[gentle music] - Elmwood is the oldest active cemetery in Memphis, and its executive director plays an outsized role in celebrating and honoring the rich historical legacy of Elmwood's permanent residence.

I'm Mark White, and this is A Conversation with Kim Bearden.

Kim, welcome to the show.

- Thanks for having me.

- Pleasure to have you here.

- Yeah, it's gonna be fun.

- So you've been at Elmwood for more than two decades, is that true?

- Yes, it is, and I sometimes can't believe it.

Usually people ask me, how did you get into this?

Did you study like funeral science to get into this, absolutely not.

I studied English.

This is what you do with an English degree, with a good old liberal arts degree.

I think that the world needs more of them.

But yes, I went to the University of Memphis and I was in my final semester there in, gosh, the last century, it was like 1998 and the fall semester, I only had one class left to take, and at that time I was working at the Memphis Botanic Garden and I was the receptionist there, and I knew that I wanted to do something in the nonprofit world.

I wasn't sure what that was.

It was either that or become a teacher or a lawyer.

And I just decided that I was really quite tired of school at that point.

So a friend of mine who worked there, came to me and said, oh, well, I have a friend who runs this organization in town.

It's this historic organization, this beautiful place, it's called Elmwood.

And I said, oh, really, what do they do?

And she was like, well, they really celebrate history there, and they're very interested in stories.

And that spoke my language.

So I called and they answered the phone and said, Elmwood Cemetery and I was like, what?

[both laughing] This was the last job that would ever have been on my mind.

But I'm so grateful.

I'm so grateful that I kept an open mind and came and interviewed and loved the people.

Really loved the place.

The first time that they opened up the lot books and showed me what kind of history we were talking about and what kind of connections there were to the Memphis story and even my life and I understood it.

I felt like I could do something with this, or at very least I could learn something great from a place like this.

So I'm very grateful that I've been here.

Later this year will be my 27th year on staff.

I did not mean this to happen.

I did not set out to work at Elmwood for over two decades.

It was not on purpose, but it has enriched my life.

It has been...

This place has been here for me through ups and downs of my life.

And it has been rock steady for me, and I'm just so grateful to have had the opportunity to work here and learn from it.

- Well, you mentioned all the history, 1852, Elmwood was founded.

So there's an awful lot of history there.

And I know you've done some writing about that history.

I know the blog on the website and some other articles.

Tell us a little bit about, when you started writing, did you think, I'm gonna write a bunch of history for Elmwood, or was that a childhood dream?

- Well, the writing, I think I've always been a writer.

It occurred to me when I was a child, we had teachers who were very focused on literary arts and reading, and I had some wonderful teachers in the school system that I was brought up in.

One of my earliest teacher was very into William Faulkner, and she read us William Faulkner's ghost stories, that's one of my formative memories.

And then I had a wonderful teacher in high school who focused a lot on reading classics.

And so I left high school with a deep sense of literary tradition, and I just enjoyed writing.

And I thought that maybe I had a voice and I could contribute a little something to it.

I didn't know that one day, I would write a book about Elmwood.

I was surprised to see that actually happen in my life.

And sometimes when I look at the book, I'm still sort of shocked by it.

But yes, I've done blog work.

In my early days at Elmwood, I asked my then boss if I could please take over the newsletter and she let me do that.

And I helped with the Elmwood 2002 book.

I was really a big part of that.

And so yes, I've written articles and I've written stuff [both laughing] throughout my life.

People tend to ask me to write about the cemetery.

I have written for a publication that was published in England.

It's a cemetery textbook.

It's about museums and interpreting death for the public.

So I've contributed that to that as well.

I'm proud of my writing work and I hope to do more of it professionally as time goes on.

- I'm sure you will get that opportunity.

Speaking of authors, there are authors buried here, Shelby Foote, one of those.

So we can talk some more about some of the people that has their final resting places here.

Again, we've got old Memphis history here.

Can you talk to us a little bit about who's here and maybe some people that we're not entirely aware of that are here?

- Sure, oh my gosh, I could do this all day.

How long do you have?

So there are 80,000 people buried in Elwood, and Elmwood was founded in 1852, like you noted earlier.

So lots of Memphis history was founded here.

When the cemetery was started, there were several other cemeteries located downtown.

Two of them notably were the Butler Morris and the Winchester Cemeteries.

And those cemeteries after a time, for various reasons, were closed.

And most of the inhabitants, the residents we like to call them, were disinterred.

If you don't know what that word is, it means to be dug up and moved somewhere else.

So most of the residents were disinterred and moved over to Elmwood, which helped Elmwood really gain a reputation for being a solid cemetery for Memphians to use.

So those people who old Memphis history were brought here.

So if you ever come to Elmwood and you're walking around and you see grave sites that you know date back to the 1830s, the late 1820s, that's why.

So some of the people, the public might not know are buried here.

We have many veterans buried in the cemetery.

It's a tradition that I'm very proud of.

And one of them is a an American Revolutionary War veteran named John Smith.

Now he's not the John Smith that you're thinking of.

Not the Pocahontas story, I wish, but no, this is a different John Smith and he was buried in the Winchester Cemetery and moved to Elmwood and his daughter married Isaac Shelby and that's the man for whom Shelby County was named.

Other people who are buried at Elmwood that the public might not be familiar with.

Dorothea Spotswood, Henry Winston.

Now that's deep American history.

She is the daughter of Patrick Henry.

We all remember Patrick Henry's words, "Give me liberty or give me death."

And she grew up in the household with him.

And to imagine the people who would've been at her dinner table would've been just fascinating.

So I think that unfortunately, there's not a terrible amount written about her, but my imagination goes wild when I think about her and the things that she would've been privy to in her formative years.

There is a spot in the cemetery where there are over three hundred formerly enslaved individuals buried.

And that's often a surprise to people when they learn that that section is here.

But Elmwood, from its inception, was always open to all people.

So many old southern cemeteries were segregated from the outset, and they were segregated for many reasons, by religion, by race, what have you.

Elmwood was not, it was internally segregated, but the wonderful thing is that we have so many different kinds of people buried here that we have a rich, wonderful wealth of stories that we can share with the public for the many kinds of tours that we offer.

So yeah, those are just a few of the people who spring to my mind.

But there are so many more that have stories worth telling.

- Yeah, I heard a long time ago read somewhere that the dates on a tombstone are important, but it's the dash in the middle that tells you the story.

And I'm sure there are just, as you said, thousands of stories here.

So how does a day-to-day work at Elmwood, it must take an awful lot to keep this going, as you said, eighty acres, all of the people that are here.

I know you're constantly doing funerals just about every day here.

So tell us a little bit about what it takes to keep Elmwood running.

- Oh my gosh, Elmwood, it's a full court press.

I think that maybe people don't think about how much work goes into a place like Elmwood, but Elmwood is not the kind of cemetery that you can come in and mow and then leave.

It is the kind of cemetery that takes a lot of care and a lot of maintenance.

First of all, just because of its age.

It's over 170 years old and we have buildings on the property that need care.

We have asphalt and concrete and we're constantly making improvements to sidewalks.

And we're constantly taking down and planting new trees.

Elmwood was founded as what is called a rural cemetery.

So rural cemetery is a cemetery, it is what it sounds like, it was started in the countryside.

And they were meant to sort of embrace the bucolic beauty, if you will, of the country and nature and a return to God's Garden of Eden, if you will sort of.

Cemeteries like Elmwood were available to the public as well as the earliest of parks.

So in the old days, in the 18th or the 19th century when you wanted to go to a park, you would come to Elmwood Cemetery.

The cemetery is filled with majestic old towering trees that offer wonderful shade for visitors and beauty.

And the birds find homes in them.

And you could walk through the winding carriage paths and discover something new around every turn.

Every corner shows something that will really ignite the imagination.

It's a place filled with beauty in the statuary as well that people have left behind.

And to your point of how much does it take to take care of Elmwood, it takes a lot.

We have a staff of 11 individuals who work all the time, and we have a grounds crew that comes in and cuts our grass once every 7 to 10 days.

And to put it in perspective, Elmwood is 80 acres and it's filled with monuments that are above ground.

Nothing here is flat to the ground, so you can't push a mower over it, if you know what I mean.

So you have to weed eat around every single stone that's here.

It is a monumental task, pun intended, but it is, it's a monumental task.

It takes several days to get the whole cemetery done and it's hard work and it's worth it.

When you come and visit the cemetery and you drive over the span bridge and see it for the first time, you're sort of...

The feeling that I get is that you're sort of Dorothy opening up the door when she enters Oz and suddenly everything's in color.

That's how I feel when I drive over the bridge every morning.

It's just utterly beautiful.

- And it's not just sitting here waiting for somebody.

I mean, you guys have so many events.

I looked on the calendar for today, the rest of the day is full.

So you're doing quite a few things with tours.

My wife and I have been on tours here at night, and so it's always progressing.

There's always something else going on, something new.

Tell us a little bit about the events coming up and just how the community can get involved in those events.

- Sure, so on top of the average 300 burials that we manage every year, we also do a lot of special events.

We are an active cemetery in both ways.

And the events that we have here are, gosh, they're wide ranging.

We try to embrace every part of Memphis history in our tours.

So we make them thematic.

For instance, tonight, the tour that we've got coming up is the Memphis Music History tour.

We have a great number of musicians who are buried here long ranging over history.

So some modern ones and some from the old days.

And we're gonna be talking about them all.

We'll walk to the grave sites where these people are buried and we'll play their music at their grave sites.

It's a really effective way to get the story down.

And let's see, Sunday we've got the Scandals and Scoundrels tour.

That is a tour.

It is what it sounds like, I like to call it the Old Time Gossip tour.

So if you want to hear what somebody did wrong or bad or may have landed them in the newspaper for not such good reasons, that's the tour you wanna take.

But we do all kinds of tours throughout the year.

And our biggest is in October, we do the Soul of the City tour and that's where the public can come in and meet the people who are buried here, the residents is what we call them.

And you get to meet eight characters who are buried here, who tell their stories.

And it's over two nights, it's grown over the years.

It's a huge event and it's wonderful.

We light up the cemetery and give everybody a chance to see it in a different way.

It's a big... Today, we also have the Music and Mayhem concert.

Excuse me, lemme say that again.

Today we have the Music and Mayhem concert that's being put on by the Beethoven Club.

It's a sold out event this afternoon.

So we do all kinds of things here and it's all for the support and care of the cemetery.

Everything that we do is a fundraiser and the fees brought in by tours all go to support cutting the grass out there.

- So Kim Bearden, what are your favorite spots at Elmwood?

You drive over that bridge every morning and go to your office, but where do you go when you wanna walk through and experience it from your angle?

- Well, thank you for asking.

People don't often ask me what my favorites are, but everyone who works here does have a favorite or several favorite spots in the cemetery.

And we like to sit around and talk about them and they change over time.

We have a... Several of us have a long running, many years running conversation about this and the history behind each spot and why our spots are more interesting than others.

So there is a lady buried in the cemetery named Dorothy Whitaker.

Her headstone, it's a simple, what we call a two by one, and it says "Dorothy Ann Whitaker, born who knows, died who cares".

That's what it says.

And it's not because someone was saying anything ugly about her at all.

She chose to have that on her headstone.

It's because she believed that ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

She had lived her life and she didn't need any kind of true monumental great thing left for her.

And I think it's a very tongue in cheek way to memorialize yourself.

Gosh, what are some of my other spots?

Some of my other spots are not monuments, they're trees.

So we have a level two arboretum here, and I think we're about to become a level three.

That means that we have 90 different species here, which it sounds harder, it sounds easier than it is, I should say It's pretty hard work taking care of the trees here.

But we have some pretty amazing trees.

For instance, we have an American elm tree that's up in a part of the cemetery called Chapel Hill Circle that we think that when that tree dies, of course you don't know how old a tree really is until it comes down, but we believe that that tree was planted or when the cemetery was founded.

So the name Elmwood incidentally was chosen out of a hat.

The founders of the cemetery needed a name for the place.

So they all wrote different names on slips of paper and put them in a hat and someone drew out the name Elmwood.

Now there were no elm trees on the property, so they had to order the elm trees from New York and have them brought in, which they did.

And we believe that this particular elm tree was one of the original that were planted here.

It's very old and large and I can't believe it survived Dutch Elm disease, but it did somehow.

We also have another tree here that's an Atlas cedar tree.

It's over 100 years old and it's just gorgeous.

So not everything that is my favorite is necessarily a monument.

Some of them are just living things.

- When I mention about Elmwood, my friends always say, oh, my grandparents are buried there, my grandparents are buried here.

And so everybody has a little bit of a special story and a special way of coming through and experiencing this area.

And so you get to do that every day when you're at work.

And so those are some of the most special times.

I would imagine this... Elmwood has been part of your life for so long.

I know you met your husband through here.

- I did, I met my husband through the cemetery.

And so another reason I'm eternally grateful to this place.

- Yeah, he was doing a documentary, I believe, on Elmwood.

- He was, and he likes to tell the story.

And this was years before we began dating, but he likes to say that I walked into the studio and he just instantly fell in love with me.

And that is not true, I do not believe that, but it is a lovely thing for him to say.

It means a lot to me.

But yes, we reconnected years later and fell in love and we got married in 2017 and we're a package deal.

We do a lot of history things together.

- So what you're doing at Elmwood, does it match what other similar cemeteries, I know there's probably few that are this age or this old, but are you doing similar things that they're doing or maybe something a little bit different?

- Well, Elmwood is unique in the area, but I can tell you that there are many cemeteries in the United States who have embraced tourism because they understand that one day, the cemetery is gonna be less busy in the cemetery business and will need to open its doors wider to the public.

And Elmwood is in the last probably, I'm gonna say decade of its active life as an active cemetery.

There will always be burials here at Elmwood, but we won't be as active as what I should probably say.

So yes, there are many other cemeteries that do the same kind of programming we do.

In fact, many of us are in touch with one another.

And it's great that way because we are not in competition with one another.

We're in totally different cities.

It's not like we're gonna franchise and be in competition.

So the cemeteries that pop to my mind are the Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta.

They do incredible programming and really celebrate their history and they take care of their grounds beautifully.

So when I started this deeper dive into the sort of history museum world about a decade ago, I looked to them first.

But I also cribbed an idea from the Hollywood Cemetery in Los Angeles, California.

They do a cemetery movie night in the there.

And so it started our own Cemetery Cinema.

On May 30th we've got the Sixth Sense that's gonna show.

But we show movies twice a year here at Elmwood and they typically draw a crowd of about 300 people.

And that's wonderful.

We have all kinds of music and tours and different things that I mentioned before that other cemeteries have...

Many of them have sort of shown the way with, but Elmwood has its own unique flavor.

So the Memphis music history tour can't happen in any other cemetery in the United States as one example.

- Well, and you mentioned that a cemetery kind of naturally winds down.

How many places can people be buried here?

How many people you have about, another 10 or 15,000, I believe, I understand?

- Yeah, I would say about 10,000 grave spaces left.

And the rise of popularity of people being cremated enables us to continue to have ashes buried on family lots for a long time to come.

We're also installing new columbaria all of the time.

So columbarium is a structure that's like a mausoleum, but it's just for ashes.

So those are very popular now and we're installing new ones.

We've got some new structures coming this summer that will be installed behind the office.

So we're always sort of trying to look ahead, embrace the trends that are happening in the cemetery world and look and see even possibly expansion.

So we have a lot of things going on on the back end of Elmwood's operations that the public doesn't necessarily see.

But we're always trying to think ahead.

We are a forward thinking cemetery.

- So Kim, was there a point where you realized that this is the job for me being the executive director at Elmwood?

- Well, I will say there was a point at when I took the job, the week that I took the job, I was still sort of on the fence about working in the cemetery.

I mean, it was not where my career I thought was headed.

I did not possess at that point the imagination to see the possibilities.

So anyway, came to work first day and thought, all right, I'm going to give this a shot 'cause I need a job and I'm just gonna see what it's like.

And they took me, the people who were showing me around the office at that time, they started showing me everything because to work at Elmwood, you have to be sort of an amateur archivist.

So to be able to find everything here is really important.

So they took me back to our archives and they cracked open one of the old daily burial records.

So we keep, still to this day, the tradition.

We keep multiple kinds of records that refer back to one another and that's a safety that a lot of cemeteries do.

So we opened up the daily burial record and what that is, is a list of everybody who dies in order, chronological order.

And in the old days, in the very old days in the 19th century, they used to, someone worked here who tracked cause of death.

And it was fascinating to me to see when these people died, but then they opened another or what they died of because it was stuff that we don't die of anymore, stuff like that.

So we opened up the 1870s book and they showed me the yellow fever book and that sort of just really ignited my imagination.

And I am exactly the kind of person who cannot be bored in a job.

And I've learned that about myself over the years.

Being bored doing work is the kiss of death for me.

I have to have something that I'm thinking about, mulling over and creating.

And in that moment when I saw not just this interesting tie to a major moment in Memphis history and in United States history, I saw the old handwriting and that connected me to a person who was in the office over 150 years previous who sat there with an ink dipped in... With a pen dipped in ink rather and scratched out these names in beautiful cursive writing.

And I realized that I was instantly part of a tradition that not many people got to experience.

It was a very important moment to me and I think that was the moment when I knew that I wanted to stay on and learn as much as I could from this really incredible place.

- Kim, we could continue this conversation forever.

It's been great, thank you very much for being here.

And thank you for watching A Conversation with Kim Bearden.

[gentle music] [acoustic guitar chords]