White Bronze - Fancy!

First published November 5, 2017 It's Sunday - time for some reflection.

Today will be the first of my photos of monuments in Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, PA. I am a tour guide for the cemetery, which I love doing so much! The training takes a good while and can be very time consuming, but I am very proud to have completed it successfully. I hope to be a LHC tour guide until I enter my plot and become part of someone else's tour route. :-) I will talk about the cemetery in general another time, but I really want to tell you about this one monument.

Professor Levi Franklin Smith and his wife, Mrs. Catherine Drinkhouse Smith were both devoted Spiritualists at the end of the 19th into the early 20th centuries. Spiritualism was a big movement during that time, more of a religion than anything else. If you think of mediums trying to contact the deceased, people holding séances for the same reason, etc. - that's a part of Spiritualism. Really, the most important thing about it is the belief in the afterlife and that you can communicate with those who have gone before.

The monument is a four sided sort of obelisk, with an open book on top. One side is for Professor Smith, one for his wife, one has all quotes about Spiritualism, and one is about Free Masonry.

Catherine Smith's side says that she "passed to spirit life 15 minutes before 12 o'clock, the 27th Day of March, 1893 from the residence of her husband" and describes her as "one of the best mediums of her time".

His side says that he "passed to spirit life October 24, 1901 from his residence, 2430 Thompson Street (that's Philadelphia, PA) and that he was a "consistent and devoted Spiritualist, and passed to spirit life with a full knowledge of this beautiful philosophy".

All of that is enough to make me love the Smiths and their monument, BUT there's more! If you tap on the side of it, it will ring like a bloody bell!

Because it's made of white bronze, a fancy term for ZINC. There are two other zinc monuments in the cemetery, and one additional one out for repair. I love them and may have to start travelling to find every other zinc monument in the US. And abroad!

I had trouble finding the one smaller monument and mentioned it to the Laurel Hill cemetery supervisor. Who laughed at me and said, how can you not find it, it's BLUE! Yup. William Casey. You can find him right behind The Silent Sentry, in a plot full of veterans of the Civil War.

And in Laurel Hill’s South section, the Shoemaker Family’s zinc angel:

So, ending with two quotes from the Smiths.

“The individual who will not reason is a bigot, who dare not is a slave, and who can not is a fool.” (I'm thinking I have a number of folks who need to read that one...)

And the favorite quote of the Laurel Hill Cemetery tour guides: “Life is eternal; death is merely a change of conditions."