M.A. Kleen

Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts

Designed by landscape architect Henry A. S. Dearborn and opened in 1848, Forest Hills Cemetery, at 95 Forest Hills Avenue in Boston, Massachusetts, is a historic rural cemetery. The area was originally owned by the town of Roxbury, until Boston annexed Roxbury in 1868. Its forested paths wind their way through 275 acres, in which approximately 16,000 people are laid to rest. Like many rural cemeteries, Forest Hills doubles as a garden and arboretum.

Brookline architect Charles W. Panter designed Forest Hills Cemetery’s Gothic-Revival main gate, which was erected in 1865. It is made from Roxbury puddingstone and buff sandstone, which gives it a distinct appearance. An inscription from Psalm 121 over the entrance reads, “He that keepeth thee will not slumber.”

Memorial to Louis Ernest Mieusset (1881-1886), son of Louise Helluin Mieusset, who designed fashionable hats for Boston’s elites. She paid for this hauntingly lifelike white marble statue of her son sitting in a boat with all his favorite toys with money she saved for his schooling, leaving her grief stricken and penniless in her old age. According to popular lore, Louis drowned in Jamaica Pond, but some researchers maintain he actually died of scarlet fever.

Bellamy Mansion in Wilmington, North Carolina

This majestic mansion and gardens transports you back to the Victorian Era.

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Built for a prominent North Carolina slaveholder and his family, the Bellamy Mansion on Market Street in Wilmington’s Historic District is slowly being restored to its former glory. Today, you can tour the mansion and nearby servant quarters, and purchase souvenirs in the former carriage house. It’s a fascinating glimpse at a bygone era.

Designed by Wilmington architect James F. Post in 1859, this 22-room Greek Revival and Italianate-style mansion took nearly two years to build. It was completed in 1861, just as North and South were embroiled in civil war. Dr. John Dillard Bellamy (1817-1896) commissioned the home for his large family and their closest servants and slaves. Dr. Bellamy was an ardent secessionist who owned over one hundred slaves throughout North Carolina.

In early 1865, the family fled Wilmington during an outbreak of yellow fever, but wouldn’t return until the fall because the Union Army had occupied the city and were using their mansion as a headquarters. Union General Joseph Roswell Hawley wasn’t keen on returning the property to an unabashed rebel. He wrote, “having for four years been making his bed, he now must lie on it for awhile.”

Heid’s of Liverpool in Liverpool, New York

Heid’s of Liverpool, at 305 Oswego Street in Liverpool, New York, west of Syracuse, opened in 1917 and has been serving Hofmann hotdogs ever since (except for a four-year period in the ’90s when a family feud erupted). The iconic diner appeared on the Travel Channel’s Man vs. Food in 2010.

Diner Resources

EIU Memories: Aaron’s Barbershop

I attended Eastern Illinois University during a time of change, when longtime fixtures of the community disappeared and new things rose. EIU’s campus is very different from when I first set foot there, but the town of Charleston has changed as well.

Aaron’s Barbershop was local institution, and I was lucky to get my haircut by the man himself. His shop, tucked in a strip mall across the street from campus, is empty now—a sad remnant of the past. When I look inside, I can still see the red bench where I waited for a haircut, and the glass case that held old hair care products and candy for sale, and an old cash register. A thin layer of dust covers the empty shelves.

Aaron Buchanan opened his barber shop in the University Village strip mall at Fourth Street and Lincoln avenue, across the street from EIU’s campus, in 1963 or ’64. He charged 50 cents. My dad attended EIU from 1963 to 1967, and he remembers getting his hair cut by Aaron.

Milanese Italian Restaurant

The Ghost of Rome

Bronze, neoclassical sarcophagus for Fredrick William Schumacher (1863-1957) in Green Lawn Cemetery, 1000 Greenlawn Avenue in Columbus, Ohio. Schumacher was a German immigrant and advertising executive who later became a patron of the arts and president of the Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts from 1904 to 1923.

Monmouth Battlefield State Park

In 1778, two armies slugged it out in sweltering heat in these east-central New Jersey fields. Though technically a draw, the Continental Army showed it could finally stand toe-to-toe with the best soldiers in the British Army.

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The Battle of Monmouth Court House was fought on June 28, 1778 between American forces commanded by General George Washington and Major Generals Nathanael Greene, William Lord Stirling Alexander, Charles Lee, and Marquis de Lafayette and British forces commanded by Lt. Gen. Charles Cornwallis and Lt. Gen. Baron Wilhelm von Knyphausen near Freehold, New Jersey during the American Revolutionary War. The battle was a tactical draw, with both sides exhausted after fighting the longest battle of the war in brutal heat.

After France’s entry into the war on the American side, British Lt. Gen. Sir Henry Clinton withdrew his army from Philadelphia and retreated toward New York City, which was under British control. He sent several thousand Tory volunteers and most of his supplies down the Delaware River, while his remaining 10,000-man army marched overland. General Washington’s 12,000-man army caught up with them at Monmouth Court House.

Washington sent Maj. Gen. Charles Lee and Marquis de Lafayette forward with 5,000 men to attack Clinton’s 1,500-man rearguard. When Clinton turned Maj. Gen. Cornwallis’ forces around to strike Lee’s left flank, the Americans broke and withdrew in confusion. Just then, General Washington arrived ahead of the rest of his army and sharply rebuked Lee. He cobbled together a defensive line, but that also broke under relentless British attacks. Washington’s third line held.