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Samuel and Mary Peel, sitting on their home’s second story balcony, had a direct view of the Bentonville Cemetery, across what is now Walton Boulevard. There they could see the large burial plot they had picked out for their own graves, already housing infant twins who died at birth in 1872.The Peels’ proximity to loss was not unusual in the 19th century, a time when people were intimately familiar with death. This presentation will illustrate how people in the Ozarks once buried their own dead, observed now-forgotten customs, and marked graves with symbols that conveyed messages of mourning and faith. Woven through Abby Burnett’s talk are stories of unusual deaths and tombstones, taken from her new guidebook to Arkansas cemeteries, Though Silent They Speak; Arkansas Gravestones and Graveyards.
Abby Burnett is an independent researcher specializing in historic burial customs, tombstone symbolism, epitaphs, and early stone carvers. She is the author of Gone to the Grave: Burial Customs of the Arkansas Ozarks, 1850–1950 and featured in the 2010 AETN documentary, Silent Storytellers.
A resident of Arkansas for 40 years, she frequently delivers public lectures on regional cemetery history and contributes expert entries on graveyards, stone carvers, and early medicine to the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas.
Photo by Don House
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Event venue
400 S Walton Blvd, Bentonville, AR, United States, Arkansas 72712
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