One more Memorial Day post about Lt. Chedel, the young Civil War casualty who lived in our house. He was brought home and buried in 1866 in his family’s plot in Providence’s North Burial Ground — an amazing place despite its current bad luck to lie next to Interstate 95. Anyhow, Findagrave has three photos of a gravestone for him: one from 2006, showing his original marble stone in reasonably good repair (visibly reset in a concrete pad); one from 2012, showing the same stone lying flat in the grass, presumably having been broken off at the base; and finally one from just a few months ago showing, not the same stone re-erected, but a replacement stone in a more generic historic-military style. I am glad that the grave has been tended and restored, but I wonder whether it was truly impossible to preserve the original stone — which, after all, was chosen and erected by his own parents?
Not sure I like “refreshing” gravestones like this — if the originals are discarded.
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