Clara Glen Pet Cemetery

Ever since my trip to America's first pet cemetery in Hartsdale, I've been eager to track down more pet burial grounds. I've explored more human cemeteries than I can count, but Hartsdale is the only cemetery that had me tearing up multiple times. It's not that I'm cold and heartless when it comes to human death, but pets and animals are more relatable and helpless. The epitaphs for beloved pets were so much more heartfelt and personal than ones you usually see for humans. It's also easy to put myself into other pet-owner's shoes, thinking about my own cat and her eventual demise (when I'm not mad at her for screaming in my face, that is).

Clara Glen Pet Cemetery was founded in 1918 by Clara and Glen White, an animal-loving couple who had multiple dogs, cats and rabbits. They started the cemetery in their backyard in Linwood, NJ, and now Clara Glen is one of the oldest pet cemeteries in the country (Hartsdale was founded in 1896). Celebrities from nearby Atlantic City, like Irving Berlin and Billie Burke, have pets buried in the cemetery, alongside 3,800 other animals. Rex the Wonder Dog water-skied in Atlantic City's Steel Pier water show in the 1930s and 40s, and a diving horse (we saw at the last diving horse left in the country at the Magic Forest) is rumored to be buried here as well.

Pet cemeteries are disorienting because they're so serious on the one hand—losing a pet is devastating—and ridiculous on the other, with stones etched with names like Buttons Gifford, Fifi, Puddles Sawyer, Fluffruff, Mr. Bum, Rover and Pokey Palermo. While Clara Glen is tiny compared to Hartsdale, which contains more than 80,000 animals, I'm actually shocked that so many people opt to incur the expense of burying their pets in a public cemetery, instead of having them cremated or buried in their own backyards.

Clara Glen had fallen into disrepair over the years, and many stones have been broken or vandalized. It's now maintained by the Linwood Historical Society, and remains a bit overgrown but in fair shape. It's still basically located in someone's backyard, in a nice residential neighborhood near a cul-de-sac. We felt a little bit as if we were trespassing, but it's easy enough to slip in and out of for a quick visit.

I wish more of the stones hinted at what kind of animal lies beneath—in addition to mostly dogs and cats, we saw one confirmed bird named Polly Donnelly. Poodle statues were common, along with St. Francis, the patron saint of animals. I didn't tear up at Clara Glen as much as I did in Hartsdale—the epitaphs were sweet, but short—and it was a great little detour on our way back from Atlantic City.

I mentioned recently that owning a house with a backyard cemetery is my new life goal, and after visiting Clara Glen I'm thinking I should revise that to include pet cemeteries as well.