Crown Hill Cemetery and Funeral Home Serving The Indianapolis Indiana Area

MONUMENTAL NATURE

Crown Hill is a combination of natural nature and monumental nature. When you see a real rabbit hopping across the cemetery lawn, you are seeing just that, a real rabbit hopping on real grass. And a squirrel is just a squirrel. But when you look inside the Bane Mausoleum on your way up Crown Hill and see the rabbit and squirrel in the stained glass window, with a leprechaun, you are seeing much more. You are seeing the whimsical personality of the Banes; you are seeing the things that they love. In a real sense, you are looking at the Banes and not at a rabbit, a squirrel, and a leprechaun.

This is symbolism: "the art of using something that stands for or suggests something else by reason of a relationship, association, convention, or resemblance." The monuments in the cemetery, especially those of earlier times, are rich in symbolism. The same is true of the stained glass windows of the mausoleums. The following briefly describes some of the more common symbolic objects, and what they were meant to convey.

Animals

Cobra - An Egyptian symbol of immortality, especially when forming a circle by swallowing its tail, as at the top of the Caleb Smith Mausoleum (NW side of Sec. 5). When two cobras are combined with a winged sun, the result is called a Winged Sun disk. Smith has an example, but better ones can be found inside the Marott mausoleum at the SE corner of Sec. 51.

Dove - Often seen perched on top of a column or one of the tree trunk monuments, doves stand for love, purity, peace, and most particularly, the Holy Spirit. Eagle - Courage, especially common on monuments of those with military service.

Lamb - Unfortunately, this is one of the more common monumental animals seen throughout the cemetery. It symbolizes innocence and usually marks a child's grave. Up until the turn of the century, about 40% of all burials throughout the country were for children under the age of 5.

Lion - Courage, bravery, strength. Also may be thought of as guarding the tomb. Lions usually come in pairs, and sometimes, as in our example at the Marott mausoleum, one looks fierce and one almost seems playful. (SE corner of Sec 51.)

Plants

Flowers - In general flowers speak of life's brevity and frailty. Specific types may have additional meanings: Daisy - youth; Morning Glory - resurrection; Lily - purity, chastity; Rose - love, but unopened rosebuds point to the shortness of life. A garland or wreath of flowers, however, speaks of victory of death and one's reward in Heaven.

Leaves - Such as laurel, ivy, and palm leaves, denote triumph, immortality, and victory over death.

Tree Trunk - Scattered throughout the grounds of Crown Hill are many monuments designed to look like tree trunks, some standing as much as ten feet tall. Such monuments were designed to fit in with the rural, rustic, look the cemetery hoped to achieve in its landscaping. Some traditions hold that the number of cut off limbs indicate the number of children the deceased had and that a broken branch dangling from the trunk indicates that there were no surviving children. This is not always true. The same rustic motif is carried out in "log" benches and crosses, and in stacks of logs or piles of rocks.

Wheat - The harvest of life. Shocks of wheat are paired with shocks of corn on the four sides of the English monument, (the circle across from NE corner of Sec. 1).

Human Forms

Angels - About thirty of Crown Hill's ninety statues are angels. Angels represent a definite belief in a Heavenly afterlife. In some instances, they accompany the soul to heaven, or are carrying a trumpet in order to call forth the resurrection.
Mourner - Almost all of the other statues are of classically draped females perpetually mourning the dearly departed. In some cases they are sprawled across the grave in a great display of emotion, but more often they are either standing or seated, perhaps dropping flowers, looking sad or pensive.

Objects

Anchor - Usually a religious symbol for hope, steadfastness, and salvation, based upon Hebrews 6:19: "We have this hope as an anchor for our soul."
Broken column - Occasionally you will see a column which is designed to look broken. This is a sign of a life cut short, or of death and its accompanying sorrow in general.
Cross - Another religious symbol of faith and resurrection and a statement of the deceased;s Christianity.
Drapery - Very often a monument will be covered with drapery. This is a sign of mourning.
Urn - Because of their original use as a container for one's ashes, urns have become a symbol for the fact of death itself and its sorrow, a sort of reminder of: "dust to dust and ashes to ashes."

Geology

Most of the monuments, mausoleums, and buildings in Crown Hill are either granite, marble, or limestone. The 34th Street Gates, the Gothic Chapel, and the Community Mausoleum are all of Bedford limestone. The "rustic" monuments, the tree trunks, logs, rock piles, etc. are also usually of limestone.
Even if you do not know anything about rocks and minerals, it is usually easy to tell granite from marble these days. This is because most of the marble monuments look old and very worn, and the granite looks new, no matter how old it is.

Marble does not do very well in the Hoosier climate with its cold winters and hot summers. It begins to "sugar," i.e. get rough and sandy feeling and its details erode away. Hands and fingers fall off statues and writing becomes hard and eventually impossible to read.

Granite, on the other hand, is said to erode about 1/8th of an inch every 100,000 years. In other words, a good granite monument will continue to look brand new for a very long time. This can be seen clearly on a few monuments which have both granite and marble in them. Granite comes in a various shades of gray, pink, and black. Because of its durability, it is about the only stone used in today's monuments.

Suggested Activities

1) Talk about symbols before coming to the cemetery and have the students point out examples as they walk around, or have them write down the names of the monuments on which certain examples occur.

2) Look inside as many mausoleums as you can. How many have stained glass windows? What do those windows picture?

3) Have the students point out examples of the different kinds of stones used in monuments. (Ask them to be careful not to touch the marble monuments. They are very fragile.)

4) How many angels do they see on their cemetery tour? How many mourners? Do they see any statues of some other type? What are they?

5) Students may be interested in researching the symbols and monument styles of the American colonial period, or of Indians, Greeks and Romans, etc.

6) This may be a good time to talk about symbolism in other art forms such as painting or literature. Have the students read anything in class recently which used symbols?

7) Ask the students to think about what objects they would currently choose to represent their own lives. What objects or ideas are important to them?

8) Walk through Section 12, an older section with several beautiful statues, then step across the road into Section 46-B, a modern section. What similarities do the students see? What differences? Which monuments do they think reveal the most about the personality the person being memorialized?

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