOs and other spooky subject matter greeted me each week on 148 episodes from 1976 to 1982. The local kids would often tell the story about the bachelor farmer who hung himself in his barn. He couldn't be buried in the Catholic cemetery because he committed suicide. That's where the real drama was, the Catholic cemetery.

All along the road there are bas-relief depictions of the Stations of the Cross. The set was built and donated in the early twentieth century. At the far end of the cemetery is a life-sized depiction of a crucified Christ entombed a mise au tombeau if you will. You can peek through an opening and a mirror reflects your view down to the statue. We used to tell each other ghost stories too and dare each other to cut through the cemetery at night.

Boys eventually grow up and over the years cemeteries have become places of peace and contemplation rather than the habitat for ghosts and monsters. How a culture remembers its dead says a lot. In college I studied Greek and Roman funerary statue. If you walk around various cemeteries of St. Paul and Minneapolis you can see a great variety of very beautiful funerary art in the form of statues, mausoleums and crypts.

One such place is Oakland Cemetery in St. Paul Minnesota. It was established in 1853 with 40 acres and became one of the first formal non-sectarian burial places in the territory at the time. Since it was well removed from the city's population, in the North End, Oakland cemetery became a destination for family picnics. Today Oakland Cemetery is 100 acres, surrounded by development and remains non-sectarian.