The Van Buskirk family vault, from 1854, is located in Evergreen Cemetery, Hillside. EAST BRUNSWICK – A cemetery can tell us more than just how people lived and died.
Just what tombstones and burial grounds can tell us is what drew Mark Nonestied, of East Brunswick, to the subject.
Nonestied is coauthor of “New Jersey Cemeteries and Tombstones: History in the Landscape,” to be released in February by Rutgers University Press. The book, cowritten with Richard Veit, an associate professor at Monmouth University, West Long Branch, is a look at burial grounds in the state and how they’ve reflected the times from the 17th century to the present.
On Friday, Nonestied and Veit will give television viewers a tour of some of the more interesting New Jersey grave sites on the New Jersey Network’s State of the Arts show “Hauntings.” The program airs Friday at 8:30 p.m. and again Oct. 31 at 11:30 p.m.
Nonestied, who is a staff member with the Middlesex County Cultural and Heritage Commission, said the forthcoming book covers 400 years in the history of New Jersey’s tombstones and cemeteries, and how they’ve evolved. The styles of the graves as well as the symbols on them have changed from Native American and Colonial times until now, and reflect what a society was thinking at the time.
The segment on “Hauntings” will be a synopsis of those time periods, in part focusing on “the truly unusual,” such as the life-size Mercedes-Benz headstone in a Linden cemetery.
For the book, the authors visited nearly 900 cemeteries. Among the highlights are a Presbyterian graveyard in Elizabeth that is considered the state’s best Colonial-era cemetery, and a Victorian-era cemetery, Newark’s Mount Pleasant, which was the state’s first garden graveyard. Because of the time it was built, the Mouunt Pleasant cemetery is much more striking.
“They were elaborate, and a contrast to the Colonial cemeteries,” Nonestied said. “This was a new design movement, and reflected on how society handled the dead.”
Nonestied said the book has been in the making for many years. He’s been friends with Veit for over a decade, and the two shared an interest in cemeteries. The book is the result of “a tremendous amount of research,” he said, including the cemetery visits and the gathering of historical documents.
“The last two years were spent writing and pulling all this research together,” Nonestied said. “We visited close to 900 cemeteries in the state, between the two of us. It’s a complex history to pull together.”
In addition to telling of the times in which they were built, cemeteries also shed light on the people who built them.
“Different ethnic groups had different styles of commemoration,” Nonestied said.
The book is over 300 pages and includes more than 120 pictures and illustrations.
“It’s the story of New Jersey, in essence,” Nonestied said.
The collaboration with Veit worked well because the men have differing interests when it comes to cemeteries, he said. Veit is more interested in the 1700s and modern times, while Nonestied was more intrigued by the 1800s and early 1900s.
One trend still around is the use of mausoleums. These began to be used by the late 1800s, Nonestied said, with wealthy industrialists commissioning “stunning” examples. One pyramid-shaped mausoleum belongs to Charles F. Harms, who was inspired by the great pyramids of Egypt.
Despite the entertaining nature of show, the book is more of an anthropological study.
“Talking about the educational aspect of cemeteries is important, especially during this month when there are stereotypes about cemeteries,” Nonestied said.
“It’s a great opportunity to sort of buy into the time of year, but also be able to teach people that [graveyards] are more than the stereotypes they are made out to be.”
The “Hauntings” program, which airs every Friday and Wednesday, explores the art of the grotesque, the macabre, and the simply spooky, according to a press release from the New Jersey Network. But this week’s show is special, arriving in time for Halloween. In addition to the segment on cemeteries, the episode will feature an orchestra playing scary music as a score to the 1931 flick “Frankenstein,” the craft of theatrical mask making, and the Jersey Devil making an appearance in a ballet.