In a cemetery, time doesn't move forward. Dates etched on grave markers don't change like the numbers on a digital clock.
Yet a walk through the Provo City Cemetery with sexton Sandy Mitchell can carry one back in time. It's as much a place for the living as it is for the dead.Established in 1853, the city cemetery is one of the oldest in the state. Every one of its 35,000 graves adds a piece to the cemetery's history.
Buried beneath its towering pine trees are Dan Jones, who visited with Joseph Smith in the Carthage, Ill., jail the night before the first president of the LDS Church was killed; Philo T. Farnsworth, the man who invented television; and Brian Watkins, a Provo tennis enthusiast who was murdered in a New York subway station last year.
Orrin Porter Rockwell's first wife, Luana Hart Beebe, is also buried in Provo.
Before the city plotted its cemetery, early Provoans were buried in several locations throughout the area. Burial grounds existed at Fort Utah, Temple Hill (where the Maeser building sits at BYU), the mouth of Slate Canyon and downtown. Some of those bodies were moved to the current cemetery after it opened.
Matilda Haws, who died in 1849 at the age of 23, is one of the first entries in the cemetery records. Mitchell said Haws and her father, George, another early entry in the books, were originally buried at another site.
Years ago, when more ground was available in the cemetery, people bought large plots in which to bury several family members.
The extended family of Abraham O. Smoot, a controversial U.S. senator and LDS Church apostle, has 30-foot by 30-foot piece of land where many of the Smoot clan are buried. A concrete border, recently uncovered by cemetery workers, surrounds the site.
"Uncle" Jesse Knight's large stone monument marks the main cemetery entrance. Knight was a prominent turn-of-the-century businessman whose name appears on several downtown buildings.
Elaborate grave markers have pretty much become a thing of the past, Mitchell said. "There are no figurines or obelisks any more," he said.
"Weeping Mary," as the Elizabeth Smoot Hardy marker has come to be known, depicts a sorrowful woman looking downward. Her eyes seem to follow whomever happens to be looking at her.
Maybe that's why the cemetery's most well-known legend (every cemetery has a legend) revolves around "Weeping Mary."
Mitchell said if one walks around the statue three times saying "weep for me," Mary will follow that person around the base of the statue.
Clyde Dahlman, who died nearly two years ago, has a unique marker. It reads, "Rise and Shout the Cougars are Out." It's fitting for the man who wrote the BYU fight song. A block "Y" is mounted on the headstone.