Wooldridge Monuments - Description

Description

The total area of the monuments are 17 by 33 feet (5.2 by 10 m). All eighteen monuments face east, like most of the gravestones in Maplewood Cemetery. The most prominent is a life-size likeness of Wooldridge himself, a 6-foot-tall (1.8 m) marble statue in the center of the site, made in Italy. Fourteen other monuments surrounding Wooldridge are made of limestone, and have more rigid poses. The largest of these represent Wooldridge on his horse, named "Fop". The other limestone statues are 5 feet (1.5 m) tall on 3-foot-tall (0.91 m) bases, and represent family members. Behind these are replicas of a fox, a deer, and two hounds chasing them; the dogs are unidentified on the statue but represent Wooldridge's dogs "Towhead" and "Bob". The statue makers, who hailed from Mayfield and Paducah, Kentucky, never before or after had a more "complex" or "ambitious" project.

The female statues represent Wooldridge's mother Keziah, his sisters Minerva, Narcissa, and Susan, and his nieces Maud and Minnie. The male statues that are not of Wooldridge are of his brothers Alfred, John, Josiah, and W.H. There is no statue depicting Wooldridge's father.

The fence around the lot was placed there by the Mayfield Masonic lodge, replacing the old iron fence. Wooldridge was a Freemason.

Read more about this topic:  Wooldridge Monuments

Famous quotes containing the word description:

    As they are not seen on their way down the streams, it is thought by fishermen that they never return, but waste away and die, clinging to rocks and stumps of trees for an indefinite period; a tragic feature in the scenery of the river bottoms worthy to be remembered with Shakespeare’s description of the sea-floor.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    God damnit, why must all those journalists be such sticklers for detail? Why, they’d hold you to an accurate description of the first time you ever made love, expecting you to remember the color of the room and the shape of the windows.
    Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)

    Why does philosophy use concepts and why does faith use symbols if both try to express the same ultimate? The answer, of course, is that the relation to the ultimate is not the same in each case. The philosophical relation is in principle a detached description of the basic structure in which the ultimate manifests itself. The relation of faith is in principle an involved expression of concern about the meaning of the ultimate for the faithful.
    Paul Tillich (1886–1965)