"Milwaukee’s Forest Home Cemetery is a Place for the Living Too”: The Reemergence of Deathscape Recreation at Forest Home Cemetery

Summary

This is an abstract from the "There and Back Again: Celebrating the Career and Ongoing Contributions of Patricia B. Richards" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The original design and use of the Garden Cemetery deathscape encouraged recreation and social interaction among the living and the dead. Forest Home Cemetery, a historic (1850–present) Garden Cemetery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, hosts more than a dozen events in the cemetery each year, including tours, reenactments, a 5K run/walk, Door’s Open, a Day of the Dead celebration week, and “Shakespeare in the Cemetery.” This paper explores a renaissance of Victorian Garden Cemetery recreation at Forest Home, identifying recurring themes (financial considerations, advertisement, and landscape use) and highlighting distinctive new engagements facilitated by the “changing face of death.” In recognition of Patricia B. Richards’s research emphasis on human actors, ethnographic field notes and archives, including social media platforms, were utilized to provide data on landscape use at Forest Home. I argue that we are witnessing a transformation of the deathscape at Forest Home, with implications for increased community engagement and a reimagined necrolandscape.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• There and Back Again: Celebrating the Career and Ongoing Contributions of Patricia B. Richards   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38884.0