Abby Boewe Burnett

Growing up in the exotic cultures of Iran, Pakistan and India, Abby Boewe Burnett dreamed of becoming an archaeologist. Sometimes the professors who came to visit her father, director of the Fulbright Program for international education exchange, told her stories and answered her questions. Other times, her father, Charles Boewe, took her to the Americans' excavation sites, and she got to see for herself the artifacts that brought history out of the ground.

Many children share her dream, but Burnett found her own unique way to live it. The revelations she seeks hide at the edge of the dirt, sometimes covered with lichen and eroded by time. The tombstones she loves release stories, tales of hanged men and tragic women, in a rich, secret language set in stone.

Burnett's passion for the above-ground archaeology of cemeteries grew over the past 20 or more years, until lectures and short articles for newspapers, historical society journals, Arkansas Encyclopedia entries and Gravestone Studies publications could no longer contain it. The Kingston resident thought she'd collect those papers into a manuscript, then she thought she'd do a little research to fill in the gaps.

The result was a 260-page book, Gone to the Grave: Burial Customs of the Arkansas Ozarks, 1850-1950, published in October 2014 by University Press of Mississippi. Until now, it's been in hardback only, a $65 investment for libraries and historical societies. But through the efforts of event organizers, the $30 paperback will be released May 17 at Books in Bloom, and Burnett will be a speaker at the annual Eureka Springs literary festival.

BOOKS IN BLOOM

"Abby is well known to many of us on the [Carroll and Madison Public Library Foundation] Board," says Jean Elderwind, co-chairman

of Books in Bloom, now in its 10th year. "The Books in Bloom Committee has been anxiously waiting for her book to come out for a couple of years.

"Our Books in Bloom audience has shown us year after year that not only do they like popular fiction, but they also are an enthusiastic audience for nonfiction, especially books about the Ozarks region and its history," Elderwind continues. "Given that Abby is a local and is well known and well respected as a researcher, adding her to the roster was the easiest decision the committee has made in quite a while."

Elderwind approached Steve Yates, assistant director at University Press of Mississippi, asking him to hurry the paperback edition of "Gone to the Grave" for the event.

"Often when a book shows promise, we will bring out a paperback," Yates says. "Sometimes that can be 12 months after a hardback, sometimes longer, sometimes, sadly, never. However, this book's promise was evident. Then along came the opportunity at Books in Bloom, right in the cultural heart of the Arkansas Ozarks. It seemed an ideal occasion to launch the paperback."

But who can be expected to buy a book about death, dying and burial customs?

"It is the most interesting book you will ever read," promises Tommie Mooney of Lamar, a friend of Burnett's and fellow historian who does genealogy research. "I could hardly put it down once I got my copy. I realize not all folks will like it and want to read it, but I think as a general rule most of them will read it out of curiosity -- and they will learn a lot!"

LIFE AND DEATH

Curiosity fueled Burnett's interest even after she realized archaeology was more "test pits and soil analysis" than "a steady stream of exciting finds." Her paternal grandparents, who lived in West Salem, Illinois, were her link to the United States and to a much more normal family life.

"Both my parents are writers and biographers," Burnett says, adding that it was not unusual for her mother to leap up from the dinner table to consult the Dictionary of American Biography or for her father to lecture on the correct uses of "albeit" during the meal.

"We lived overseas," she says, "with no television and no Internet."

On summer visits to her grandparents between boarding school semesters, Burnett became "interested in death in a positive, life-affirming way," she jokes. Her grandparents were Moravian, a religious denomination related to Catholicism, and their customs piqued her already voracious interest. Walking the church cemetery with her grandfather, who kept its records, Burnett saw how men and women were buried separately from each other, even down to infants. Her great-grandmother was the first buried outside the cemetery fence, she remembers, because the women's side was full, and her grandfather told her how his uncle -- then 3 -- willed himself to die, saying, "I want to be with Mama."

"They're fond but sad memories," she admits.

Stones were in German, and the symbolism was unusual and complex. One verse -- in English, not German -- captured her teenage imagination:

"The voice at midnight came,

"He started up to hear,

"A mortal arrow pierced his frame,

"He fell but felt no fear."

"He must have died in an Indian attack," she imagined. No, she found out. It was dysentery.

Like that one, many stories were simpler, once you knew the language. The grandest monument in the cemetery often belongs to the monument dealer, she recalls learning, because it never sold.

PASSION IN PRINT

While studying English -- "the family trade," she jokes -- at Principia College in Alton, Ill., Abby Boewe met Ron Burnett, who became her mentor and later her husband. They were married in England in 1980 and intended to stay there, but at about the same time, his work permit was denied and his mother was found dead of natural causes at her home in Gravette. In December of that year, Burnett moved into her mother-in-law's house and started learning new things -- like how to cook.

"I grew up with servants," she recalls. "I never went near a kitchen! I was literally not allowed to because it made extra work for the servants."

Encouraged by her husband -- and her stomach, she admits -- Burnett became a passionate cook, which led to 15 years as a food columnist and contributing writer for The Springdale News, one of the predecessors of this newspaper. As a "correspondent," she sometimes covered significant historical events, among them the Huntsville funeral for former Gov. Orval Faubus, and honed her skills for a stint as interim editor of The Madison County Record.

"There was no crossover between food and death," she jokes, "except toward the end of the column, I did ask readers for stories about funeral food."

Burnett's reputation as a reporter led to the writing of her first book, "When the Presbyterians Came to Kingston," which was self-published in 2000 and will be rereleased by the Madison County Historical and Genealogical Society later this year. One particular reader contacted her, seeking a tribute to the funders of new bathroom facilities at the church. What Burnett discovered, digging as she always had, was how a huge church was created in a tiny Ozarks town -- and how it disappeared.

"The thing you set out to do isn't always the thing you end up with," she muses. "There are always so many little, circuitous trails, and so much happens by chance."

One of those happy chances for Burnett was bumping into Fayetteville artist William Flanagan in Evergreen, the community's most historic cemetery. She was hunting lambs on tombstones.

"I love it when people have a tombstone quest," she says, laughing. "That was my first."

"I've always loved graveyards," Flanagan says, describing them as "sculpture gardens for the dead," and their common interest forged a friendship strengthened by working side by side on a project to document the graves in Evergreen. In the end, it was Flanagan who encouraged Burnett to look beyond the papers she was writing for various journals and consider a book.

Citing her love of language and detail, he says, "Abby's perfect for that."

It was death -- or actually, mistaken identity -- that forged a bond between Mooney and Burnett. Mooney came to the newspaper office in Huntsville and mentioned she knew one of the former columnists, Vernon Eaton. "Oh, he's dead, isn't he?" she remembers Burnett remarking. As it turned out, it was not that Vernon Eaton but a different man named Vernon Eaton who had died that week, but "she and I kept in touch and found out we had a lot in common," Mooney remembers. Mooney, who is 82 -- and still works full time -- shared memories of "the way things were done when I was growing up" with Burnett for her book, but they also shop flea markets and yard sales and visit cemeteries together.

"Abby is so generous with her time and knowledge that I don't remember if we first met at a library where she was speaking or on a cemetery tour," says Bertie Wells of Deer. "Her enthusiasm is contagious. People at her talks and cemetery tours respond readily to her huge interest and realize they have tales to tell, too.

"When I saw the film 'Silent Storyteller' [an AETN production that featured Burnett] I loved the pictures of Abby getting in her vehicle with her lunch, telling the dogs goodbye and taking off for a graveyard. I wanted to be in that vehicle."

Shonna Harvey, shelter manager at Paws & Claws Pet Shelter in Huntsville, knows Burnett because she volunteers there every Tuesday, picking up donations, bathing dogs, answering phones and helping coordinate the first-ever Color Me Fun Run fundraiser yesterday.

"We do get quite a few people who come and volunteer once or twice, but rarely do we have somebody who comes back every single week," she says. "Abby is a one in a million kind of girl."

Even Debbie Upton of Wesley, who edited "Gone to the Grave" for University Press of Mississippi, became a fan.

"After her book came out, I took her out to lunch," she says. "I wanted her to know how excited I was about her book coming out. The number of university presses is limited, so it's a real honor to be published by one. It says a lot about the book, I think."

STORIES TO LIVE ON

From start to finish, Burnett invested nearly 10 years in "Gone to the Grave." The peer review and editing process alone took two years. And she readily admits two things:

"If I had known then what I know now, I would have been so much better organized," she says. And reining in her passion might have saved her cutting about a third of the book to make it viable for publication. ("There's enough for another one," Flanagan says.)

But it's the stories that always drew Burnett in, not the less appetizing aspects like the early years of embalming. She bought the textbook, she says, because she had to, "but there were parts I couldn't look at." She was, however, fascinated by the story of the early undertakers gathered in Searcy to learn about the new process of embalming -- and how they were lucky enough to have an indigent die in jail so they had a body for the visiting New York City expert to use. And how the body was displayed in store windows for weeks afterward.

Clearly, Burnett's popularity as a speaker for historical societies and civic clubs rests on her ability to choose her topics wisely. Everyone enjoys tombstone symbolism, she says, and understanding the secret language that reveals the meaning of clasping hands and broken columns. Garden clubs like the lilies and roses and vines found on tombstones. But Burnett still digs below the dirt, looking for the signatures that are current passion. She has fallen in love with the stone carvers of the early Ozarks -- so much so that she helped to purchase a tombstone for Nick Miller, who was buried in the Berryville city cemetery without one.

"My dream," she says, "is to be an evening speaker at the Association for Gravestone Studies."

Her topic? She'd love to know more about Lucy Daniel, who carved the Goddess of Liberty statue at Pea Ridge National Military Park but never signed the tombstones Burnett knows she carved.

"She told an interviewer that she did the lettering on the stones made by her father, so she did carve. They had a shop in Springdale very briefly in the 1880s," she says. "When you pull the dirt back and you see a signature? I really love that moment."

NAN Profiles on 05/10/2015