Episode Transcript: Pull Up a Headstone and Stay Awhile: Storytelling in the Cemetery

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Welcome to the Remembering Life podcast. I'm your host, Gail Marquardt, and today we're at Forest Home Cemetery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a cemetery full of history. And I'm joined by Cyndi Kramer, a volunteer docent here at Forest Home. We're going to do a bit of a walk about the cemetery and learn a bit about its history and some of the interesting people buried here. Thank you so much for being my guest on the podcast today, Cyndi.

CYNDI KRAMER:
I'm excited to be here. Looking forward to it.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Alright, let's start walking.

CYNDI KRAMER:
So we actually have an apiary over here where we raise bees and we sell the honey inside.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
I saw the honey in the gift shop and I've talked to people who come here just to pick up honey.

CYNDI KRAMER:
It’s pretty good. And this little section right here, there's about 500 people buried in here and I think there's only a handful of, there's one monument and then some in the ground.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
That's what I was going to ask. Are they?

CYNDI KRAMER:
There are, and some of 'em are just unmarked because I believe that there are a number of people buried in here that were either from an orphanage and or one of many epidemics from the city. And so they were buried very quickly, close together and in smaller spots, spaces because in the early days they didn't have to have all the regs about how big things were. There weren't vaults, there was nothing like that. So it was all just, if you were a kid, you got buried in a kid-size plot. Well, so coming up on our left, of course, is a Newhall house monument, and this is still Milwaukee's largest fire-related tragedy even today. It happened in 1883 and the downtown hotel, the Newhall House, which was the premier fancy hotel when it got built in 1853 by 1883 to become sort of a death trap and it started on fire and they couldn't get people out and people were jumping from the windows. It was a huge blow to the Irish community because most of the people killed and there were about 75, we don't know the exact number, but at least 50 of them and possibly more were Irish maids who were staying up on the sixth floor and couldn't get out.

So that was a pretty big blow to the Irish community. One of many. So we're at the Mooney stone right now, and this is my favorite place to start tours. This is where Catherine Mooney was buried. Catherine Mooney Miller, people always go, but she didn't die. Yeah, there's a lot of those around the cemetery. But she has a stone over here. She died in 1990 and this is for my tour “Smokers, Drinkers and Troublemakers.” And when I started doing this, I put the word out to people, I'm looking for smokers, drinkers, and troublemakers, and I want a flapper. Does anyone have a flapper in their family? And so this guy named Rick Charlie actually sent me a notice saying” my grandma was a flapper and here's a picture of the dress she used to wear.” And he sent me picture of the dress and he said she would be so excited that she was part of a tour.

This is just like the coolest thing ever. So Catherine Mooney is buried here and I talk about how when I do the tour, I do talk about how she was sort of the emblematic of the jazz era in Milwaukee and the flapper era and how so many things changed after that, including at one point the people of Milwaukee were just outraged that these girls would be out there being so independent and free. And so they noticed that the girls were reaching out to young men on their own, not waiting for grandma or mom to make the introduction. And then they would go to the river down on the Milwaukee River and rent a canoe so they could get out in the middle of the river and canoodle without anybody bothering them or in the flapper era. They gave us necking, spooning and petting. Those are all flapper terms. And so these moral majority in Milwaukee got all outraged and went to the police department and said, you need to patrol this more. And so they said, okay, great. They bought a boat. You know what the name of the boat was, the Killjoy.
I just love that so much. So this is Catherine’s stone and that's why we talk about her because she was one of the very early flappers. Also I've discovered when I was researching her that the bob haircut, that was sort of the thing that marked most flappers out. And that was because before that women never went to the hairdresser. They never cut their hair. It just was really long and they wrapped it up. And so when they wanted to get their haircut, they had to go to the barbershops. And so if you were ever thankful that you don't have to go to a barbershop that you can go to a hair salon, thank the flappers. They pushed really hard for that because they were sick of, as they put it, the dreary conversation it men's salons.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Oh, that's fabulous. So she has a pretty big monument.

CYNDI KRAMER:
Yeah, this is a family monument. The other side says Manchester, which was her family. So she was a Manchester Mooney. Her mother was a Manchester, her father was a Mooney, and then she married a guy named Franklin Miller. And Franklin, I've not found out a lot about him except I think he had an alcohol problem. He was arrested at least once when he was 49. He was found drunk on the street and he got pretty belligerent. They did finally just take him home and he's not buried here, she stayed married to him, but he's not here. So I'm guessing things are not all copacetic in the Mooney Miller household.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
I imagine there's a lot of drama among people who are buried here.

CYNDI KRAMER:
And the people that always go, oh, in the good old days they never did this. Oh, you come on a tour. Back in the good old days, there was all kinds of stuff going on and divorces, if you had money, you were just gone. That was just a thing. So yeah, it's pretty interesting really when you get into it. And the nice thing is that the newspapers back then literally reported everything except follow-up stories. They never told you how actually things played out. So that sometimes is a little frustrating, but

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Awesome.

CYNDI KRAMER:
So this next part is a little bit farther over. Do watch your step. There are a lot of holes in here. Okay.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
What is your role here at the cemetery as a cemetery docent?

CYNDI KRAMER:
I give tours. I also started learning how to clean stones, so I could do that as well. But mostly it's giving tours. And this is a little bit different from some other places. You actually, if you want to do a tour out here, you have to pick your topic, you have to pick your people and you have to write your tour. And I actually tell this to people on my tours now, how you do a tour. So my very first tour ever was dead architects. And so I made a list of about 300 people from Milwaukee who could be architects that might be buried here. And then the next thing you do is you make sure they're dead. And people always laugh, but I wanted to include the first Black architect and it turns out he's dead, but he's not buried here. So I said, no problem, I'll find the second Black architect. Oh, well, he's very much alive. So history is not that far in our rear view mirror at this point. I don't have any Black architects on my tour unfortunately.

You make sure they're dead. Then you figure out are they buried at Forest Home if they're buried at Forest Home, then you go into the office and you spend a bunch of time locating where you think they're going to be out here in the cemetery. And then you come out and look for 'em. And people think, well, if you know where they're going to be, how hard can it be? But if you look out in here now and you see all those stones you go, they're not really that lined up. And I've done more than one tour where I've gone somewhere out here is a guy named this. I have not found his stone. So if anybody sees it, let me know. And then invariably, a couple tours later, completely unrelated to that one, I'll look over and there it will be. But you do have to write your own tours out here, so I do do that.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
So what are some of the topics that you've held tours on?

CYNDI KRAMER:
Like I said, my first one was dead architects, then I did Smokers, Drinkers, and Troublemakers. I do like the specialty ones. So I do one for a 411 Day in Milwaukee and I do kind of a, we, number one, I pick things that were first here. I do an April Fools one where I take famous names, but it's not the famous person who's buried here. And we do one for Valentine's Day and they'll tell you in the office that I am dark and I like the salacious stuff. So my Hearts and Flowers too took a dark turn in like zero to 60. So that happened. But like you say, there's a lot of drama out here. So if you start off on a thing that is Valentine's Day, you're bound to run into things that aren't that happy and that happens.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
So Milwaukee is known for its beer and I know a lot of beer barons are buried here. Is there a beer baron tour?

CYNDI KRAMER:
There is a beer baron tour and up until just recently it was done by a guy named Bob Giese. He's not going to be able to do that anymore, unfortunately. He's had some health issues. But I'm actually going to be picking that one up at least for now.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
And I understand you're a big fan of one of the barons.

CYNDI KRAMER:
I am. I'm a Captain Pabst fan girl. I love that man. I want him to appear to me as a ghost. I want to be his girlfriend, whatever. I love Captain Pabst. My very first tours that I started doing in the city were out at the Pabst Mansion, so I got kind of connected that way.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
So it's kind of your ghost bucket list.

CYNDI KRAMER:
Yeah, that's my ghost bucket

GAIL MARQUARDT:
List. Anyone else on your ghost bucket list?

CYNDI KRAMER:
If you're a psych major, you'll recognize this name, but in the previous life I was a psych major B F Skinner. I met him in person one time, but I wouldn't mind meeting him as a ghost. So that would be kind of cool. Ahead of us over here, this little gazebo, this was actually, this is actually where you can have your ashes scattered if you choose cremation. So this is just one option and then you pour 'em in there and then they put your name on the thing on the outside so it doesn't go in an urn. It's actually,

GAIL MARQUARDT:
I want to peek in. Interesting. A little bird's nest, huh? Okay.

CYNDI KRAMER:
This little space ahead of us is called Faith Hill. And this little piece of land actually got donated to the cemetery by St. John's Episcopal Church primarily during a very big cholera epidemic in the city. So too many people were dying, they didn't have space for them, especially for the indigent people. And so she gave this land over and said for indigent people, but I would prefer if at first it was the indigents from St. Paul's, but then it got it expanded. You'll see it doesn't look like there's many people buried out here. Of course, if they couldn't afford a plot, they probably couldn't afford a stone. And secondly, after the family's fortunes improved, they often would go and purchase the family plot somewhere else in the cemetery.

So we're going to go up here and I'm going to hope I'm in the right spot. This is from my Valentine's Day tour.

And of course we have Love here, so you got to talk about them. But I found some interesting stuff out about this and I hope we have a couple of Loves here. So when I was doing the tour, when I was doing the tour, I wanted to do Love. And when I started doing that, I discovered that one of the family members was named Lotta La. Lot of love. So you can't pass that up. And so while I was doing that little bit of intel, I discovered that over here there's a woman named Floy. Floy Love, I can't see her right now, but she's over here. And Floy actually was a woman that was married to a guy named Oscar Olson. So she was an Olson. But anyway, it turns out she had a lifelong love of her own and her lifelong loves was named Bessie M. Stafford.

So she and Bessie would spend a lot of their time together and they actually died together in the Iroquois Hotel fire disaster. Then they were buried within 30 feet of each other at a cemetery down in Illinois. So she did not get buried here, but she is buried near her beloved Bessie. So you find out all kinds of stuff and I discovered there's a couple of different couples here in the cemetery that are two women and they used to call those Boston marriages. And if you've never heard that term, you might have heard it on my last talk. A Boston marriage is when two women have a relationship. It may be platonic, it may be more than that, but it's without a man involved and they have enough money to do it. And those women actually, it was pretty frequent and I think easier for two women back then they were just spinsters then it was easier. So anyway

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Awesome story. It looks like a lot of Loves buried in this plot.

CYNDI KRAMER:
And there are more. I think there's more around the corner, which yeah, there are a lot of Loves. And I did for the till Death Do us part Valentine tour, we did Candy and Love and everything I could think of.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
So when I was here a couple of weeks ago just walking about, I was looking for the graves of the founders of the bank that I used to work for him here in Milwaukee, Samuel Marshall and Charles Ilsley. And I found them and I was really surprised that there were 24 Ilsleys planted in the same plot.

CYNDI KRAMER:
Well, back in the early days of the cemetery, when they first opened the cemetery up, they actually promoted it with how they buried people back then, which were in family plots. So you would buy at minimum eight to 12 places in the plot. And it could be more like the 24. Ludington has another big, big plot over there, but we're going to go right by the guy weed wacking. And so they would buy these enormous plots and that was the case until World War II and World War II was when you started to see people moving away. They didn't come back to be at home. And so you had more of the mom and pop kind of graves. That's why you'll see more of those. But the big families back then, they used to buy these just gigantic plots and that's how they sold them.

In fact, if you wanted a single plot or just one or two, you would get bumped over to the other side of the cemetery where they had single graves.
Mr. Thorson here with this beautiful stone has the actual distinction of being the owner of the very first private bathtub in the city of Milwaukee. Before he literally everyone had to bathe at the natatorium. So he bought his bathtub, he had it put into his home, it was tin. His wife Sarah actually escaped narrow death when she was on a steamer in the English channel. There was some really heavy fog. They hit another boat and she was among about 200 people that actually got saved during that time. So every family has this amazing history and this amazing story to tell. But they had the first bathtub, which is the only reason I talk about it.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
I love it. And obviously had a lot of money in order to purchase such a gorgeous monument.

CYNDI KRAMER:
It's a beautiful stone. It really is. Okay, this is the part where I always have to trouble finding Orville, so I got to pay attention to what I'm doing here.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Reddenbocker?

CYNDI KRAMER:
Orville Cadwell. So there's something you won't see too much in this cemetery and that is an angel. Angels have to have wings. So if you see other women in the cemetery, those are just mourning women. But because it was started by the German Lutherans, pretty Protestant area, so we're going to stop at the first person buried in Forest Home Cemetery. There's not a lot to tell you about this guy because he did not come from Milwaukee. His name is Orville Cadwell. He came here when he was 18 years old. He came from Pennsylvania looking for some work and a way to start his own family. He got a job downtown working in a store and shortly thereafter he started feeling pains in his stomach. And by the end of the day he was dead, probably typhoid at that point. That was a pretty big killer back then.

But he does have family members and I know that they're buried in Pennsylvania. But if you go around the cemetery, you'll see dates that are later than 1850. The cemetery opened in 1850. And you'll see dates that are earlier than that. That is because in the early days of Milwaukee, there were six cemeteries, three of them were run by the city, three of them were run by churches. None of them were run terribly well. So you get people, they didn't bury you in very much, maybe just a shroud. They didn't bury you too deeply. So you might be walking along Brady Street one day and you come up on Cass over there in that neighborhood where there used to be a cemetery. And you would notice that grandma was no longer resting peacefully because the feral hogs had come through the night before. And that's when the vest in of St. Paul's Episcopal said, we can do better than this. They rode out here in their carriage, took 'em two hours, it's four miles from the center of downtown. They bought 78 acres and they started Forest Home Cemetery. And I'm sure they thought at the time, 78 acres is huge and we're way out in the middle of nowhere. And this is where people will be able to rest peacefully forever. I think they would be shocked that we're in the middle of a really dense urban area right now, but you can't really hear it, can you? It's kind of fun. So you'll see dates older than 1850. That's because they moved those people here. A lot of them don't have headstones because they didn't have headstones where they buried. So they didn't have 'em when they came here.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
So in your opinion, what's the value in burying someone in a cemetery and having a final resting place?

CYNDI KRAMER:
I think that's really more for the people you leave behind. I mean, if it gives comfort to someone to come and have a moment. And I know my grandmother, both my grandmothers went to the cemetery every weekend, cleaned the grave, put out new flowers, set a prayer, and that was super important to them. And I think that people need that. It's interesting how we're kind of getting away from that because right now in Wisconsin, I don't know about nationwide, but here in Wisconsin, cremation is at 65% as the preferred method of your final internment. But look, we also get this cool park out here too. I love that. I eat lunch out here a lot. I walk around here a lot. I look for ideas out here a lot.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Well, and it's full of history.

CYNDI KRAMER:
It is. There's a ton of history and if you're motivated at all, you can just pick a name and you can find out about almost anybody. I rarely run into a complete dead end with people. Not everybody's equally interesting, but no pun intended.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
And is there still room in the cemetery? And it's not just famous people who are buried here, right?

CYNDI KRAMER:
No. And in fact, if you look over in the section, we've been walking through smaller stones, not as many names that you might recognize right off the bat when you come through here. We have 118,000 people buried here right now. We have about 25% of our land is still available and a lot of that hasn't even been plotted out yet. So we've got a lot of room. They figure we have about a hundred years left before we're actually full. If you get over farther into the east side of the cemetery, that's what I call the “good neighborhood.” And that's where you start to see all the big names and the much more taller. You start to see the sarcophagi that came in when Egypt mania swept through the country. You'll just see, you see the cemetery sort of morphing and evolving as you get over there.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
And there's a natural burial area too, correct?

CYNDI KRAMER:
Yes. There's a natural burial area to the south down here. And we actually manage that with a herd of goats. That's who mows that over there.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
It's just a field?

CYNDI KRAMER:
It's just a field, yeah, that's all it is.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
And there you're buried in a shroud in or your cremated remains

CYNDI KRAMER:
Are buried in cardboard. I think you can use cardboard over there as well. So anything that's easily biodegradable.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
I've been over there and it's beautiful.

CYNDI KRAMER:
It's very peaceful. It's really gorgeous. I think the whole cemetery is peaceful. I love it and I love it that this was the cemetery in Milwaukee when it started. There was no other cemetery and I don't know how many people know that, but we didn't really have public parks either. And so in the early days, this was our public park because you could go to a beer garden, but it costs money. This you could come to for free. And on a Sunday, on a day we have today, you'd see about 8,000 people out here all dressed up in their best clothes. They bring their picnic lunch, they would meet and greet friends, they would promenade all these streets that we've been walking on, used to have flower names and I've been agitating for the grounds guys to put those back and they just go, no, that's not going to happen.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
That would be wonderful. Maybe a combination of the two.

CYNDI KRAMER:
Yes. I will point out one quick thing while we're here. You see that stone right over there that it's from the Civil War and we have a woman out here, her name is Margaret. Her thing that she does out here as a volunteer is she goes around and she tries to figure out what graves are out here of Civil War veterans that don't have a stone from the government. She gets all the information together to prove that they're actually Civil War veterans. And then she contacts the government and they give them this stone. Once she gets it, she does a ceremony, they do a reenactment with Civil Qar guys in the uniforms and come and put in the stone, which I think is so cool.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Wow. Yeah, that's wonderful.

CYNDI KRAMER:
And that is like her baby out here.
And we have a woman who does the symbology stuff, tells you what everything means on the stones, which is pretty cool. And you get to know some of them when you're out here doing it all the time. But she's the one who's kind the expert. And on all my tours, I do try to look for interesting tombstones to tell you about, which when I'm talking about it, I can't see forever.

Well, I'll tell you a couple more of these two guys right here. Estrin and Wolf right here. Wolf is cool because he was in a ship building company with Davidson. So there are lots of business people you'll find buried next to each other out here. But the Howard that's on top, Mr. Wolf had a son named Howard. He was 16 years old and he was apprenticed on one of their lake freighters. That's what he did.
And he fell through an open hole in the deck of the ship, but he fell through that and he died. And so this is his memorial, which I think is vaguely creepy. And Mr. Bistro next to him, I love him because he was a builder slash inventor here in Milwaukee. He was an incredibly talented builder, but he liked to invent things. And one of the things he invented was the very first extendable fire ladder. He designed it. He had it built, he extended it, they put all the firemen on it for a picture, and they never used it again. It took too long to put it up. And then he was also one of the guys who championed the flushing tunnel here in Milwaukee, which actually was the first step of cleaning out our rivers. And he championed that hard to make that happen. So he was a big part of the very early, late 1800s, 1900s, cleaning up the river. Once you get over into this section now, you'll start seeing the mausoleums. And we'll drop down this way to see the beer barons.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Do you know how many people are generally buried in a mausoleum?

CYNDI KRAMER:
It depends on the size of the family and the size of the mausoleum. I know that there are still, like the Blatz one, you can still be buried in there. They have a couple of spots still. If you come out here during the fundraising gala that they just had, they open up some of the mausoleums and you can go inside.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Wow. Yeah. See, here's the Samuel Marshall and the Charles Illsley.

CYNDI KRAMER:
So you found 'em over here? Yeah.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Yeah. Those are the ones that I visited when I was here just for fun.

CYNDI KRAMER:
But it's so funny, as I've been doing this, I've gotten really into Milwaukee. I'm not from Milwaukee. I got really into Milwaukee history. When I take people on the tour who are from Milwaukee, I'm always surprised at what they don't know. You're just like, oh, I guess I just assumed everybody would know that. And what's cool about that is that is not a huge monument. So a lot of these guys really didn't go in for the great big towering sort of event kind of stuff that you see. But some of them did.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Well, Charles Illsley was very careful with money, which is why the bank was successful back in the day.

CYNDI KRAMER:
These two guys, Dura and Ruggie, they were both builders and they were actually in business together. And Ruggie built Dura's house for him, and then they're buried out here next to each other again. Cool stuff that you see in the cemetery.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
I never knew about those kinds of connections.

CYNDI KRAMER:
Yeah, this guy was a doctor. Okay, so here is the Blatz monument. Over here to the right is the Schlitz. The Schlitz is actually a grave as well as a cenotaph. So if anybody doesn't know what a cenotaph is, although I'm assuming your audience does, there's a stone, but the person isn't buried here. He's not buried here because he was lost at sea. He was on a ship that sunk off the coast of England and did not make it back here. So that's his monument. And then the Blatz monument is across the way. And my favorite, of course, is the Pabst monument over here. I spent two summers ago, literally about 16 to 20 hours cleaning the monument and all the stones around it. It was in pretty rough shape. It was pretty dark, pretty green. It needs some structural work on it, but it's looking so much better.

And once we cleaned it off, if you look over on the stairs over there, you can see where the sculptor carved his name in there in the year that he did it. But interestingly, and this wouldn't have been, would've been more the rule than the exception back then, each of these little graves you see here would've had a mound on them that was covered with myrtle as a grave cover. And then there was actually a chain across the bottom stepped on there to keep people from walking up on there. But the cemetery outlawed myrtle because it is very invasive. And that's when they also, I think started monitoring flowers and all the things that would make it difficult to keep the cemetery up to snuff. Because in the early days of the cemetery, they had about 40 people full-time on maintenance out here in grounds care. Now I think in the summertime they have eight people that they hire on.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Wow. Yeah, it's quite a bit difference.
So is it a coincidence that these three beer barons are buried next to each other? Do you know?

CYNDI KRAMER:
Probably not. They probably, well, they're there. I'm going to be there. I mean, if you look in town and you look at the tied houses, if you're familiar with, those are the breweries that built a bar and you had to sell their product and only their product, there would be a Pabst on one corner and a Schlitz on the other corner. And it's kind of like a Walgreens and CVS now, I think. So very similar. So I'm a Captain Pabst fan girl, not going to lie. I am. And he was an incredible philanthropist in his community, and I think that he was one of those guys. Well, when he died on New Year's Day, his family wanted a small private funeral. And by the time he'd been dead for a half an hour, the Wisconsin Avenue was filled with thousands of people out front of his house wanting to pay their respects. But he never really forgot where he came from. He was in his fifties when a newspaper reporter asked him, if you lost all your millions now, what do you think he would do? And he goes, I think I would like to go back to being a steamship captain. And I think he meant that he loved doing that. He really did. So kind of became a brewer by accident.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
And that's the kind of story that you learn when you visit a cemetery and learn about the people who are buried here.

CYNDI KRAMER:
That's right. One of my favorite stones across the road, only because when you read it, it says, in loving memory of Henry Clay Payne, sometimes postmaster of the United States. I dunno why they felt the need to throw “sometime” in there. Really. Okay. And the Reming monument over there with the three holes in it, that's where it used to have three bronze panels hanging and those were stolen out of the cemetery.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
I was wondering, when I visited here, I walked past that and I was wondering if there was symbolism of the empty spaces, but they aren't supposed to be empty.

CYNDI KRAMER:
They're not supposed to be empty. I just can't figure out who they sell it to. I mean, if you steal an angel and three things, bronze things out of a cemetery, somebody's going to say, this seems kind of sus to me. Right. I would think. Talk about inviting someone to come back and haunt you.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Well I just have a quick question. We're in kind of the older part of the cemetery. Are there still graves that are available in these older parts?

CYNDI KRAMER:
Yes. And if you look over to your right, you'll see a number of Hmong graves. They actually have worked very hard at figuring out where there are still spaces in the older part of the cemetery. So you'll see a number of those and they'll be over here tucked in as well.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
And did I see there's a Muslim area of the cemetery?

CYNDI KRAMER:
Yes, there is. And we actually keep over there two graves dug at all times because you have to bury within a certain period of time, and if they die on a weekend, you will not have time to get that done. So they dig two graves over there, they cover them with plywood and they keep them available.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Are there other ethnic groups?

CYNDI KRAMER:
There's a whole section that the Chinese American Association bought up and then they sell those back to their members over there. There's, next to the Muslim, there's also a veteran section over there. And next to that is where there's a pretty significant Hispanic area as well. And then I think those are the main ones I can think of. Of course, we now help manage Greenwood Cemetery. We don't run it, it's not ours, but we do a lot of the maintenance and the bookkeeping and office management stuff for that. And they're right next door to the west. We just did our very first Greenwood Cemetery tour this weekend, so that was kind of fun.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
So is there an area here specifically for people who may not be able to pay for a funeral or have no family or don't have money for a burial?

CYNDI KRAMER:
I don't think we have that now. We used to a Faith Hill that I told you about, that would've been the earliest one that was done. I don't know that we have one now, but I will say that the cemetery is very, very, very good at working with people. So I feel like if you really needed something, they would maybe not free, but would work with you to make sure it was something you could do. But we don't have a specific area anymore now.

So I'll take you to the last stone that I wanted to talk about. It's right up here. And of course there's still mowing over here. There's nothing I can do about it. I did find out something looking at these stones today, this area that you see here with a lot of the flat stones in the ground that are bigger than just the small stones usually, see this would've been one of the areas where they would've put those burials. So you would've seen a lot of burials into this area. And I don't know if those stones were meant to be upright at one time and it was just easier to put 'em flat.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
I was wondering about that when I visited.

CYNDI KRAMER:
And it looks to me like they were meant to be upright because this whole section here would've been in the ground. You needed to have almost as much of the stone in the ground as you have above the ground. So this stone over here belongs to George Marshall Clark known as Marshall Clark. And he is, as far as we know, the only lynching in the city of Milwaukee in 1861, he and his buddy James Shelby, were walking down the street in the Third Ward. They were in the company of a couple of young Irish ladies, some young Irish men took issue with that, started a fight with them. And in the course of that Marshall's friend James stabbed one of them. He lived long enough to identify James as the man who had stabbed him, but he died. And so a mob rammed their way into the jail.
And James had managed to hide himself away. So they snatched up Marshall and they just beat him senseless all the way down the street until they took him to the fire station where there was a sort of a makeshift courtroom set up. They had a kangaroo court trial, dragged him all the way down Buffalo Street, beating him all the way, and they hung him from the pilings at the end of Buffalo Street by the river. He was buried here by his mother without a stone. She was very, very concerned in 1861 about grave desecration, things that might happen. And so during the pandemic, a young student named Tyrone Randall started investigating and he worked with our office people and he figured out where Marshall had been buried. And then he started a fundraiser in order to get this stone. And then almost to the day, you can see September 8th, I think it was 160 years, they dedicated it again for him here. So we have this here and the only lynching, but still pretty terrible. And I try to include it in almost all my tours if I can.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
So yeah, a lot of history here. Not all of it is from our best days, right?

CYNDI KRAMER:
Yeah. It shows our good and bad side. So it's just not a pretty part of our history, but it's something that we need to talk about.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Yeah. I'm so glad that individual raised the money for a new stone.

CYNDI KRAMER:
Yeah, he was pretty dedicated about it. So this stone right here, I love this stone right here. It's actually called a vernacular stone. And it was done by the family, not a stone cutter. So it's pretty basic. And it's carved to look like a headboard of a bed because the idea is you're not dead, you're sleeping. And they would give them stencil so they could stencil out the name on here, but it was the cheapest option to give your family a headstone if you wanted one, but couldn't afford one. So it's called the vernacular. We have a couple of these in the cemetery.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Wow, that's awesome.

CYNDI KRAMER:
Yeah. Isn't that cool?

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Oh, and we're right back. Okay. This was so wonderful, Cindy. I learned so much today. Thank you so much for being our guide.

CYNDI KRAMER:
It was fun. I'm glad you made it out here.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Yeah, definitely going to be back because I know there's a lot more history here that needs to be explored.

CYNDI KRAMER:
I don't think you could run out out here.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
So one more question for you. Who are you remembering today?

CYNDI KRAMER:
I always remember Captain Pabst when I come out here, because I want to meet him. I want to be his girlfriend. I'm not going to lie. If I was going to see a ghost, it'd be Captain Pabst. So that's who I always remember when I'm out here.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Awesome. That's great. Thank you so much. And for more information about remembering loved ones in meaningful ways and how cemeteries can be a part of that, visit Remembering life.com.