In 1894, a man showed up at the Detroit Free Press offices with two dead insects in a vial: periodical cicadas, with their shed skins, which he had gathered in a graveyard. It was important to him that the newspaper make note of them.
“With this communication please find two specimens of the seventeen year locust, cicada septendecim, with their cast-off skins, which I brought to-day from Woodmere cemetery,” wrote the man, whose name was Daniel Winder1, in a note he included with the insects. “A large brood has appeared there, and during the present week will continue to make that locality musical with their notes.”
Winder wanted the newspaper to run a story about these cicadas for one of the simplest reasons anyone wants the newspaper to run a story about anything: He wanted it on the record. This hyperlocal moment of natural historical significance, Winder thought, needed to be noted, for the benefit of the future of hyperlocal humanity: “Placing this on record in The Free Press will serve as a calendar to which entomologists may refer for information, should they forget that seventeen years from now, in the year 1911, a like brood will find their way from a depth of three or four feet in the earth to the surface, cut off branches from the trees, and trill their notes again in Woodmere cemetery.”2
I have been thinking a lot about cicadas, insects I never thought much about before in my life, familiar as they are — not only to me, but to most of the world. There are some 3,000 species of cicadas on this earth, on every continent except Antarctica. Every summer, they come out of the ground, where they have lived on tree sap for two or three or 13 or 17 years. They hatch out of their exoskeletons, leaving them hanging on trees and brick walls, on old marble headstones and the ratty weave of old beach chairs left out by the garage. And then they start to sing — congregationally. That’s really what it’s called — congregational song. Their summer drones rattle human eardrums across cultures, landscapes, eras. They sound, to me, like August heat, a field with no shade, camp boredom. Or that’s how I heard cicadas until this year.
Long after Winder collected his periodical cicada specimens at Woodmere — nearly two broods later, in the mid-1920s — the naturalist William T. Davis reconsidered their scientific name. Davis had quit his job on the New York Produce Exchange in 1909 to devote the rest of his life to the study of cicadas, and to the local and natural history of his native Staten Island. Davis came up with a new genus name for the Gothic-looking black-and-red periodical cicadas that fearsomely (but harmlessly!) climb out of the ground after 17 years in the dark and sing their hearts out. He called them magicicada. Goddamn perfect.
Davis, as it turns out, also took an interest in cemeteries. An 1889 paper he wrote about homestead graveyards on Staten Island is still widely cited today; he also wrote, with his fellow Staten Island historian and naturalist Charles W. Leng,3 a book of the gravestone inscriptions at an old Methodist cemetery in the area.
So, I went searching for evidence that Davis observed or collected cicadas at Staten Island cemeteries. I found it in Davis’s notes about an emergence of periodical cicadas in 1907, in a report from the New York state entomologist. Davis had expected that emergence, having observed periodical cicadas 17 years earlier, on the north shore of Staten Island, in 1890. That same year, Davis wrote, his friend Mr. Leng saw them at Moravian Cemetery in New Dorp. It’s completely unsurprising that two dudes who loved insects and local-historical burial grounds would look for insects at their favorite local-historical burial grounds. Still, it’s nice to have the receipts on that.
Working at a cemetery has changed my relationship to cicadas. I’ve been at Elmwood for nine months now, since the first brightening weeks after the winter solstice, and I spend many of my working hours wandering our 86 acres of rural landscape, walking the same paths over and over again. This has given me the chance to literally watch time pass, to observe seasonal shifts both obvious — magnolias blooming, gimme a break4 — and subtle by hours, like a trout lily that only flowers for a day or two by a muddy shaded corner of a mausoleum.
The last couple of highly publicized broods of periodical cicadas did not emerge in this part of Michigan. I have never seen one. But I did see one of our regular old “dog day” cicadas up close for the first time this summer, walking very deliberately and adorably up a monument. It’s on the plot of the Rolshovens, a family of goldsmiths and diamond dealers who ran one of Detroit’s largest jewelry stores for 75 years.5
The beauty of the cicada really surprised me, a jewel-like beauty, boldly decorated in gold-flecked green and black. In my season of cicada fascination (and through lots of late-night eBay trawling, uh-oh), I’ve learned that cicadas were popular in French celluloid jewelry in the Art Deco era; carved in jade and placed on dead tongues in ancient China; hammered in bronze and stashed in the tombs of Germanic queens. Did the Rolshovens sell any sparkling cicadas across their counters? Something like this, maybe? I can imagine it.
But the unknowability of that question, and questions like it, is one of the things that I am stuck on about cicadas. So many things a cicada can mean are so simple: death and resurrection, emergence and transformation, the uncomplicated joy of being alive in the summer. (In Provence, where they are a kind of mascot, their slogan is the sun makes me sing). But they also bring us these mysteries — about time, and how we live in it and carry things through it. How do the cicadas know it’s been two years, or five years, or 13 or 17 years, and that it’s time to come out? How do entomologists pass the knowledge of periodical broods across brood-time and brood-place? This is not unlike the question of how cemeteries preserve the records of all of the people buried at the cemetery and all of the stories those burials tell — work that sometimes must be done and re-done, as notes are lost and stories mis-remembered and researchers retire and grave markers fade or sink into the ground. William T. Davis and I both understand.
A Michigan entomologist expressed this beautifully in a 1902 observation of an emergence of periodical cicadas on the west side of the state. He wrote: “This interesting insect passes the long period of seventeen years underground, in preparation for a week or so in the upper air. During its long period underground, its name and habits are almost forgotten, and when it appears at last, its story is as good as new.”
His name was Rufus H. Pettit, and as an entomologist stationed at the Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station in East Lansing, Rufus Pettit was kind of an insect weather forecaster. During his long career with MSU’s department of entomology — he was its first chair, a job he held for 27 years — Pettit often found himself telling people not to be afraid of the cicadas: They are not locusts, they do not damage crops, farmers should not buy any snake-oil insecticides to fend them off. The thing is, we know all of this about cicadas. We may have known it for thousands of years. But Pettit accepted his role and went on the record, again and again, to remind the readers of the Lansing State Journal and the Detroit Free Press and the Kalamazoo Gazette about the periodical cicada. Harmless, a little grotesque, gorgeous to some eyes. He never used the word magic. He was a scientist! But you have to admit that it’s fitting.
Rufus Pettit died in 1946. He was buried at Deepdale Cemetery in Delta Township, and he has what I think is one of the best epitaphs I’ve ever seen. His headstone reads:
Rufus Hiram Pettit
Jan. 11, 1869
June 1, 1946
Devoted his entire life to the prevention of economic losses due to noxious insects
A little note about the Little Detroit History Letter
Hey, you know what? It’s been a year since I re-launched the newsletter. I hope you’ve been enjoying it! I considered putting together a reader survey of some kind because I am a nerd, but a survey doesn’t really inspire delight, and that’s all I really want to do here. I kind of would rather this be a literal letter that you get in the mail, like this pamphlet? about baseball?? but I don’t have the skillset to make you a zine.
But I would love your casual thoughts, if you care to share them. What kinds of stories have you liked best? Is there anything you’ve been curious about that maybe I would be curious about too? More cemetery stuff or less cemetery stuff? Are these emails going to your promotions folder? What else have you been reading lately? Are you getting sick of newsletters? I kind of am but I can’t stop myself from writing one??
Let me know. Thanks for being here. See you next time,
-aeb
Daniel K. Winder was also a notable local amateur astronomer! We love it.
Detroit Free Press, August 21, 1894.
While Davis had devoted his life to cicadas, Leng was a beetles guy. They were both founding members of what is now the Staten Island Museum, of which Leng was director for a time. They both donated large collections of insect specimens to the museum, which today has one of the largest collections of cicadas in the world. We should probably go visit soon? yeah?
okay sorry the magnolias are also extremely magical, I apologize for being cynical for effect
The painter Julius Rolshoven, whose name you may know — he painted the well-known “nude brunette” at the Detroit Athletic Club — was the son of jewelry store owners Frederick and Theresa Rolshoven. Julius and Theresa actually died on the same day, hours and hundreds of miles apart, an eerie coincidence. The papers reported a planned double funeral at Christ Church and that mother and son were to be buried side-by-side at Elmwood, but somehow only Theresa ended up on the Rolshoven plot. Julius is at Woodlawn. Whaaaaat happened here? I am looking into it, obviously.