Lone Fir Cemetary

[olivermoss]

A bit of a wack at it at least. Not through shooting the place. It's a really cool little cemetery with lots of visual variety.

Time only moves forward:














Some Woodmen of the World gravestones. The tree stumps are such an odd touch:





Those aren't fancy gravestones for lumberjacks. Woodmen of the World are one of the secret societies fraternal organizations that are response for how many interesting gravesites we have in Oregon. Woodmen, Eastern Star, etc all favored mausoleums and interesting headstones. They wanted to leave indelible marks. There are a lot of Woodmen medallions in our city's giant mausoleum.











One of our better known graves:



An iron gate and a concrete topper with an iron cross bolted to it:





Iron cross/bolt detail:



I also took some lot 14 pictures, but am not posting those for now. The pictures are fine, but the context is a lot. Pre-pandemic I'd been working on a sideblog about gravesites and had been researching that. I needed some of my own images in case I pick that up again. I wish I had pictures from a few points in the past but time only moves forward.

Comments

[gingicat]

Enjoying all your recent pictures, but haven't had time to give them the comments they deserve.

[pauraque]

Oh, we have some tree stump gravestones just like that in a cemetery near here. I never knew what the significance of them was. TIL!

[ihavenoarms]

nice photos

[dine]

Lone Fir is a neat cemetery - great photos!

[bleodswean]

Some great shots here! I love cemetery photography. We have a group on LJ, not sure if there is one here on DW.

Not all treestones denote WOW. Do these bear the WOW badge?

[olivermoss]

Glad you're enjoying them :)

[olivermoss]

Thanks!

[olivermoss]

I think on some the badges are worn off? I didn't actually get close to the gravestones. I was using a fairly long prime lens on most of the shots to get that background separation. I know about them from having previously researched this cemetery... and having once mistakenly thought that they were like prominent lumberjacks. I need to get all my notes together and do some write ups on the place, whether or not I ever get Death Travels going.

[bleodswean]

I think that's a very common mistake! What's crazy is that stacked logs indicate the number of children the deceased had!

So.............what is Death Travels?

[olivermoss]

Death Travels was a side blog I was starting of interesting graveyards and other places of rest. But, then pandemic hit. Since graveyards were an exception to lockdown rules, they become busy. Lone Fir and some others actually closed to the public at a point. I tried to go to Lot 14 to snag a picture even if it was from the outside, and wound up with police telling me to go. So, the project got derailed.

My Portland Mausoleum pictures are the most popular gallery on my website, so I wanted to expand on that with more gravesite stuff.

[oracne]

I live in Philadelphia, and it's very interesting to see a cemetery with so much open space. Those are really atmospheric, cool photos.

I live nearest to this one - https://www.woodlandsphila.org/ and

[olivermoss]

Thanks! Yeah, the place is spread out and has this relaxed, rambly feel to it.

That place near you looks cool! I want to get shots of all that various places of rest here. I have a gallery of Portland Mausoleum shots up on my website. I've been working on that gallery for a while.

[mistressofmuses]

What a cool cemetery! I love ones that have a lot of variety in the styles of headstones. Some excellent shots - I love the one of the tree "swallowing" the headstones, and some of those wider shots. The iron cross is definitely an interesting one.

Most of our older cemeteries here have at least a couple Woodmen of the World markers (at least one also has a couple "Women of Woodcraft" ones, too.) The detail in the plants at the base always impresses me.

[sperrywink]

Pdx does seem to have more than their fair share of "secret" societies or what have you.

But, love the pictures. Very October appropriate!

[oracne]

I bookmarked your gallery to look at later.

[lovelyangel]

These are fun pictures! Thank you for sharing. I like the first two photos the best; there's a strong focus on the subjects, while other distractions are played down.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, it's a neat place! I need to shoot it more. It is hard to get good angles on the iron grate grave, especially when you are short.

There is not a lot of info on the Woodmen stuff. Hrm, yeah, I want to do some research into a few things at least.

[olivermoss]

Thank you!

[olivermoss]

Yeah, I think that is a major reason why we have such a massive mausoleum. Though, asking questions of the tour guides there yields no info. They talk like all the Egyptian iconography there is because 'they wanted it to stand as long as the pyramids'. I mean, yes, they likely did, but there was something else going on with all that. Maybe not much else, a lot of these groups turn out to be surprisingly boring. But that's not the only reason.

Thank you!

[mistressofmuses]

It definitely seems like a very neat place!

So many of those secret societies fraternal organizations have such shady or obscured histories. (Regardless of whether they were likely up to Shady Business or not, ha.)