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CLEVELAND -- Tour an old cemetery with Joe Hannibal and tombstones will
never look the same again.
Where most see markers for the dead, Hannibal sees lively lessons in
ecology, geology, paleontology and anthropology.
A geologist, Hannibal strolls past gravestones "with his eyes wide-open," said Katie Karrick, a Lyndhurst resident and editor of Tomb With a View," a
quarterly newsletter for cemetery enthusiasts. "Joe has the ability to look at it as a learning experience."
Hannibal is curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Cleveland Museum of
Natural History, where he oversees more than 10,300 cataloged specimens. The
collection includes fossilized animals that lived in shallow seas that covered
Ohio during much of the Paleozoic Era (546 million to 245 million years ago),
including fossil crinoids, trilobites and phyllocarids.
What takes him out of the museum, however, are graveyards. If he isn't
scoping out sites for his own research, he's leading tours and pointing out
geological finds.
Hannibal said tombstones not only reveal rich stories about Ohio culture
and heritage, but are a testament to how time and weather affect markers.
"If you look in any geology textbook, you'll find gravestones," he said.
Hannibal's travels have focused on cemeteries in northeastern Ohio, but he
regularly visits graveyards across the state and has made some trips abroad.
"Columbus has the wonderful, fascinating Green Lawn Cemetery. It's
different from ours," said Hannibal, a Cleveland resident.
"The lichens are different. The stones are different. There are fossils in
the bases of the monuments -- corals in the basins and such."
The Ohio Statehouse also has a lot of the same fossil types, he said.
Stone preferences have changed over time, from whatever was in local
quarries to imported marble and granite, Hannibal said.
In Columbus, local stones included limestone and Blackhand sandstone. The
latter, which is found mostly in Fairfield and Licking counties, was used to
build Trinity Episcopal Church, 125 E. Broad St.
Though Cleveland and Columbus are only about 130 miles apart, they are
geologically different because of how glaciers cut through the state, Hannibal
said.
Among the first stones used in Cleveland cemeteries were Euclid bluestone
or Berea sandstone. In the 1830s, marble gravestones became popular.
"Marble is softer and easier to work with than sandstone," Hannibal said.
The marble was imported -- either from Vermont or from Carrara, Italy --
and brought to Cleveland via canal, he said.
Artisans continued, however, to use sandstone to make monument bases
through the 19th century.
Marble gravestones remained popular throughout the Midwest through the 19th
and early 20th centuries, but they were replaced by granite.
Because it holds up better over time, granite was used to replace some of
the more weathered sandstone and marble markers in older cemeteries, Hannibal
said.
In a study of three northeastern Ohio cemeteries, Hannibal and three
colleagues found a correlation between style and stone types.
For example, sandstone and marble were used early to form tablet-style
gravestones, whereas marble and granite markers are more varied.
The study, published in The Ohio Journal of Science in September, revealed
other influences on stone choice, including:
- Architectural designs, such as the Greek Revival movement in the early-
to mid-1800s.
- Technological advances in grinding, carving and polishing -- such as
development of pneumatic drills and greater use of sandblasting in the 1890s
-- that made it easier to carve granite monuments.
- Development of roads, rails and canals to transport marble imported from
New England or as far away as Italy.
- Ecological concerns such as acid rain.
For example, cemeteries closer to pollution sources deteriorate faster.
Rural cemeteries tend to hold up better than urban sites.
"The same thing would happen in Columbus or anywhere else in the
northeastern quadrant of the U.S.," he said.
Such studies are more common in New England, which features older
cemeteries, said Karrick, who is president of the Ohio Cemetery Preservation
Society and a trustee for the Association for Gravestone Studies.
Hannibal's "study is invaluable because it compared a cemetery in a very
urban area with two relatively rural areas to see how deterioration of the
stones is affected by the environment," she said.
"Stones fall apart like anything else. If they didn't, we wouldn't have
any beaches."
Hannibal's research is well-known in the scientific community, said
Annabelle Foos, a geology professor at the University of Akron.
"If I have a building-stone question, I call him," said Foos, who
specializes in geochemistry and clay mineralogy.
Foos recalls attending a geological meeting out west.
"I remember going into a statehouse, and he was laying on the floor of the
lobby with his hand lens checking out the marble," she said.
Hannibal said he does that all the time.
"The Nebraska Statehouse has some great rocks in the floor," he said.
"But you can't lay on the floor and look at the rocks in St. Peter's Basilica
in Rome."
When he leads a tour, Hannibal often heads to Lake View Cemetery in
Cleveland.
There, he shows visitors President Garfield's tomb and other historic
monuments that dot the hilly grounds.
Then he asks them to look closer, as he does, to see such nuances as cracks
and grain size, which reveal the stone's origin and approximate age.
"It allows him to integrate his knowledge of geology with his interest in
the museum and the more historical," Foos said.
With his knowledge of history, architecture and geology, Hannibal brings a
new dimension to the tour, said Mary C. Krohmer, spokeswoman for the Lake View
Cemetery Association.
"He discusses not only what happens during glacial time periods in where
we're standing, but also talks about how the stones are used and how they
weather the climate," she said.
Hannibal, 53, has been leading field trips through cemeteries for 20 years.
"The more people visit cemeteries, the better. Traffic discourages
vandalism," he said, adding that many visitors end up buying plots.
Some cemeteries no longer accept marble -- only granite, he said. Others
only accept flat markers as opposed to boulders, which are popular among
Hannibal's colleagues.
"Geologists will pick certain rocks that they are fond of. As a group, we
do all of that kind of crazy stuff."
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