Marshall Fredericks is one of the best known sculptures and humanitarians in the Detroit metro area. One of his award winning creations was called the Leaping Gazelle. It was one of his signature artworks and it adorns his graveside at Greenwood Cemetery located in Birmingham, Mi.
Greenwood Historic Cemetery contains the remains of some of Oakland County’s earliest pioneers and most prominent citizens. Birmingham’s only Revolutionary War veteran, John Daniels, was buried here in 1832. Dr. Swan was interred in 1847.
Additional interments include Michigan State Senator Ebenezer Raynale (1881); Martha Baldwin, for whom the Birmingham library is named (1913); Birmingham Eccentric publishers George Mitchell (1929) and Almeron Whitehead (1926); U.S. Congressman Roland Trowbridge (1881); George Gough Booth (1949) and Ellen Scripps Booth (1948), who established the Cranbrook Educational Community; and Pewabic Pottery founder Mary Chase Stratton (1961) and her husband William Buck Stratton (1938).
Why am I sharing all these Cemetery statistics with you? Greenwood has become kind of a go to place for me during Covid. I like to ride my bike or walk and do a moving meditation through the grounds.
I'm not particularly religious and I'm not obsessed with death or cemeteries. I do get a sense of calm when I am visiting there.I like to think of all the trials and tribulations that these people have endured since the Revolutionary War. How they must have struggled and fought to overcome wars, depressions and other worldly meltdowns.
It kind of puts our current pandemic in perspective. It is tragic and unfair and all the other descriptions we can label Covid-19. We will get through it and life will eventually get back to some form of normalcy. Hopefully before we end up like the place below.
