Statistics depend upon their source, but it’s clear that cremation has grown steadily in popularity during the 20th century. On-line cost estimates for traditional funerals vary widely–from $6,000 to as much as $15,000–when all the incidentals are tallied. Nearly thirty years ago when my dad died, it was about $7K because we already owned a cemetery plot. Cremation offers a cheaper alternative now and, frankly, one that seems much less grim than the open casket type my family preferred.

Agincourt has three cemeteries: St Ahab’s for Roman Catholics, “The Shades” for Protestant and non-sectarian burial, and the Hebrew Burial Ground for Jews. The recent influx of Muslims will probably be accommodated at “The Shades.” As I mentioned a few entries ago, they’ve been situated (clustered together near the east edge of town) but not designed. The idea of the cemeteries intimidates me, not for their purpose (they are romantic places I enjoy visiting) but because I know so little about landscape architecture; I can speak about the history of cemeteries but remain clueless about the mechanics of laying one out. Ignorance hasn’t stopped me before, but this seems different somehow.

A Columbarium

Trees and terrain may intimidate, but buildings prime my creative juices. I just can’t help it.

So I spent the last few days investigating columbaria as an historic building type, one that dates from ancient Rome and has parallels in other cultures (like the Japanese nokotsudo). The name columbarium comes from a Latin term for dovecote or pigeon house–a curious thread connecting birds, guano and human remains. Once begun, I turn pit bull, unsatisfied until I’ve gathered so many examples that no one can dominate my thinking. In this early stage, however, there are three that will be difficult to ignore.

The great California architect Julia Morgan designed “The Chapel of the Chimes” in Oakland, founded in 1908 but Morgan’s contribution dates from the mid-20s. [I need to know more about Miss Morgan.] There is also an astounding columbarium at Chicago’s Bohemian National Cemetery, a place I’ve never seen despite growing up less then twenty miles away.

Interior of the Oakland Columbarium by Julia Morgan.

The third great example is, predictably, at Père-Lachaise in Paris, perhaps the most colorful and highly visited burial ground in Europe, if not the world.

Père-Lachaise columbarium, Paris.

With these as inspiration, how can I fail?

We’re alive for a while, and dead a lot longer.

One of my high school classmates died last week. Gloria Imrisek Sidell was exactly 364 days younger than me–a fellow Capricorn–and had battled Lou Gehrig’s disease for longer than anyone ought to. Glo was a whole lot braver than I could have been. If you have any spare cash at the end of this lean year, think about sending some to the nearest ALS Chapter. I am.

Several weeks ago, I was a pall bearer for Marlys Anderson, our department secretary many years ago. I dutifully put on my dark blue suit and felt some paper in the inside pocket: it was the program from Joanne Meisner’s memorial service. And folded inside that was the program for Carl Wichman’s mother. Do you think this has become my “funeral suit”? There’s some fine print on your birth certificate guaranteeing that every person who dies is way older than you; I know it’s there but just can’t find it. When my friend Dennis Colliton died at age 50, I started looking for it and a toll-free number to complain. Shit like this just shouldn’t happen as often as it does. I’d better get used to it.

When I’m dead, for goodness sake have a party. Make it the kind of party I’d be pissed off to have missed. Tell stories; make jokes; argue. Remember what an asshole I’ve been and recall some of the good I left behind. Get drunk and send me the bill. 

We arrive. We live. We leave. 

That’s pretty much what I believe: In the three-act play of life, I didn’t audition for this role, but wtf. That’s all she wrote; that’s all there is, yatta, yatta.

But it’s hardly the end of the story.

Had lunch yesterday with Kris Groberg and Larry Schwartz. In a three-minute conversation before Larry arrived, Kris and I fairly spontaneously conceived our next team-teaching gig: “Necrotecture: the art and architecture of death.” Among our shared interests is a fascination with cemeteries; with dying, death and the often astounding, sometimes absurd rigmarole that has come to surround the disposal of what we once were.

There is a surprising array of methods for dealing with the dead, including burning, burial, boiling off the flesh and keeping the bones, tanning, freezing, taxidermy, drifting off toward the horizon on an ice flow as a buffet for seals and walruses, allowing vultures to eat us, and on rare occasions eating one another. We’ve even been herded to death camps and recycled as soap. My favorite method was a 19th century proposal from the pages of The Scientific American: electro-plate the dead and place us in the living room or on the front lawn as our own ornament. The instructions for my own disposal are simple: 1) baggy; 2) twist tie; 3) curbside; 4) Tuesday morning before 8:30.

Ten or twenty thousand years of the so-called civilizing process have brought considerable sophistication to the table. We’ve been lifted, leveled and lowered; buried horizontally, vertically, in the fetal position (apropos of a birth into the next life), and, in the spirit of feng shui, aimed at various points of the compass. In “The Loved One,” the film adaptation of a novel by Evelyn Waugh, actor Jonathan Winters’ character suggests that we should be launched, shot into orbit–“Resurrection now!” he exclaims with televangelistic glee. Architecturally, what’s left of us more often than not finds its way into a mausoleum (whole bodies), ossuary (bones) or columbarium (ashes). 

The Soane family tomb in St. Pancras Cemetery, London, designed by Sir John Soane.

Poets have romanticized the dead; composers rhapsodized them. Artists and architects have created an astounding array of imagery related to being dead, all of it unappreciated by those memorialized by them. Cemeteries, it has always seemed to me, are for the living; not for the long-term residents.

The cemeteries of Agincourt are pretty tame, I’m afraid. They’ve been located but not designed, though at least one of them has been populated with Neil Klien, grave-digger with an agenda. I see a design project in my immediate future.

One of the most valuable tools for my sort of research has been genealogy. So a subscription to ancestry.com had been a good investment for several years–until the annual fees got beyond my budget. Recently I’ve had to be content with the freebie NDSU library edition.

Genealogy is an odd activity for me, since my own family is so small, particularly in this part of the world where a half dozen children is average and the number of cousins can get well into double digits. Anyone who claims to be closely related to me is lying, though I can’t imagine why they’d want to. As the only child of an only child, I’m the last member of my line and reasonably content to be snuffing it out. So how does genealogy contribute to my research activities? 

One very long-range project has been identification of every architect active on the Great Plains before 1930. Just for grins, I’ve extended the project boundaries to include all states from Texas to North Dakota, as well as Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and the three Canadian “Prairie Provinces” of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. Aside from city and regional directories, you’d be surprised how much information can be gleaned from genealogical sources. Much of this material is now available on-line. So the prospect of a name at a place during a period of time can now be fleshed out with tidbits about emigration, education, apprenticeship and other useful stuff. There are 2,400 names in my database that I’d love to share with you all.

When it came to imagining Anson Curtiss Tennant (1889-1915/1968), an isolated young man coming to architectural practice circa 1912 was simply not enough. He required parents and siblings; a support network of extended family; relationships through marriage that might prove useful in establishing a practice. Relationships are (I’ve been led to believe) a two-way street, so Anson’s connections would be a way to both give and receive. 

Anson’s family tree grew during a year or two and might grow again. You’ll find him just to the right of center in the fifth generation, with sisters Lucy, Mollie and Claire. 

In the spirit of “war brides” from yesterday’s blog, I recalled Anson’s niece Mary Grace Tabor. She was also Howard Tabor’s aunt (he writes today for the Daily Plantagenet) and the founder of a Montessori school circa 1951 (conceived by Agincourt contributors Vince and Carol Hatlen). While Mary Grace was studying Maria Montessori’s methods, she met Kurt Bernhard, a French refugee of sorts, a widower with a son by his first wife Clothilde Sobieski. The first Mrs Bernhard had been a civilian casualty during the German occupation of Paris. I’m guessing there’s a story here.

The whole Tennant-Tabor family have been fertile ground for community history–a vein that my friend Howard will never completely excavate.

Themes can be valuable tools for sketching the history of any community. Agincourt is no exception. Some come immediately to mind–public health, the Great Depression, war and peace, for example. One that didn’t occur to me came from Mitch Dressel as we prepared the 2007 exhibit.

Mitch proposed to create Agincourt’s first pizza shop. He would design the twenty-five-foot store front on South Broad Street–certainly the remodeling of an existing building–but he wanted to go well beyond that, researching and crafting the menu (with appropriate 1950s prices); even the play list on the jukebox hadn’t escaped his attention. At the exhibit opening, the only thing missing was Mitch in a poodle skirt.

His back story, however, was inspired. This ’50s teen hangout was opened by a couple (whose names escape me; sorry, Mitch) barely out of their own teens. He was a local boy, but his wife was an Italian war bride whose family recipes for pizza and pasta came with her, directly from Napoli. Not incidentally, that exhibit opened my eyes to the breadth of our students’ experience and their ability to imagine lives well beyond their own.

I don’t know the number of Iowa men who served in the Italian campaign, but I’m guessing that more than a few did one or both of these things: 1) they left pregnant women behind, or 2) they brought brides home to surprised families and friends. Mitch’s story line was a typical “American Tale” acted out in communities across the country. In my own limited experience, there are two war brides of my acquaintance: Bill Burgett, who taught architectural history at the University of Oklahoma in the 1960s, was married to a beautiful woman from Italy; I was often a guest in their home. And at the local Sons of Norway lodge I’ve much more recently made the acquaintance of Gerda Johnson, a delightful Polish woman who married a Norwegian-American soldier from the Red River Valley. As a twenty-something I didn’t have the perspective to ask Mrs Burgett about her wartime experiences, but Gerda has been forthcoming with uncomfortable stories about the Russian treatment of young Polish girls–too grim to share with you here. Mrs Johnson’s reminiscences make me ashamed of my species.

Even Anson Tennant’s family sprouted a branch with wartime connections, but I’ll save that for another day. Suffice to say our nation of immigrants was further enriched this way.

Do you suppose there were war husbands? 

Just down Whitehall from London’s Trafalgar Square is the Banqueting Hall, first and, regrettably, only phase of Charles I’s proposed Palace at Whitehall. Charles was trying to keep up with the Joneses (read: French monarchy) and had commissioned his architect Inigo Jones to create a royal residence comparable with the Tuileries in Paris. As one of England’s earliest proponents of the Renaissance, Jones drew from a recent continental tour, especially his visit to the Veneto and the work of Andrea Palladio. What resulted was an elegantly appointed hall for royal entertainments. 

During your visit, don’t forget to look up, where Peter Paul Rubens–commissioned to decorate the ceilings with allegorical works reinforcing the Divine Right of Kings–breached the fine line between art and propaganda with a central panel titled “The Apotheosis of James I.” James was Charles’s father. 

WPA

Art is often called into public service. This was surely the case during our Great Depression when a mythologized America helped us through a difficult time. We could use a few constructive myths right now to accomplish the same thing.

Agincourt’s city hall was a WPA product of 1938, designed by an imagined architect but conceived by the very real Prof Steve Martens; Steve has recently completed a massive study of the WPA in North Dakota. Though he never mentioned specific examples of public art near, on or in the building, I have a feeling there’s a powerful mural surrounding the City Council Chamber. I have an even stronger feeling that it tells the chronological story our Civic Life–in the abstract (as myth) and the particular (as editorial). Now if I can just persuade some art students to undertake its realization.

WPA Mural by Henry Sternberg (1938); Lakeview Branch Post Office, Chicago, IL

In The Island of Lost Maps, Miles Harvey recalls a game played with his parents on family trips. His father would wake him from a travel nap and quickly ask “Which direction are we driving?” Still fogged with half-sleep, Miles could reply “North” with assurance. “See?” father would say to mother, “I told you.” Young Harvey had (and still has, he believes) a built-in geo-positioning sense that rarely fails. It may just be a “guy thing”–never admitting to being lost–but I have a similar gift.

Maps simply become a part of my database. Feel free to test me some time.

Mental mapping can be a revealing exercise. Ask children to map their world and you’ll discover what matters in their lives: friends’ homes, playgrounds, school (maybe), landmarks of every sort that vary with gender and age. Our lives are regulated by a Tinker-Toy-like assemblage of nodes and links. I recall a speaker several years ago who had done some neighborhood planning that began with a 1960s-style workshop. On huge sheets of newsprint stretched across a gymnasium floor, neighbors drew the places that had personal meaning; negotiated their relative importance; and, in the process, learned a great deal more about one another, I suspect.

As I have watched the plan of Agincourt evolve, it’s easy to role play; to be a letter carrier, a school kid, a shopper–even a Jehovah’s Witness–as they go about their business. As I walk from home to the public library, what path will I take? What shortcut will save time? What detour will permit a stop at the candy store. And on the way, what will I discover that was lost or thrown away? What might I see that I shouldn’t? Who might I encounter that could alter the course of my day or, perhaps, even my life?

Agincourt’s Alleys

Agincourt’s original townsite came to me quickly–a last gasp of Enlightenment ideals tempered by mid-19th century railway pragmatism. There have since been two major changes to that plan: the replacement of numbered avenues with the names of New England authors (some very welcome civic meddling by the Ladies’ Literary Society) and the recognition that alleys can be at least as significant as streets.

Folk singer Pete Seeger wrote a song about “The House with the Queen Anne Front and the Mary Anne Behind.” Think of your hometown: recall easily who lived on either side of your own home, but I’ll bet the folks across the alley were more familiar than the people across the street. Twenty years ago, when I first moved into a downtown Fargo ghetto, my closest acquaintances were Minnie Rehnquist and Marcella Depute–garbage can buddies from just across the alley. Perhaps this is why I couldn’t live in the ‘burbs: no alleys.

The reconsideration of alleys became an opportunity to enrich the texture of neighborhoods. A block-long length of alley beside Adams Restaurant, for example, was named by petition to honor the passing of Mrs Maud Adams. The lane behind First Baptist Church became Roger Williams Alley as it morphed into a de facto retirement community. Carousel Alley grew from the city’s acquisition of a circus merry-go-round, installed on The Commons in the 1930s.

A half-block length of alley was created about 1900 from two ten-foot strips shaved from original lots. Developers of the Blenheim Hotel got a fourth side for rooms and Mrs Annabelle Miller received enough cash to build a whore house. It was a win-win scenario. 

So, like Robert Louis Stevenson’s map of Treasure Island, the developing plat of Agincourt has generated both characters and the narratives of their lives.

I am a frequent traveler to the Land of Serendip.

At about 5:00 this morning I finished a book (reading, not writing it, sorry to say) and wandered to the shelves opposite my bed for something to tide me over until dawn. Two down from the top of an old pile was Miles Harvey’s The Island of Lost Maps, which I had read about eight or nine years ago. Architecture was not my first career choice: I had earlier wanted to be a cartographer.

What was the first map that I held? Our family didn’t subscribe to magazines, so National Geographic was right out. Much more likely were the freebie maps that gas stations once offered for the asking. We had a rack of them just inside the door of my dad’s Phillips 66 gas station (at 6455 South Archer Road, Bedford Park, Illinois; GLobe 8-9563; this was long before either ZIP or Area Codes). In fact, one of my earliest jobs was replenishing the rack from a supply behind the counter. Whatever the source, maps of all sorts filled some deep need within me. Hindsight suggests they did not represent escape so much as exploration. It’s that syzygetic pairing of boundaries and horizons: boundaries are an impediment; horizons an invitation. I am eternally expectant of the surprise that lies beyond the limits of my sight.

Wonderfully mired in Miles Harvey’s second chapter “Imaginary Creatures”—a rumination on maps, seasoned with quotes from various authors—I found a key to the emerging plat of Agincourt.

I thought about the meaning of plan, plat and map—each both noun and verb—and found comfort in Harvey’s observation that “a map provides no answers. It only suggests where to look.” Harvey also adds two revelatory quotes from Robert Louis Stevenson, whose Treasure Island was a map before it was a book.

As I pored upon my map of Treasure Island, the future characters of the book began to appear there visibly among imaginary woods;…they passed to and fro, fighting and hunting treasure, on these few square inches of a flat projection….

It is my contention—my superstition, if you like—that he who is faithful to his map, and consults it, and draws from it, his inspiration, daily and hourly, gains positive support…. The tale has a root there: it grows in that soil; it has a spine of its own behind the words…. As he studies [the map], relations will appear that he had not thought upon.

Stevenson was right.

How do you suppose Agincourt spent the day?

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month a moment of silence ought to have been observed. But, after all, I was raised by a grandparent in her mid-twenties when The Great War ended. On more than one occasion I’ve even lapsed into old-speak and called it Armistice Day.

In an earlier blog I’ve admitted having little contact with war. Few male relatives and fewer yet in military service. No Rosie the Riveter, either, though my mother would have made a good one. Crossing a busy street in Rome is the closest I’ve been to harm’s way. But as an only child, a solitary and sedentary child, I ruminated–a lot. Retro- and introspection can be therapeutic. It works for us as individuals and as a society; that’s what today is about.

Do you suppose Maya Lin saw this image from the trenches of World War I? A gouge in the earth devoid of the living, death is also absent, though perhaps lurking around each corner. Evocative stories came from those trenches, as did poetry and art. Erich Mendelsohn produced some of his most dynamic ink drawings waiting for the Brits or the Americans to attack. He survived; millions didn’t.

Wars are fought for various reasons, but their immediate and long term effects are more or less the same. That’s what we recollect today.

Faith is a simple thing. Either you have it or you don’t. But the ABC World News last night offered an interesting kink to my oversimplification.

The teaser to last night’s report hinted at a number of pastors hiding something from their flocks, leaving us to stew during the commercial break what their secret might be. Clearly some denominatinos have more to hide than others–matters of sexual abuse, for example. But the revelation last night shouldn’t have surprised anyone: many ministers–who spend hours studying the Bible, scouring its text for sermons, counseling, etc.–have concluded that what we take for its richness is simple contradiction. They have lost their faith through the study of its principal source. Father Karcher must have sought consolation in those pages, shifting six times among four denominations during his lifetime and, perhaps, never finding peace from his study of The Book or its many interpretations. I can identify.

I cannot claim for the 19th century a range of spirituality broader than that in our own time. J. K. Karcher was hardly typical of his age, but his spiritual odyssey makes the point: people shifted between and among religions with frequency and conviction, if not with permanence or ease. In America, this was true for denominational change within Christianity, as it was for sectarian change between Christianity and other faiths. Today most of us would find the phrase “liberal religion” a contradiction in terms; I do not and neither would many during the 150-plus years that Agincourt has existed.

At times of stress and indecision, I too have searched for answers in religion. But even Unitarian-Universalism has left me stone cold sober and shaking my head in confirmed disbelief. So, while I can imagine a group who’ve elected to share that quest, and while I might also welcome such a client’s need to give form to that collective inquiry, I must also agree with Groucho Marx: “I won’t belong to any organization that would have me as a member.” And with Thomas Jefferson, who was the only member of a denomination of one.

For Agincourt, I’ve decided once again to borrow someone from my research files: Frank H. Irons, itinerant journalist and real estate agent, who was both an Episcopalian and a Unitarian during the years he lived in Fargo. The story of Frank and Susan Irons is doubly tragic–perhaps a decisive test of their faith–because they lost two children to a needless epidemic brought on by laissez faire city government disinterested in regulating Capitalist free enterprise within the Fargo corporate limits.

Though the story is not fully formed, I think Franklin Irons will be station agent for the Milwaukee Road, beneficiary of the bureaucratic snafu that delivers two water towers some time in the 1930s. The site: a twenty-five-foot square of junk real estate, on Carousel Alley behind Hradek’s shoe repair.

Stay tuned.

PS[12Jan2021]: Friends know that my attention span has yet to be exceeded. And so it is with the story of the five children lost by the Irons and Birge families here in Fargo in the Fall of 1882. Yesterday I related the outline of the story to some associates — I think they’d like that characterization — and today I went back to ancestry.com, since there are new databases added and old ones expanded every day. Here’s what I found:

• Franklin Henry Irons [1846-1905] was resident in Fargo from at least 1882 until at least 1900; he died in Kansas City in’05.
• Martha Susan (née Parrish) [1848-1910] appeared in most sources as Susan M. or M. Susan; she died in California, possibly Los Angeles.
• She bore eleven children! Walter B. [1869-1875]; Robert Ingersoll [1871-]; Charles Frank [1875-1882]; Susan Mae [1876-1959]; Peretic [1878-1882]; Jennie [1880-?]; Victor Hugo [1883-1936]; Edward Darrow [1884-1964]; Blanche C. [1886-1958]; Stella B. [1887-1958]; William Henry [1889-1940]. Those in red died in Fargo of an unidentified fever; those in blue were born in Fargo and survived their residence here. Oh, and Peretic was a boy; hadn’t figured that out until today.

The reason the Irons and Birge families interest me in that they lost a total of five children from a mysterious fever contract in the neighborhood west of University and South of 12th Avenue in the Fall of 1882. What we call Co. Drain #3 — the soccer field near student housing — is labeled “Long Lake” on early maps, a flattering name, because it was actually a dumping ground for offal, all the “leftovers” from slaughter, because it was beyond city limits and civic control. Normal burial was impossible, because roads to the cemetery were impassible, so my friend Rev. B. F. Cooley permitted burial on Gethsemane church grounds, within city limits and in violation of city ordinance, for which he was fined $50, worth about $1200 today. I’m sure you appreciate the irony: the city did nothing about the likely cause of death, yet find Cooley for doing the human thing. Some things never change.

Now, here’s the weirdness: I used the Irons family to tell the story of the 1918 pandemic in Agincourt. And also as a way to write about crises of faith. I’m guessing you didn’t notice the link with atheism, or agnosticism at best: The second Irons child was Robert Ingersoll Irons, named for the most (in)famous atheist in 19th century America. I had not know about any of the children except those who had died here.