Paper short abstract:

This paper explores volunteer labor to maintain the long-neglected Eastern Cemetery (Kentucky, US). Volunteers’ place-based meanings develop at the intersection of their everyday acts of care for the site and growing understandings of its history of over-burial, abandonment, and necroviolence.

Paper long abstract:

How do place-based meanings develop at the intersection of care and abandonment? This paper explores how volunteer maintenance of a neglected cemetery in Kentucky (US) produces complex meanings that tie together positive impacts volunteers ascribed to their work and embodied knowledge of the site’s violent past produced through this labor.

In 1989 a whistleblower exposed the clandestine 150-year history of massive over-burial at Louisville’s Eastern Cemetery. With the owners forced into bankruptcy and the cemetery moved into a series of court-appointed managers, the 29-acre (12-hectare) site became neglected and overgrown. Headstones were toppled, stolen, or sunk, and the site became an overgrown space in the city’s core. In 2013, a group of volunteers began to maintain the site, organizing weekly mowing and trimming, and fundraising to replace missing fences and broken gates. A decade into their work, Eastern remains caught at the intersection of care and neglect. In interviews with core volunteers, they express the importance of this labor to their identity and discuss how Eastern became profoundly meaningful in their lives. Their labor, however, also impresses upon volunteers the present-day impacts of Eastern’s history of necroviolence (De León 2015): they struggle in the summer humidity to manage invasive plants, recoil as mowers hit hidden headstsones, twist ankles in sunken ground, and, at times, face families who place blame for the site’s condition on those seeking to remedy it. This paper explores how voluntary labor evokes these embodied contradictions that merge care and neglect into narratives of place-based meaning.