On the blustery Sunday afternoon in March that I attended my first annual board meeting, I decided to take a walk through the cemetery. As I passed under the arch that displayed the name “Calvary,” the quiet enveloped me. The hum of traffic from the neighboring streets seemed muted. Watery sunbeams played tag with the clouds. I began to read tombstones and get acquainted with those whom I felt had somehow become my charges.
Calvary Cemetery was founded in the 1850s during the Holy Trinity Church pastorate of Father Jeremiah O’ Conner. Naturally, it was the burial place for a number of the Irish Catholic immigrants who settled in the area west of Clark Street, known as “Little Dublin,” now the site of Trinity Place apartments. Their presence is reflected in the many tombstones inscribed with Irish names: Mahoney, McNary, Sheehan, Flynn, Mulligan, O’Brian, Dillon, Kelly.
Some of them speak to us, hoping we would keep them in our thoughts long after their passing. “It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from sins,” James Ryan (died March 15, 1862) reminds us, the quote from the Apocrypha still legible on his weathered monument.
Parishioners from neighboring St. John the Baptist Parish, and later, St. Mary’s, many of them immigrants from Italy and central and eastern Europe, also found their final resting place at Calvary Cemetery. Their names add a cosmopolitan flavor to the cemetery roll: Scarpa, Earnst, Habig, Lafayette, Neiderlander, Opavsky.
Many of the names are familiar to me. I rub elbows with their descendents every weekend at Mass. Others bring back childhood memories: Beloved priests, including the Rev. John Oberlander, pastor of St. John’s during the early years that I attended grade school there. I can remember his funeral, grand and solemn in a standing-room-only, incense-scented church, but most times when I see his tombstone on my cemetery ambles, I remember how he could descend from the pulpit after delivering a particularly high-volume, hair-raising sermon on the perils of sin, then come out to the playground and jump rope with us school kids.
More than 2,000 people have been buried in Calvary Cemetery since its founding. Early records are sparse and unfortunately many were destroyed, along with some of the tombstones, during the 1913 flood that swept away much of the area’s history. A 1908 trustees report which survives notes that a Mr. William Barry — incidentally, a great name for a cemetery caretaker! — was responsible for maintaining the grounds in “a very well-kept condition” and adds that “rigid economy had to be exercised so as not to exceed our income.” (So what else is new?)
It, too, contained many familiar names of dues-paying members including — I felt a faint thrill of recognition as I ran across it — my grandfather, who died long before I was born — Frank Burk.
This same 1908 report notes that “surely Catholics want their Cemetery to be a credit to them, and all should evince the right kind of spirit and show the proper interest in bringing this about,” with the logical conclusion, of course, being a request for contributions to the operating budget.
A hundred and two years later, the song remains the same, so to speak. My original intention in writing this piece on Calvary Cemetery was simply for a notation regarding fundraising for operating expenses to be published in the Holy Family Parish church bulletin during the first week of November, when we traditionally honor the deceased of our families. Although there are no remaining lots for sale in the cemetery, we still address the issues of maintenance and insurance.
So I walked again among the old stones, reading of birthplaces in Ireland, of war veterans, of children dying young, and wondering what untold stories lie here. Surely, I thought, many of these people and their stories remain somewhere in the memories of the living.
And on that Sunday walk a small brainchild was born and a Facebook page — Calvary Cemetery, Middletown Ohio – has been launched, to provide a forum for “friends” to tell some of the stories, post old photos and — through the modern media format that is the Internet — allow at least some of the dead to speak again.
Dr. Stephanie A. Burk is a Madison Twp. veterinarian.