Wiki Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Dqfn13
Wiki Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Dqfn13
The brick wall between them is obvious to anyone looking on. The outstretch arms joining the two headstones is clear. No words are needed. Now, please take a look at this more modest gravestone of a husband and wife below.
This is the gravestone of John A. Wills, husband, Elizabeth “Libby” Wills, his wife and their daughter Elizabeth Wills. They were buried in 1936 and 1937 in St. Joseph’s Catholic Cemetery in Waterford, New York. At that time, their marriage was called a “Mixed Marriage” and the Catholic pastor forbade a Protestant burial in the Catholic cemetery as was the custom. Apparently, he relented – slightly. If the children would pay for a brickwall to be built around their father, the pastor would allow John to be near Libby. So during the height of the Great Depression when it was a struggle just to afford food, rent and utilities, the eight remaining Wills children paid up to build the brickwall.
You cannot see it. It was constructed beneath the topsoil and separates the coffins of John and Libby. It may even completely wall off John from all the other burials in St. Joseph’s.
This was state of religious tolerance in the 19th and early 20th century and difficult for anyone born in USA after 1980 to imagine.
