“In deep pain, (there is) no worldly wisdom for the heart.” So reads the inscription translated from German on a mausoleum in Rock Creek Cemetery in DC. Flanked by four statues, each in rippling drapery and coated with copper and bronze, the mausoleum of brewery founder Christian Heurich is among the cemetery’s most lavish monuments—and one of many students visited in a workshop-style course last fall.

“Cemeteries tell the story of everyone,” says Stephanie Jacobe, CAS/PhD ’13, public historian in residence in the Department of History and director of archives at the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington. From ostentatious displays to pared-down headstones, these are sites for the study of society and its myriad curiosities.

Among the curious figures buried nearby is Wilmer McLean, a Virginia grocer who famously said the Civil War “began in my front yard and ended in my front parlor.” McLean, who was laid to rest in the Wilkes Street Cemetery in Alexandria, Virginia (another of the class’s stops), lived on the Bull Run battlefield; later, he moved to a house in Appomattox Court House, Virginia—the same one where Robert E. Lee later surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant.

In Jacobe’s class, students explore the stories and design of cemeteries through maps, local histories, and websites and write papers using the criteria published in National Register bulletins.

“Cemeteries tell us who we were” and “who came before us,” Jacobe says. These sites might not offer “worldly wisdom” for a grieving heart, as inscribed in Heurich’s mausoleum, but they help one to study the past and, as Jacobe says, “move forward into the future.”