#76 History of American Cemeteries with Tanya Marsh
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 629 Ratings
🗓️ 23 October 2017
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Death is something that all humans have in common. How we dealt with death is not. The cemeteries that occupy prominent places in the American landscape, as well as the twenty-one thousand funeral homes in operation across the country, are products of the time and place in which they emerged. In this episode, we speak with Wake Forest's Tanya Marsh, to learn about the historic forces at work in the creation of America's death care industry. If you've ever wondered why we embalm our dead, whether or not it's legal to be buried in your own back yard, or what happened to the bodies of slain Civil War soldiers, you'll get your answers here.
Tanya Marsh is Professor of Law at Wake Forest University and one of the foremost experts on Mortuary Law and the history of cemeteries in the United States. She has published three books in her field of expertise, including The Law of Human Remains (2015) & Cemetery Law: The Common Law of Burying Grounds in the United States (Co-authored w/ Daniel Gibson, 2015).
For more info on this, or any other episode of The Road to Now, visit our website: www.TheRoadToNow.com.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Road to Now, where we look to the past and everywhere in between. |
| 0:09.3 | To understand the present, I'm Bob Crawford, and joining me as always is Dr. Ben Sawyer. |
| 0:14.3 | Ben, I had quite an interesting week last week. |
| 0:18.0 | Yeah, what happened? |
| 0:19.0 | Well, my wife and I and some friends took a trip to Savannah, Georgia, and yeah, we visited some old graveyards. |
| 0:26.7 | Old cemeteries. Yeah. See the ghosts? I did not, but we did go to Colonial Park Cemetery in Savannah, which was built in 1750. And it contains a lot of the early settlers and hundreds upon hundreds of victims of |
| 0:43.1 | the yellow fever epidemic of 1820. |
| 0:46.3 | And it's interesting because you can take ghost walks at night. |
| 0:50.3 | Huh. |
| 0:50.7 | And the person who gives the tour lets you know that the cemetery was once much larger than it currently is today. |
| 0:59.0 | Huh. |
| 0:59.6 | So why is it now smaller than it was before? |
| 1:02.8 | Well, they had to widen the roads for the automobiles in the early 20th century. |
| 1:07.3 | Aha. |
| 1:08.2 | And so rather than dig up the bodies of which there were many, many bodies, they paved |
| 1:14.8 | over the cemetery. |
| 1:15.9 | Man, that's fascinating, Bob. |
| 1:17.1 | I would love to know more about the history of cemeteries in the United States. |
| 1:21.2 | Well, Ben, you have come to the right place because this week on the road to now, we have |
| 1:27.0 | Tanya Marsh, who is an expert in |
| 1:29.3 | funeral law and cemetery history. And she's in the law school at Wake Forest University, |
| 1:35.1 | a position she has paved her own way in, which is amazing. She sure has. You don't really hear |
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