My name is Frida Hilbrich. I am a senior Photography and Creative Writing major, and my interests include writing poetry, photography, and painting. A highlight for me this year was going to the Mount Vernon Cemetery for the first time in the four years I have been at Cornell College.
Today, a small group of us, students and faculty, walked in the Mount Vernon Cemetery to see some of the original Cornelians’ gravestones.
A lot of the teachers that originally came here to Cornell in 1800-1820 came here to work. They lived and died here. Many were part of the Civil War and were also probably some of the most interesting people that we have had in our College history. One of the people that was buried in the cemetery named Jewel Bothwell Tull, was a writer and a playwright; her husband worked here on campus as an English teacher.
Last year me and a group of three other students transcribed a couple of chapters from her book called Sylvia of the Stubbles. I remember really connecting to her, because she was a poet at a time when women were not really seen as capable of the same intelligence as men.
The cemetery is falling apart; it is over 200 years old. But, it still has a beautiful and peaceful nature emanating from its very being. In this cemetery, there are hundreds of people who founded buildings on campus and other historically significant places in Mount Vernon. There are also hundreds of past Cornell
professors, faculty, and founders.
The people here are buried on rolling hills. Family members who have passed are buried together under willowy, overhanging trees older than they were. The trees create a canopy over the headstones of the dead.
There are gravestones that don’t have words anymore, so we don’t know who’s buried there. It would be a cool job for students at Cornell College to try to figure out who is buried there and what they did or who they were. There were a lot of them; it made me really sad, and I feel like those people deserve to have their names known in the place they were buried and possibly the place they were born and lived most of their life.
Being an artist and a writer I found the cemetery in Mount Vernon to be an emotionally charged place but it could also be a place where someone could go to find inspiration for names for characters in a book they were writing.
One particular headstone caught my eye. It has a drawing of a man smoking a cigar and a top hat. I later found out he was an art teacher at Cornell for a very long time.
Because I am currently in a class based on Jane Austen, I am looking forward to an event being held on campus for Jane Austen’s 250th birthday dinner on the 16th of December. There’s going to be singing, music, readings from her books, and snacks.
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