Next week, the McLean County Museum of History kicks off Mourning in McLean, a series of coordinated events and hallway displays on the topic of death culled from their permanent collection.
It’s familiar territory for the museum, which for 30 years organized the Evergreen Cemetery Walk depicting McLean County people whose final resting place is there. Senior director of education Candace Summers had the idea for Mourning in McLean even before the decision was made to end the cemetery walk last year, inspired by a coordinated display of Victorian funerary customs and other mourning rituals at the C.H. Moore Homestead and DeWitt County Museum in Clinton.
“The walk sunsetting allowed me to do this massive research undertaking to work with our collections department and our archive on these displays,” Summers said. “It took a lot more time than I was thinking it would—in a good way.”
In contrast to the cemetery walk, which cast actors to embody select dearly departeds for a theatrical walking tour, Mourning in McLean uses objects to tell their stories.
“Each and every object I researched has a person behind it that we have their story,” Summers said.
A variety of artifacts and documents are carefully positioned on each floor of the museum, including funeral clothes, jewelry incorporating loved ones' hair or teeth, and a cooling table, used by funeral home directors before embalming became a common practice.
“I discovered we have so much more in our collection than we can even display about this topic,” Summers said.
A suit on display was owned by Kenneth Curtis, who lived in the eastern McLean County village of Bellflower.
“He wore this suit to school activities, to funerals, shopping around town,” Summers said. “We learn about him, what he did and where he lived. The objects have stories to tell.”
Auxiliary programming associated with Mourning in McLean include an Oct. 18 talk by Summers, lunchtime tour of Evergreen Cemetery and Day of the Dead festivities. In total, the initiative explores how customs vary over time and between customs, while helping people today understand where certain traditions came from.
“Mourning is still a very private, personal, lengthy process and everybody mourns in their own way, but it’s definitely changed over time,” Summers said.
It’s less common, for example, to see mourners dressed in all black. Burial customs have radically changed. You can donate your body to science. Or compost it. Some traditions, however, are enduring—if for different reasons.
“Like the wake,” Summers said. “Now you’re not sitting vigil to see if somebody’s still alive. It’s paying your respects and even coming to celebrate a person’s life.”
Some families still stop the clocks when a loved one dies, open the windows “to let the spirit out” or shroud photographs in black fabric. Flowers, once used to mask the smell of death, have become more of a symbolic gesture.
“A lot of these things hang on,” Summers said.
Five years since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, people today aren’t immune to processing death—even on a large scale. But the development of vaccines and other medical advancements contributing to a sharp decline in infant mortality is, in Summers’ view, the biggest change.
“One of the stories we tell in our case about post-mortem photography is about a boy named Preston Butler, Jr.,” she said. “The last 11 months of his life were very painful.”
A bout of measles became a cold, which led to whooping cough and eventually typhoid pneumonia. At the time, photographs were cumbersome and expensive—with some parents only having and image of their child after death.
“Prior to 1950, the cemeteries were populated with child graves,” Summers said. “You can see doves mourning on the graves of children. Lambs. Those are all symbols of child loss. A lot of that culture evolved around our brief stays on this earth.”
Whether such experiences made people more capable of processing death is a questions Mourning in McLean endeavors to ask. Summers said her two decades researching death have given her a unique perspective.
“I see it just as a part of life,” she said. “It’s the final stage. We mourn, we remember and it’s all a process. To hold onto those memories and cherish those things from our ancestors is a way to celebrate them—while still working through that grieving process.”
