Lecture: Lasting Impressions: Art, Symbolism, and History Found in Graveyards and Cemeteries

The stones of New England’s graveyards are rich in art, history, and symbolism. Their meaning, once patently understood however, is generally shrouded in mystery to modern visitors. The mother-and-daughter team of Paulette Chernack and Cassandra Davidson recently compiled their extensive collection of gravestone rubbings and photographs into a seminal book on the subject. Together, they decode the iconography of New England gravestones—including a few in York’s own Old Burying Ground—and talk about American gravestone carving of the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. This lecture is the third in a four-part lecture series exploring the complex topics of crime, punishment, superstition, and death in old New England. The lecture is followed immediately by dessert, coffee, and tea in Jefferds Tavern. Paulette Chernack and Cassandra Davidson Chernack are members of the Association for Gravestone Studies and the Maine Old Cemetery Association. They educate people about gravestone art and its history through hands-on lectures, demonstrations, and gallery exhibits. In 2003, they acquired Old Stone Enterprises, continuing its tradition of manufacturing and selling high quality supplies for making stone rubbings.