Wahoo Baptist Church cemetery Wahoo, Georgia

: an empty decorative stone grave shelter in the shape of a box with an oblong horizontal lid (ledger stone) of local soapstone (local greenish-grey soft chloritic schist) with two slots cut into it, through which the vertical head and foot stones are fitted, called a 'through mortise-and-tenon joint' in woodworking. The ledger stone is thus suspended over an internal empty cavity by the weight-bearing shoulders of the head- and footstones, and by either (a) long cut stone blocks (squared-stone-logs) approximately 5"x5"x(~length of body), stacked one on top of the other equally on each side, or by (b) one-piece side slabs, to create an above-ground stone box monument that resembles a tomb. The body is presumably underground since no remains have been seen inside exposed internal cavities of broken or collapsed boxes. purposes: an ornate hole covering; a stone grave shelter; a decorative means of preventing wandering open-range livestock from stepping into the softer dug earth of a human grave; also used to prevent predators & scavengers, including human 'resurrectionists', from digging up a buried human body, especially in shallow graves dug into rocky ground; similar in purpose to the wolf (ledger) stone. 168 found to date in ±24 Upland South folk cemeteries almost exclusively in rural northeast Georgia around Wahoo. ethnicity: English & Scotch-Irish and predominantly Baptist. dates: 1848-1889, the latter corresponding with the closing of the state's open range and fencing of livestock in pastures.   locally quarried & carved. original research by tpkunesh © 2000-2011

" Many [Lumpkin County] graves are marked with Soapstone markers
carved to fit with precision of a carpenter with wood. " - DP

Mount Hope public cemetery Dahlonega, Georgia

O'Kelley family cemetery south of Shoal Creek Baptist Church

Shoal Creek Baptist Church cemetery west of Cleveland GA

types of headstones

The double-shouldered headstone is found as a remnant of the slot&tab tomb.
The extra shoulders are used to support the slotted ledger stone.

all sites are within an 11-mile radius from Wahoo Baptist Church

maps by google

Always In Search of the Slot & Tab Tomb's Origins ... Know of another slot&tab site that isn't listed here? tell me about it: tomb@darkfiber.com maps | diagrams | search USGS for feature: cemetery tom kunesh

other interesting SouthEast USA burial monuments

Gilmer County GA 56 churches, 0 mines New Hope Baptist Church - (2) Hall County GA 132 churches, 0 mines Gainesville Bellton Baptist Church Lula, Hall Co. - cement ledger stone with footstone Hopewell Methodist Church Murrayville, Hall Co. Habersham County GA 63 churches, 0 mines Clarkesville cemetery Zebulon Baptist Church, Toccoa - table tombs, roundtop headstone Carnes Creek Baptist Church Toccoa, Habersham Co. - triangular monuments, table tomb White County GA Town Creek Baptist Church White Co. Mt Pleasant Methodist Church White Co. Friendship Baptist Church - gravehouse (1) Chattahoochee United Methodist Church - fieldstone/soapstone (1) Nacoochee United Methodist Church - cairns, gravehouse Tesnatee Baptist Church Blue Creek Baptist Church - megaliths, triangular stone tomb White Creek Baptist near Cleveland - box tombs Monroe County GA Forsyth cemetery - table/box tombs Providence Congregational Methodist Church (est. 1852) High Falls

Georgia Enon Baptist Church Alto, Banks County other Banks County cemeteries Big Buckhead Jenkins County - table tomb & Carswell Grove Baptist Church (African American) Dacula Gwinnet County - ledger stones New Echota Calhoun, Gordon County - Pathkiller's table tomb Elliot cemetery Henry County Hart family cemetery (est. 1888) close to Macon, Bibb County Tennessee Concord Baptist Church, Chattanooga, Hamilton County wooden gravemarker/headboard, Chattanooga, Hamilton Co. Montgomery cemetery Hamilton Co. - table tombs Hixson family cemetery, Chattanooga, Hamilton Co. Hixson family cemetery, near Dunlap, Bledsoe County Greenwood Columbia, Maury County - table tombs Zion Church Mt. Pleasant, Maury Co. the Cumberland Bledsoe, Van Buren & Overton Counties - tent tombs South Carolina Antioch Baptist Church - Pickens County - gravehouse fun reading: Low-Cost Large Scale Aerial Photography & the Upland South Folk Cemetery, by Eric B. Wolf, Northwest Missouri State University 2006

a world away:   slot & tab tombs in the Middle East (Israel/Palestine, Egypt, Turkey)

similar - the larger wooden grave shelter "OBSERVATIONS ON THE FORM AND FUNCTION OF MIDDLE TENNESSEE GRAVEHOUSES", Donald B. Ball, Tennessee Anthropologist, Tennessee Anthropological Association II(1):29-62. 1977. An intensive survey of three contiguous Middle Tennessee counties (Cannon, Coffee, and Rutherford) has documented a total of 16 extant gravehouses in nine cemeteries plus to former location of several others. Built to cover an in-ground interment, these structures were found to exhibit a high degree of diachronic attribute similarity when recorded in detail and compared architecturally to one another. It is suggested that these structures represent a traditionally patterned mechanism for the tangible expression of sentiment on a personal, rather than social, basis. To place these little studied structures in a spatial and historical framework, data are presented pertinent to both their distribution in North America and probable European source area.

photos of three grave houses in NE Georgia:

child's low gravehouse ca. 1968 child's bavarian-style gravehouse ca. 1978. photos 11-14 group gravehouse

Southern Graveshelters and English Lych-gates: The Search for Culture Trait Origins, Gregory Jeane, Tributaries, Vol. III, Alabama Folklife Association. Association for Gravestone Studies, Massachusetts Intro to Archaeology Gravestone Project table tombs in Georgia and Tennessee on box crypts and table gravestones in Missouri religion as art: gravestone iconography Sickness and Death in the Old South wooden gravemarker/headboard, Chattanooga, Hamilton Co. TN Where is this gravestone shelter?	Triangular Burial Monuments by Lonsdale MacFarland Green 1999 Center for Rural Life, University of the South      Comb Grave tent-style The tabletop tomb was a fad during the mid-19th century. "The people are buried in the ground, underneath the box tomb," Ruedrich said. "Yet half the box tombs I've worked on have had their tops taken off by curiosity-seekers looking for a body. So the more people who understand that no one is buried in there, the better off we'll be." - Dean Ruedrich, historic preservationist, Ruedrich Restorations of Bunn NC. & btw, what does S.T.K.S.H.T.W.S. mean?
Falling Springs Baptist Church cemetery -> Allred, Overton County, Tennessee other sites w/photos 1 2 3 4 5 6

aniconism in religion, opposition to the use of icons or visual images to depict living creatures or religious figures. Such opposition is particularly relevant to the Jewish, Islamic, and Byzantine artistic traditions, eg, iconoclasm. The biblical Second Commandment (part of the First Commandment to Roman Catholics and Lutherans), "You shall not make yourself a graven image, or any likeness ... - Encyclopædia Britannica cenotaph literally "empty tomb", from the Greek kenotaphion, from kenos empty + taphos tomb. A symbolic tomb, honoring the dead but not containing the body; often a tomb or a monument erected to commemorate a person or persons whose remains are elsewhere, such as soldiers buried abroad or sailors lost at sea. chest tomb aka cadaver tomb, tomb chest tomb designed in the form of a cist or stone box placed over a burial. Its outward form often reproduces the features of the classical sarcophagus or medieval effigy base. - Structural Images of the North East Project, England ledger stone large (typically 3ft x 6ft) flat (horizontal) stone that covers the top of a gravesite, flush with the terrain or floor; inscribed floor slabs One of the main challenges has been in repairing the monuments, many of which are brick lined graves with ledger stones on top and a monument on top of the ledger. The design of the graves was to facilitate the removal of a ledger stone so that additional family members could be placed in the grave (some graves contain up to eight people). - on Nunhead Cemetery mausoleum (Middle English, from Latin, from Greek mausOleion, from MausOlos Mausolus died ab 353 B.C., ruler of Caria; 15th century) 1 : a large tomb; especially : a usually stone building with places for entombment of the dead above ground mortise a hole, groove, or slot into or through which some other part of an arrangement of parts fits or passes; especially : a cavity cut into a piece of material (as timber) to receive a tenon: a projecting member in a piece of wood or other material for insertion into a mortise to make a joint plinth a block serving as a base for a statue or gravestone; the lowest member of a base; subbase sarcophagus (Latin sarcophagus (lapis) limestone used for coffins, from Greek (lithos) sarkophagos, literally, flesh-eating stone, from sark- sarc- + phagein to eat; 1619) : a stone coffin; broadly : COFFIN sepulchre or sepulcher (Middle English sepulcre, from Old French, from Latin sepulcrum, sepulchrum, from sepelire to bury; akin to Greek hepein to care for, Sanskrit saparyati he honors; 13th century) 1 : a place of burial : TOMB tomb (Middle English tombe, from Anglo-French tumbe, from Late Latin tumba sepulchral mound, from Greek tymbos; perhaps akin to Latin tumEre to be swollen; 13th century) 1 a : an excavation in which a corpse is buried : GRAVE b : a place of interment 2 : a house, chamber, or vault for the dead 3 : a building or structure resembling a tomb (as in appearance) tympanum / crown the top portion of a gravestone (or doorway) above the uppermost horizontal line. Traditional English and New England headstones had semicircular tympanums and footstones triangular typmpanums.

b o o k recommendations M. Ruth Little, Sticks and Stones: Three Centuries of North Carolina Gravemarkers 1998 University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill "best book i've read on the subject" - tpk types of    ---> gravemarkers figure 1.2
types of headstone shapes figure 1.10 1 Baroque (eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries); 2 Neoclassiscal Revival (nineteenth to early twentieth centuries).