The Other Side of the Cemetery
Taking photographs in Baltimore's Loudon Park.
Loudon Park is an historic cemetery dedicated back in 1853 on the west side of Baltimore. I grew up down the street from the graveyard and used to ride my bike all over the area — and it’s pretty big… about 100 acres or so. The cemetery is split up roughly into three parts — a newer section with burials mostly after 1900, an older section with mostly burials from the 19th century, and then a National Cemetery (which actually might be considered a separate graveyard). Definitely it was a place that as a kid was a source of much inspiration… you can let your imagination just run around like a rabid dog in a place like that.
The photographs here are unfiltered and were taken in July 2023 during a hike through the old part of the park. This is just a general look at the old parts of the graveyard, I’ll have more in-depth views and show some of the local dead celebrities buried here in a later post.
I should note that when I was in 10th grade or so, I got the notion that I wanted to be a gravedigger. So a friend and I went up to find the cemetery office and apply for work. No one was available at the office, so we wandered out into the park and came upon a couple groundskeepers. We told them our plan and they looked at us kinda funny. Told us that if we wanted to talk with the right people, we’d have to go to “the other side of the cemetery”.
We never figured out where that was or what otherwise they may have meant by “the other side of the cemetery”. But years later, I wrote a very short story where “the other side of the cemetery” means the part underneath where you would be walking. And I styled the graveyard in that story after Loudon Park.
