The way I drive into Frederick, from the south on Market Street, takes me right by Olivet Cemetery. I’d always meant to visit the cemetery, with its impressive collection of funerary monuments, but it took me more than a decade to do so.
I should perhaps explain that while I’ve no belief in an afterlife, others’ beliefs and interpretations of it fascinate me. I’ve wandered through cemeteries in Russia, Italy, France, England, Turkey, and other far-flung places, not to mention a number of them here in the U.S. I guess I’m something of a graveyard connoisseur, macabre though that might sound. In fact, it’s rare that I don’t learn something interesting about a place when I visit its graveyards.
Olivet Cemetery is an exceptionally lovely place, with long, gently sloping paths running through well-maintained grounds dotted with groups of tall elms and locust trees. The day I visited, I was looking for a particular set of graves. The first person I encountered, a genial, chatty funeral director stationed to greet mourners for a funeral, seemed happy to talk about the cemetery and give me its general layout. Where funeral directors have gotten their ill-deserved reputation as morose or neurotic, I’ll never know. Every one I’ve met has seemed almost preternaturally well-adjusted.
One of the most prominent features of Olivet Cemetery, an elaborate monument to Francis Scott Key, Frederick’s most famous son, is not far from the entrance. Key was originally buried in Baltimore (where he penned "the Star Spangled Banner" as well as practiced law), but was later brought home to his native city. A flag unfurled gracefully in the breeze on a tall flagpole set beside the monument, a fitting tribute in this town where flying the Stars and Stripes was a tradition long before national tragedy rekindled patriotic sentiment.
Further down one of the central paths, I paused by the grave of Barbara Fritchie, that feisty patriot who faced down Confederate troops and earned the respect of Stonewall Jackson himself. Nearby, the colorful Maryland flag flew over the grave of Maryland’s first governor, Thomas Johnson (1732-1819), a close friend of George Washington and uncle by marriage to John Quincy Adams.
As always, the pathos of a few graves stood out. A small marble child lay as if curled up asleep on a stone bier, but the chiseled name and date had long eroded. Elsewhere husbands and wives, with names I recognized from local streets and parks, lay side by side.
I reached the back of the cemetery, where, as I’d been told, I found a long row of modern plain stone markers, each set behind much older, barely legible headstones marking the graves of hundreds of Confederate soldiers, many dated September, 1862: the Battle of Antietam. Another large stone marker commemorates 408 unknown Confederate soldiers who died at the Battle of Monocacy. Still another monument, listing Frederick men who died on the Southern side, testified to how the divided the local community’s loyalties were.