When a person dies, their spirit can live on in several ways. A headstone, a photograph or obituary helps keep their memory alive, even in death.
Candace Summers, senior director of education for the McLean County Museum of History, is hoping to give people a fresh perspective on the process of death and grieving. Her new book Mourning in McLean: The Story of Death, Grieving, and Funerary Customs in McLean County was released in May and is available for purchase at various events this week in the Twin Cities.
Summers will present her book at 7 p.m. Thursday during a public event at Bloomington Public Library; copies will also be available at a book signing 1-3 p.m. Saturday at Bobzbay Books in Bloomington. She said her book serves as a companion piece to a previous display of the same title that was shown last year at the county history museum, because “there was just so much stuff” that didn’t make the cut.
“We didn’t want to lose that information or just tuck it away in our archives,” Summers said. After the museum’s curator of cultural interpretation and communications director suggested to test the water with a publication, Summers said they could feature extra materials and provide more depth to the people that were featured in the display.
An evolution of undertaking
In her research, Summers said she “left no stone unturned, pun intended.” As a historian, that sometimes leads her down a rabbit hole of research.
“I just keep digging and I keep finding more and I want to know everything that I can know about the people who these things once belonged to,” Summers said.
Her book covers past rituals, burial practices and monument makers from the mid-1800s through the 1920s and 1930s. During an interview held at Evergreen Memorial Cemetery, Summers said monuments to the deceased are found “literally everywhere.”
Summers said she found that the Higgins-Jung-Kleinau Co. was the biggest and most prominent monument maker in these parts. Downtown Bloomington’s Pars Rug Gallery currently operates in the same site, but Summers noted you can still see “H.J. Higgins & Co. Marble Works” inscribed on the facade of the stone building.
“I love knowing more about our history and knowing more about the people that are out here in our local cemeteries, because it’s just a [headstone] now, but the stone tells a story about the person who’s interred beneath it,“ Summers said.
In the 1850s, Summers said wagon makers got into the business of fabricating coffins and caskets as a side gig — their custom-designed offers were touted in local newspapers and city directories. The wagon makers then turned into undertakers and then wagon making became a side business, Summers said; undertakers later evolved into the modern funeral homes.
“Towards the turn of the century, that’s when you really start seeing funeral homes take off," she said.
‘Deep mourning’
Summers became familiar with all of the things she was researching over 20 years of work on the Evergreen Cemetery Walk, which ended in 2024.
She said the customs and clothing of grieving surprised her the most, including “how rigid the mourning process was dictated, especially for women.”
“Women got the short end of the stick when it came to mourning,” Summer said. “If your husband passed away you were expected to mourn for at least 2 years.
“That was probably the biggest kind of gender inequality, because for a man, if you lost your wife, the mourning period was a year — but you could shorten it to like 3 months.”
She noted Queen Victoria went into mourning for 40 years until she died in the early 20th century following Prince Albert’s death.
“The several first few years were in deep mourning, where she didn’t interact with anybody. She wore all black,” Summers said, adding they kept the prince’s room exactly how it was before he passed away with his clothing laid out for him.
“Sometimes people would leave out an empty chair for that person with a full dining set added. They would cover their portraits in black fabric as a symbol of mourning,” Summers said. “A lot of our customs, traditions and superstitions all come from that Victorian era.”
That includes allowing extra time people to travel to their services and sitting with the deceased for longer periods of time. Summers said Victorian customs of remembering the dearly departed became a model for both people of America and the United Kingdom.
In a way, traditional customs like holding a wake are still observed, she said, but the meaning or symbolism of them have changed.
“A lot of times, people don’t wear all full black to a funeral anymore. It’s a little more casual, more of a celebratory period, with that note of sadness too,” Summers said.
Cremation is happening more often and people are turning to non-traditional burial methods now, she said. That could include aqua-creamation in high-pressured water or being laid to rest in a tree pod.
“The most fascinating one to me is in the state of Colorado — they allow a Viking funeral pyre. I kind of want that,” Summers said, noting her Danish heritage.
To talk about death helps people be a little less afraid about it, she said. Summers said she hopes her research helps people have a better relationship with the passing of life.
Summers’ presentation takes place from 7-8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 8 at Bloomington Public Library, 205 E. Olive St.; she will also be signing books from 1-3 p.m. Saturday at Bobzbay book store in Downtown Bloomington. The book is also for sale for less than $8 at the McLean County Museum of History. And if you see her there, she says she'll sign it.
