Valentine has since been instrumental in recruiting volunteers for the project. I thought I could put it on hold and finish the story, but I think I knew from the beginning that this was going to be my thing.” “That’s kind of how it happens for a lot of us: you get involved, you keep coming out every week… I was just going to be an independent journalist, but I realized that I’m kind of a part of this now. “The more the plot thickens, the more you realize you’re a part of it,” Valentine said. After an interview at his home, and participation in one of the cemetery’s weekly cleanup days, Valentine discovered she was just too passionate about the project to objectively write a story about it. While interning for public radio station WFPL in 2013, Laura Valentine met Andy Harpole, a citizen concerned about the state of the cemetery. That is where the Friends of Eastern Cemetery come in. He is also responsible for the cemetery records, which DiBlasi’s students painstakingly scan and transcribe, so people who want to find specific graves can do so digitally.īut for more than 20 years, almost no one was taking care of the land itself. He now waits for their relatives to claim them. This is how DeBlasi came to care for the remains of over 500 people. The company responsible for the cemetery has ceased to hold meetings, and there has since been no legal owner or caretaker for the property and the bodies that rest there. As a result, modern gravediggers may not know how wide a grave can be without breaching another plot. Gesturing nonchalantly to a thin, black casket leaning up against the wall in his office, Di Blasi said the caskets of the 1800s were narrower than they are now. “The law they charged them with violating is one that says that if you buy a grave, you own it forever, and if somebody sells it and then reuses it, they’re violating a property law.” “Believe it or not, there is no state law in Kentucky saying that I can’t dig through your grandmother and put somebody else there,” DiBlasi said. Today, there are roughly 9,000 prepurchased graves at the cemetery, but there is not enough room on the lot to support them without resorting to reburials. The task becomes virtually impossible when one realizes most graves there are unmarked. Black families suffered in particular, he said, because they did not tend to visit graves after the burial, making the graves of their relatives easy targets for frequent reburials.īasic cemetery ettiquette says not to step on people’s graves, but that’s a difficult task at Eastern, where plots are tightly packed, and not always in even rows. A judge ruled that an archaeologist must be present during all exhumations or burials from then on.ĭiBlasi estimates there were about 80,000 bodies buried on a lot that should only hold 25,000. Phil DiBlasi, also a U of L professor, was asked by the attorney general to step in as the archaeologist on the case. In June 1989, the company that operated Eastern Cemetery, along with two other local cemeteries, had a criminial investigation filed against them for allegedly reusing graves. Though progressive in its time, the policy later solicited a horrific injustice. It was then owned by the Fourth Street Methodist Church, and was the first cemetery in Louisville to bury both black people and white people, though still not in the same sections. The 30-acre tract of land was first used as a cemetery in the 1840s. “It was this wreckage of a place, but there’s something uniquely beautiful about it,” said Valentine. Vandals poured out cremains and sold the bronze urns for cash. Free-roaming dogs used the lot as a toilet. Homeless people burned cemetery records for warmth. “The first time I ever saw (Eastern Cemetery)…The grass out there was - and I’m not tall, I’m like 5’2”- above waist-high on me…People had been going in there for years and just dumping their trash, sitting in the woods and just having little parties.” Valentine is a member of Friends of Eastern Cemetery, an organziation dedicated to the restoration of the much maligned and once disturbingly unkempt cemetery. Now a senior anthropology major at U of L, she continues to spend a lot of time around the dead, but not as part of her degree. Valentine grew up near Zachary Taylor National Cemetery, a well-kept veterans cemetery with a US president buried in it. Laura Valentine has never been scared of graveyards.
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