Tombstone Iconography: Willow, weep for me

Winter's not an especially good time for a tombstone tourist to actually visit tombstones --- in Iowa at least. So I've decided to take a look, now and then, at the signs and symbols our forbears used as symbols and/or decorations on the monuments that mark their graves.

Actually, I borrowed the idea from the Facebook page of Bellefountaine Cemetery and Arboretum, St. Louis, one of the nation's great cemeteries, where iconography is a weekly feature.

I'll start here with a well-preserved weeping willow that I found some years ago at the grave of Elizabeth DeWitt in the far southwest corner of the Gosport Cemetery, located in a now-vanished Marion County village northwest of Columbia and right along the blacktop linking Highway 14 and Melcher-Dallas. 

Elizabeth died at the age of 29 on Aug. 27, 1874, and the tombstone would have been erected by her husband, Daniel.

This was not an especially popular symbol in the south of Iowa, although you'll find many among the clasped hands and forefingers pointed upward that were more widely used.

The tree, weeping as it is, obviously symbolizes grief --- and that's borne out by the sad little poem at the bottom of the tombstone:

Farewell my husband, children all

From you a mother Christ doth call

Mourn not for me, it is in vain

To call me to your sight again

But it also serves as a symbol of resurrection --- willows propagate easily and grow quickly. So there's that hopeful element in the equation, too.

Daniel DeWitt had a brother, Henry Jackson DeWitt (1836-1929), who also lived in the Gosport neighborhood and is buried with his wife and descendants there --- so there is an extended family connection with the cemetery altough Elizabeth's spouse and adult children are buried elsewhere.

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Elizabeth (Bott) DeWitt, daughter of John Hill and Margaret Bott, was an Ohio native who had married Daniel on Sept. 3, 1863, in Shelby County, Illinois, and then relocated after the Civil War to English Township, Lucas County, where they were living when the 1870 census was taken. The widowed Daniel and his second wife were living in Washington Township, Marion County, in 1880, so it seems likely that Elizabeth and Daniel had moved to a farm in the Gosport neighborhood of Marion County by the time she died.

Three youngsters --- Albert W., Margaret Susanna and Etta --- were left motherless when Elizabeth died and it's tempting to speculate that she died of complications of childbirth, a great killer of young women at that time. Whatever the case, Daniel married Sarah E. Simpson as his second wife on April 9, 1875, and they had several children, too. Daniel and Sarah were living at Bussey, also in Marion County, when he died during 1921. They are buried in Greenlawn Cemetery there.

Although Elizabeth's life was cut short, two of her three children lived very long lives indeed. Albert was 94 when he died during late February of 1960 in Chariton. He is buried in the Russell Cemetery. Etta (Whitten) was 95 when she passed five years later, during June of 1964 at Albia. She is buried in Greenlawn Cemetery at Bussey.