I’ve been studying and documenting graveshelters, almost exclusively in Alabama, for about twenty years now, and I have made site visits to over 100 of them. Fascinated by this subject but also intensely protective, out of respect for the fragility of these sites and the communities they belong to, I don’t publish specific locations.
Scattered across mostly very rural community cemeteries and churchyards, there exists a vernacular tradition of incredible beauty and deep sentimentality: the grave shelter.
Exactly what it sounds like, the grave shelter serves to protect a loved one’s grave. Most often made of wood but now increasingly of manufactured materials that are made to better resist weather wear, they can be low to the ground looking like a small outbuilding/house or tall, more like a modern carport.
Erecting a graveshelter is an act of love, built to shelter, mark, and remember someone that the maker sees as something a stone alone could not accomplish.
Finding one with the 21st century methods I use often, or stumbling across one by accident, the act of visiting a graveshelter fills my heart with love. They’re made for someone another could not bear to leave unprotected.
I document these because wood deteriorates, cemeteries go untended, communities dwindle in number. The people who know what these shelters meant and the family and friends who built them are no longer here to say. What remains is so fragile.
I photograph them because it’s important. These don’t exist everywhere. This tradition deserves to be known, studied, and honored…and the people for whom they’re built, remembered.
