https://digitalcollections.eku.edu/files/original/781e2119260040ce5161179677b7a074.pdf 613ab7e61c648225cba445be47b5535e PDF Text Text ~ ,,1/ ~~ ) ' ~ t'◄-.e«>- . ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE DEDICATION OF THE . h ON THE T1IIRTY-FIUST,, DAY OF DIAY, 18@6, BY FRANKFORT, .:,:ENTUCXY. A, G. HODGES &, CO,, Printer•. 1860. C r.: :.. 3 �CORRESPOND EN CE. RICHMOND, June 3d, 1856. C. F. BuRNAlf, EsQ., D•ar Sir: By an order of the Bon rd of Trustees of the Richmond Cemetery Company, passed unirnimonsly at their sitling this evening, I nm directed to communicate to you their gratitude ond sincere thanks for the very eloquent a.nd appropriate addresB delivered before the largo nnd respectable audience assembled on the Cemetery grounds on tho occasion of con�ecratioa, on Snturday last, and solicit a copy of it for publication. Trusting that you wil• yield your atscat to this request of the Board, and the general desire of the community, l rema.io, Sincerely your friend, &c., WILL. RODES, Chairman. �ADDRESS. The circumstances which have drawn together this great concourse of people are, in the history of our country, altogether new. Several years ago a number of public spirited citizens met and took counsel of each other, upon the propriety of having secured in the vicinity of Richmond, a public burial ground. The necessity for one was absolute. It was universally acknowledged-daily and hourly it stared all classes in the face-the small plat of ground originally dedicated to this purpose upo·n the establishment of our town, had been long crowded to repletiot! with excess of graves; the humble memorials erected there years ago had fallen down, or been mutilated by neglect and decay, and the spot itself, no longer an obj ect of bum.an reverence or affection, had becom e a thicket of brambles and rank weeds~ a monument at once of our shame and reproach. At the solicitation of these gentlemen, our then Senator in the State Legislature, the late distinguished Col. SPEED S~nTH, secured_t,he passage of a law incorporating, with adequate powers, the "RICHMOND Cf:METERY COMPANY." The effort to accomplish the enterprise, was, however, only: ,spasmodic and temporary. The law was indeed passed, but it slept peacefully upon the statute book~ forgotten in those more exciting aims which attract our people, or in the constant whirl of business avocations, and perhaps in that general good health which Heaven had vouchsafed to our community. In 1849, however, that terrible epidemic, which, starting forty years ago on the banks of the great river in Southern Asia, has since traversed with desolating march, almost the ) �4 entire circle of the world, re-appeared in our town, decimating, in the course of a few weeks, our population, and sweeping to the tomb not only many of our best citizens, ' but also many of our poor and slaves; and again the public I atttention was aroused to the inquiry, where shall our dead repose? In the winter of l 852 an act am ending the law of incorp oration was passed, empowering the town authorities to aid the association by a tax levied upon the citizens, upon t heir consent having first been obtained by a direct vote . .The vot e was, with singulary nanimity, favorable to the tax, and the fund thu s raised, superadded to that from private subscriptions, was sufficient to purchase the grounds when those suitable to the design could be had. Upo n the death of our venerable neighbor, Col. HuMPHREY J oNEs, his beautiful property was sold by his executors to J oEL WALKER, E sq., and that gentleman with much liberality, directed the Board of Trustees of the Cemetery Company, now organized, to ..,elect from his purchase such portion of the land ::is they desired, and at their own price. By deed from him this beautiful undulating lawn, embracing eighteen acres, situated in the heart of our large county, accessible to all our people, adj acent to our shire village, in foll view of its courts of justice, its temples of religion, its schools, its stores, offices, and shops, and yet having all the quiet of unbroken seclusion, has been chosen for the future resting place of our dead, and we, fellow-citizens, by such i,ervices as have been deemed appropriate, have this day asser11bled to consecrate it to the holy purpose for whiGh it was procured. We have met at that most lovely season of the year, when earth and sky and ocean are ever radiant and beautiful; when, "like the swell of an organ, morning rises into noon, May glides onward into June;" when the forest is filled with all sweet sounds, the meadows with fragrance, and �5 the tilled fields with the deposit of those seeds from which the husbandman antibipates the crowding of his granaries in the coming autumn. We have met not to wrangle over politics and elections, or to speculate upon the future fortunes of men, whose names will soon ring throughout the land, in the blended tones of denunciation and praise; we have met, casting aside, we would hope, all bitter feelings and personal resentments; met, christians of all religious creeds, politicians of all parties, Odd Fellows, Masons, Sons of Temperance, men and women of all classes and pursuits, glad now to do what should have been done long ago. I am not unaware that there are those to whom such an occasion may seem to be an idle parade-to be splendid foolishness. There yet lives somewhat of that cynicism which inspired one illustrious ancient to direct his body, after death, to be exposed to beasts of prey; which, with many, required that it be reduced to ashes and scattered to the winds; which made even the most spiritual of all the philosophers of antiquity te ach, tbat only the most barren places should be yielded for the sepulture of the human frame. We have hardly ceased to wonder at t,he devise, by an · illustrious New England surgeon, 0f his skeieton to the museum of the Medical College in whose balls his life had been spent in teaching, with great ability and learning, the mysteries of his favorite science. But such cases are rare.._ have always been and always will be so. We may be perfectly assured that the soul alone is indestructible, that the body has no cognisance, that it will perish and rot, and may try to school ourselves into lessons of indifforence about its final abode, but the great law of instinct and feeling will revolt at the philosophy and reject the argument. We still love that wonderful mechanism with which the immaterial essence is so marvelously blended by the All-Wise, and desire that �6 when the spirit has left the dwelling it may be entombed with decency and honor, and we cannot fail to sympathize with, although we may not credit that myth, of the ancients, wedded to immortal verse in the Eneid of Virgil, which taught that the ghosts of the unburied dead were doomed to an eternal pilgrimage of sorrow on the shadowy banks of the Stygian river. But beyond all this. . No matter what a man may say about himself; how callous and sordid he may become; how indifferent soever as to the disposition of his own remains, this indifference cannot reach beyond himselfit cannot take in his kindred, his friends, his family-all that in life belonged to them will possess somewhat of sancity to those who survive; thoughts of them make up a household patrimony, a family wealth, and often_ in silence and alone the wounded spirit will relieve itself by meditating upon them. upon all they said and did, especially in those last days of suffering and disease, when they became nearer and dearer with the receding struggles of life. Then again, impulse and feeling are more potent than logic or philosophy, and while we admit the stern aphorism, "dust thou ;1rt, and unto dust shall thou return," we would guard with tenderness and holy care that spot in which was last deposited the loved and lost. Whether the earth there has opened to receive one worn down by age, or the babe in the smile of infancy; the youth in the flush of young manhood; the venerable mother, or the maid struck down in the splendor of perfec t beauty, it is all nlike-that resignation is hard to attain which would enable us to say that with the burial, the spot like that of Moses, amid the rocks of Moab is to be unknown, still more difficult that self-command, that sublime indifference which, at the sight of an unburied corpse, can pass it by with the exclam :ttion "lo the broken shell ]from which the bird has flown." But cemeteries are on many accounts full of value-I may add of national value. Among the evidences of an ex- �7 a!ted patriotism is that sentiment which pays honor t-o dep arted benefactors. Gratitude is the virtue which particularly marks a chivalrous, a lofty generation. Finding, among the unenlightened, its outward manifestations in those humble mounds reared over their heroes distinguished in · council and war, among the refined and polished States of our race., it has been the parent of the Fine Arts. From this sentiment, perhaps, more than any other in the earlier ages of the world's history, arose those matchless creations in sculpture and painting which gave immortal renown to the genius of the Romans and Greeks-which, in Egypt, spent itself in erecting those pyramids from whose summits Napoleon, in eloquent enthusiasm, told his soldiers forty centuries looked down upon them, and in the excavation of those immense vaults and charnel-houses which in awful silence address more impressively the beholder than could the most graphic history or oration. The force of such a sentiment as gave birth to them must have been universal aud absorbing. He who had done the State good service, was conscious that his memory would be guarded after death; that the stone which covered his remains would speak to his countrymen of the deeds of his life. Whether engaged in the Senate or the camp, as an instructor of youth or a priest in the temple, or in obscure life, exemplifying th e virtues of goodness and truth, patience under misfortune, and charity in affiuencethese should not in death be written in water, but on marble ztema eis ah·, a possession forever to the living of all ages. To defend their altars and homes, their wives and children, was always, in eloquence and song, blended with the stern charge to remember the graves of their fathers, and such influences entering into the character of a people made them great, and all that even remotely tended to ·keep them alive was deemed full of value. �8 The enlightened States of modern Europe have consulted the models of the ancients not more in the erection of mansions for the the living than in the preservation and adornment of their cities of the dead. The splendid palaces which have witnessed the birth and inauguration of their kings, do not surpass in interest the monuments and tombs which tell where they sleep. The graveled walks and fountains, and mausolemsof Pere la chais are as often visited by the traveler as the magnificent halls and spacious gardens of Versailles.The statute of Peter arouses more admiration than the domes of his Imperial Capitol The grand palaces of Austria attract far less the generous visitor than the humble graves of those reformers whose very end was the resurrection of religious freedom. The abbey at Westminster, where lie in urned the mighty ones who have crowned Britain with the undying glory of th eir actions, is as often filled with anxious gazers as the chambers which witnessed the matchless displays of that statesmanship which has built the colossal fabric of British wealth and dominion. The traveler may be amazed at the display of her fleets and armaments, her quays and docks and arsenals-he may be lost in admiration of those vast structures which attest her commercial and manufacturing gre&tness, but if inground with the loftier nobleness of her literature, he will often turn aside from these to seek in sequestered places, and in rural towns that calm satisfaction and inward peace so peculiar to them-which fills vale and glen and mountain, which reign around the many hundred church yards, scattered all over the land, whose inspiration awoke the utterance of Gray's inimitable elegy, and which have been made consecrate forever by the genius of Walter Scott, as he pictures the life of an old covenanter, spent in removing with chisel and hammer and brush, the moss and stains which time had gathered upon the humble graves of his people. �9 In this country, chiefly however, within the past quarter of a century, much attention has been given to the subject of rural burying grounds. In the autumn of 1831, the Mt. Auburn cemetery, near Boston, a spot of surpassing loveliness and wild beauty, was in the presence of an immense multitude, consecrated to the dead with prayers and sacred songs, and with all the outpourings of that enthusiasm which such services and scenes and associations: superadded to the the thrilling eloquence of Story, could impart, and with each succeeding year it has continued to grow in beauty and in the love of those who have friends and kindred buried there. At a still earlier day the graveyard at New Haven, Connecticut, was dedicated with the solemn benediction of Dwight, and to this day with pride and tenderness it is regarded as one of the chief ornaments of that city of gardens and elms, resting in quiet beauty on an arm of land stretching out into the blue waters of Long I sl'and Sound. There in peaceful slumber rest the ashes of many of the illustrious patriots of the era of our revolution. There lie the bones of many of the pilgrims and t heir children-and in that silent city, not the least interesting square is one where a rude stone marks the resting place of Goffe and Whalley and Dixwell, three of those iron Republicans who adjudged to death Charles I, of England, and who · sought and found in the wild forests of America a refuge from the fury of the restored crown after the protectorate had been overthrown, carving on the rock that sheltered them the subli me inscription "resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." The Greenwood Cemetery near New York, the Laurel Hill burying-ground in the vicinity of Philadelphia, and the Green Mount Cemetery near Baltimore, embalmed and made classical, the first, by the muse of Bryant, and the last two by the eloquence of Reed and Kennedy, have over the nation a fame wide as that of those noble cities themselves, and over the nation, their influences, as seeds by far winds �10 sown, have been seen and felt, arresting our people in the fierce tumults of civil strife, teaching the man of business to pause thoughtfully in bis grasp for the perishable dust of this world, and reminding all of the rapid passage which all are making to that common level on which all must meet. These influences are salutary and enduring. They will continue to strengthen. No town, now in this age, when towns spring up as it were by magic, and especially in the great west, where lands are cheap and abundant, can with any propriety be laid off, without the most ample provision for a rural cemetery. I need not remind those who are listening to me, of that romantic spot overlooking the little capital of our State, where so many of the venerable dead of Kentucky lie-of the pure shaft which records the names of her heroes killed in battle-and the grassy mounds, where the bones of Boone and his wife now repose, removed from their forest graves in Missouri back to the soil of the 8ta '; e which first allured the pioneer to her broad bosom, when the grand old woods were only peopled by savages and game. The beautiful woodland retreat near Lexington will be forever dear to all Kentuckians, for there have been committed to the earth the ashes of her noblest, her proud!3st son. The bare mention of all these places, with the associations that gather round, then may serve perhaps to awaken your thoughts to the real value and impressive solemnity of the business for which you have met. Would it be departing too widely from the just proprieties of the occasion to add what I think should silence all cavil and urge forward the most strenuous exertions for our cause. Think for a moment of the exertions of a man like Edward Everett, combini 1~ in himself all those qualities which Milton conceived necessary to an all accomplished and consumate gentleman-a scholar skilled in the languages living and dead-a statesman and diplomatist versed in all that is �11 valuable in jurisprudence and international law, abandoning his high place in the Senate chamber of the nation, as one where great public virtue has ceased to be prized, and in this day of storm and darkness, making his way from city to city, a missionary to his countrymen, endeavoring to arouse them to a love of their union and their whole country, by newer and fresher and more truthful pictures of the Father of his country, and pleading with them in the majesty of true eloquence to rescue from neglect and ruin the home where his ashes sleep, to make it for all time national property, and to swear anew of this common purchase eternal brotherhood with each other! How inconceivably noblerand grander the position of such a man, and how much more enduring in the future his fame must be than that of those demagogues of all parties whose ambition is office and whose game is State! We sometimes hear quoted the stinging sarcasm of a brilliant but misanthropical genius, by those to whom the value of such an organized association as we feel interest in to-day is disallowed, "believe but an epitaph or anything that's false." We may admit that the purest taste does not always accompany the erection of monuments and the inscriptions carved on them, but the sarcasm is more false in spirit than they. The gentlemen who have devoted themselves to the study of law need not here be reminded that in every enlightened treatise on the law of evidence the doctrine is proclaimed that the inscriptions on tombs have been received as one high source of evidence of the truth of the contemporaneous names, dates and facts which they purport to give, no matter where found, in public cemeteries or private burying grounds. The superior excellence of public over private burying grounds, manifest, from so many controllingconsiderations, is particularly demonstrated (by the trading and emigrating character of our people. The genius of our laws and institutions has been always adverse to the creation of perpetui- �12 ties in landed estates. I may safely add in the disposition of estates by last will and testament, the spirit of our people under the moulding influences of our government framework, has been hostile to inequality. Thus no family can with much assurance anticipate the ownership for a long term of years, of the plantations and farms now subject to their control. The accumulations of industry and inherited wealth may unite in a single owner a thousand acres of our rich and beautiful territory-these may be, and often are, improved by the care and labor of a perfect system of culture and adornmentY-the stately mansion may be built in the knoll of some picturesque woods, and orchards, gardens, shrubbery be gathered around it-rows of cabins not afar off may ring with the shouts and laughter of contented servants -the home may in some republican heraldry be blazoned with a family name-a knoll or grove may be piously dedicated to the use of those who shall die on that Kentucky patrimony, and for a few years the sense of independence and family pride mHy be perfectly triumphant and self sustained. But alas, how soon the gorgeous beauty of that melodrama may shift to the weeds of tragedy. With the advance to manhood here, the son who should guard the mansion and the graves, has been allured forever away by the broad magnificence of our western plains, or by the stir and din and conflict of the great city, throbbing in its every street and lane with the great and bounding pulse of life, or by the eternal soundings of the gray old ocean felt in the fascination of a life on ships. The fair haired daughter of such a house, who has learned from childhood to love its every .,nook and bush and tree-whose life has been to find a rival to her own peerless beauty in the beautiful sanctuary of home, and that her love shall be immortal-suddenly, under the witchery of stranger influences, leaves without a tear, this home, in the very blossoming of womanhood. �13 But without these, the fluctuations of trade and stocks, the revulsions of bold speculations may intervene and change beneath the hammer of the sheriff, from the hand of the proprietor in his own day, the house, the garden, the woodland the orchard, the meadow-yes and the graves-,-not only into stranger hands but and not unfrequently into the hands of the heartless and profane-and then what? Need the picture be filled up? It is not a picture of fancy--it is the harsh realization of life itself as we see it day after day; and in view of it, I ask if our old men desire to see their children scattered from them in early life, coming back on a pilgrimage to t he old homestead, only to find it now passed into the hands of strangers, and to find the graves of their parents, their brothers, and their sisters, lost in a thicket of briars and alder bushes, ploughed over, a spot where mules and swine and cattle feed; is that your wish, with regard to your parents, and those of your own offspring who have died in youth? I.., I will answer for you, no! Rather remove them to a ground sacred to the dead, where the hand of affection shall plant over them the rose and myrtle, where the ivy and willow shall intertwine, and where the cypress and pine shall wave green in the storms of winter, and where the birds of the summer morning shall pour out their voices unfrightened by the dog and gun of the hunter, We may not make our grave-yard the rival of those on which so much care has been expended elsewhere, to the mere visitor and beholder, but can we not make it clearer t o ourselves? How many revolutionary soldiers now lie buried in the boundary of :Madison county, the graves of many of whom are unknown! What a spot for our patriotism to cleave to, if in one portion of our cemetery there could be grouped together all that remains of those venerable men. Their names have all been struck from the pension roll. Not one survives. Of many no memorial remains. Bar- �14 nett, and ,Covington, and Peyton, the Maupins, and · Lane, and Dunbar, Miller and Fox, and Woods, Taylor and Gentry and their countless companions, all, all, are dead. Many of them lyii;ig on bare hilt-sides, with rails and fennel and dogweed and rank grass mouldering over them. And then our old Indian fighters-the men who gave names to our hills and water-courses; chainmen and markers when old surveys were made; who fought at Boonsborough and at Little Mountain; who were in the Estill Station, in Hart's Fort, in Irvine's Fort, in Tanner's Fort, in Hoy's Station; who knows their history; what legend tells when they died, and where they were buried? How many a youth has grown up, who knows only, by the mist of tradition, of those men who were prominent in the organization of our county-who were its judicial and ministerial:oUicers, its representatives and senators, and who, living in their day and time less for themselves than for those who should come after them, have been forgotten by their posterity. Where are the clergymen who sixty, fifty, forty, thirty years ago proclaimed to our people, the oracles of the living God? Their names are appended to some old minute of an association a conference or a synod, or to some marriage certificate returned to the office of the county .court, but how much of their memory with their dust is gone. Clark, Tribble, the Woods, Finney, Pace, their reward is on high, but over their graves the wind passe.~ and is gone. 'But ceasing., to lament over the past let us make better provision·<(-;for ttie future. There are those in our midst whose end is not yet, who merit as noble a cenotaph as any who have died. ,.,, Venerable fathers whose lives have witnessed some act of goodness every day-pious mothers who have tasted of that fountain of pure _religion, which has been in them a well of water springing UP, into everlasting life-these shall die, and ,, �15 by their side shall sleep those snatched from the world in the very visions of its young glorJ and freshness, when "earth is but another, nay a happier heaven, prodigal of the same glories, and haunted by the same forms." Wisdom and strength, and beauty and innocence (such· ' ,he stern and unchanging .he mountain, and shalt law) shall still droop at the base . not the sprig of Cassia grow to tell where each has fallen, and whence shall he the place of their resurrection? Whatever else we may do, let us not falter now in our work- let us make our little ~emetery worthy of ourselv0s. With those gentlemen who have been thus far connected with its su pervision it has been a labor of love. Entirely unimproved as yet, they believe it susceptible of being made in beauty and interest equal to its design. We may lament th at here and there no grand old oak, no spreading walnut, and maple and arbatus have been spared by the axe of the wood man. Others may n'grc;f that no sounds of running waters will break the stillnees of the scene. Gt.hers yet might choose a sheltered valley guarded all round like Jeru sale m of old with fortresses of rock; and still others might h we preferred any place difforent from this. To all the a nswer is, we have done what we could-we may trust the correct ju dg ment and taste of ' those who will have the superintendance and adornment of thes / may I not ruw) especi[tlly, of the worthy Presi association, Cot. Wm. Rodes, whose zeal and dt Al good ent,erprises hav e made him not only an ornament, but a necessity in our community. The oak, the maple, the wal11nt, the willow, the evergreen will all in time find places here transplanted from our forests. We may adorn the gravec of our friends with flowers and plants, just emblems of that life which has been compared in holy scripture to those fading beauties, which buried in dishonor ri se again in glory. The winding gravel walks will fu rnish a retreat for health and exercise, as well as thought and meditation. And when summoned by the melancholy 1 1 f . �16 chiming of funeral bells we will, with le.ss sorrow it may be, be attracted to the just opened grave-glad that we have a spot to which they can be brought without favor or shame-that we have one spot where th e servan~ freed in death from the master shall sleep in pea,~-<-& rthat the stranger shall not be . driven from our gate, bi ere rich and poor shall sleep toget efp looking up to one common Father who is the maker of them all, knowing that they who rest beneath the earthen sod, equally with those over whom splendid monuments have . been built, are, if good, and just, the favorites of Heaven. Though nameless, trampled, and forgot, His servants humble ashes liey et God has marked and sealed the spot, To call its inmate to the sky. · NoTE.--Since the delivery of the foregoing speech, the Cemetery at Richmond has become a spot of exceeding loveliness, and is now the ornament qf the village. Many tasteful and costly marble mon-nts have been r€'U"ed, and the grounds have been adorn1Jil •ith fl~vers ry, and decorations, which make the to ptii.ee dear those !he requests o·rman been struck off for dis,. .. . tched over it. It has been to gratify few copies of the foregoing have · ng them . � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Burnam, Curtis Field Papers Description An account of the resource Curtis Field Burnam was a well-respected lawyer, judge, and statesman from Richmond, KY. He was a refined orator, as well, and numerous items in the collection are copies of addresses and orations which he presented to a variety of audiences. Much of the material has to do with the Civil War in Kentucky and in general. Many aspects of the Civil War, such as secession, abolition, and slavery, are reflected in the collection via newspaper articles, correspondence, and addresses. His daughter, Lucia Burnam, also has material in the collection such as her personal diary, passport, and a memoir in which she recounts the events surrounding the Battle of Richmond.<br /><br />Only a portion of this collection has been digitized. See the <a href="https://ekuprimarysources.libraryhost.com/repositories/2/resources/438">Finding Aid</a> for a description of the entire collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1803-1942 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <span>Contact </span><a href="mailto:archives.library@eku.edu">Special Collections and Archives</a><span>, Crabbe Library, Eastern Kentucky University for reproductions, rights and permission to publish.</span> Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource correspondence photograph news clipping scrapbook certificate speech publication pamphlet poetry flyer Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource text image Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 2013A001 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Address Delivered at the Dedication of the Richmond Cemetery Description An account of the resource A 16 page booklet that has the address presented by C.F. Burnam in regard to the dedication of the Richmond cemetery. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Burnam, Curtis F. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Burnam, Curtis F. Papers Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1860 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Contact <a href="mailto:archives.library@eku.edu">Special Collections and Archives</a>, Crabbe Library, Eastern Kentucky University for reproductions, rights and permission to publish. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource speech Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 2013a001-b01-f17 Richmond Cemetery