The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1904-02-02
CREMATION OR BURIAL?

victims and are sent forth to attack
1.-The living and start new epidemics.
Burial of the dead in or near cities
is thus an evil that grows at an ever
/, increasing rate of progression. This
is a fact recognized by men who have
studied sanitary science closely, and
many Boards of Health
CEMETERIES NOT PERMANENT.
Another thing against cemeteries is
that they cannot be considered perma-
nent. One is tablished in a part of
city that is considered to be well
adapted for such a purpose, and out of
the way of future development of the
resident district it is thought Is there
one present who has not seen ceme-
teries closed and bodies being removed?
In San Francisco in the seventies some
of us saw the old Yerba Buena give
way to progress on the site of the
present city hall lot, and bones being
dug up and hauled away in dump carts.
After writing the above / came across
the following reference to this same
circumstance. In the Real Estate
Circular, 1895, we read:
Few of us, ever thought of, much
less were worried by, the sacrilege
committed.in the moving of the bones
of the pioneers who We're buried in the
old Yerba Buena cemetery. The re-
mains were rooted out of their resting
place and carried off like so much lum-
Der, to make room for a new city hall.
Did it ever strike those who now strut
their brief hour upon the city stage
that, after their own demise, it is quite
likely their skeletons win also be hus-
tied out of their graves within ten or
twenty years. The grave is not
long home when it is in the path of
a great city's growth. We fear the
sleepers in Lone Mountain and con-
tiguous cemeteries will receive a call
to move long before Gabriel descends
to awake them with the resurrecting
notes Of his trumpet"
The Grand Hotel occupies now the
site of an old cemetery, the bodies from
which We're removed earHer than most
of us remember, that is in the early
fifties. Lone Mountain occupies one
of the most slightly situations in San
Francisco, and there have been many
deter med efforts to move the ceme-
ter;es Ehich are located there. In 1876
Laurel Hill, one of them, was reduced
in size and bodies removed; in the nine
ties it was again reduced and four
thousand bodies moved In 1897 the
mayor approved an ordinance prohibit
ing the burial of the dead within the
City and County of San Francisco, the
preamble of which was:
Whereas. the burial of the dead
within the city cemetery is dangerous
to life and detrimental to the public
health, therefore, the people of the
Of ID
Ordain as follows
Much litigation has attended this ac-
ton and it has been bitterly fought in
the courts, but few months ago it
was declared valid by the Supreme
Court of the State. In and about the /
site of New York how many of the old !
burial places remain today? Those !
about the walls of Trinity and ST. /
PauPs, but where are the others? And
as to the condition of Trinity during
the years. These grounds emitted
such pestilentiaI doors that in 1871 .
layer of earth two or three feet in
thickness was spread over them, and <
again in 1922 were covered with quick
ime they were so offensive to passers
~. In and about Paris it is said
of roads are sometimes
made with grave-stones, showing the
ransitory nature of supposed perna-
lent marking of the places of burial
n regard to stones marking now the
places of the dead which they were
to indicate, Dr.. Oliver Wen
Iell Holmes, speaking of three burial
rounds of Boston and one of New
FORK, says:
THE stones have been shuffled
round like chessmen and nothing
hort of the Day of Judgment will tell
whose bones lie beneath. Epitaphs
we're never famous for truth. but the
Id proverb here lies never had such
wholesale illustration as in these
burial places, where the
tone does lie above and the bones do
OF lie beneath
HONOLULU CEMETERIES.
AS to our local cemeteries. In Nuu- 4
nu valley you see an area not appar-
ntly crowded, but there are lots in
hat cemetery where body has been
laced over body. Records have been
ept since 1S47 and they show $500 bur-
ais in those grounds. No one who
nows anything about the King street
r Kawaiahao burial grounds considers
nat they should be used further. The !
.rmer is badly crowded and many in