Though Silent They Speak: Arkansas Gravestones and Graveyards

Though Silent They Speak: Arkansas Gravestones and Graveyards is a fascinating and informative guidebook to the most unusual graves and graveyards in Arkansas. Within the pages, readers explore showy marble monuments in city cemeteries and haunting, primitive carvings and inscriptions discovered in isolated, rural graveyards, while telling the stories behind these burials. Examples include private tombs in public places, African American burial grounds, a graveyard on the grounds of a former Japanese internment camp, and two small graveyards that are now state parks.

The book is also a tome of knowledge on the wide variety of materials used to create markers, the styles of grave coverings once common prior to the Civil War, practical advice on understanding tombstone symbolism and fraternal lodge emblems, using noninvasive methods to photograph and clean headstones, and other hands-on advice for extracting maximum information from a tombstone. Author Abby Burnett also provides biographies of the murderers, accident victims, seers, and circus workers, among other colorful characters, buried within the graves. Though Silent They Speak serves not only as a practical guide for cemetery enthusiasts but also as a valuable resource for historians, genealogists, and anyone interested in Arkansas’s rich history.

Abby Burnett is an independent researcher who, as seen in the Arkansas Educational Television Network’s 2010 documentary, Silent Storytellers, studies such things as long-lost burial customs, tombstone symbolism, epitaphs, and the work of early stone carvers. She is author of Gone to the Grave: Burial Customs of the Arkansas Ozarks, 1850-1950, published by University Press of Mississippi. She has written entries on graveyards, stone carvers and early medicine for the online CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, in addition to doing public speaking on all aspects of burial in Arkansas, her adopted state for the past forty years.