Maud Munn, who died of scarlet fever in 1892, has become a bit of a local celebrity because of the statue that marks her grave in Newark’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery.
The marble statue portrays the 10-year-old girl dressed in ballet slippers. But the cracked and tarnished face almost looked skeletal and undead. With the help of a story in Weird N.J. in 2014, her visage had become somewhat of an occult attraction.
This didn’t sit right with Michael Perrone, president of the Belleville Historical Society, who has been cleaning and restoring the tombs of war veterans in Mount Pleasant Cemetery for the past five years. He was so moved, as many are, by the gravesite that he reserved some time to brush off the century-old grave just in time for the cemetery’s annual History Tours on November 1.
“We didn’t like the idea of this little girl’s grave looking scary,” Perrone said.
The last time the history tours were held at Mount Pleasant Cemetery was in 2021. Actors playing different people buried at the cemetery, including Munn, dress in period costumes each year. But last time, the pandemic protocols required the players to wear masks, which may have spoiled the illusion.
Munn’s cleaned-up statue fits the mission of the newly founded Friends of Mount Pleasant Cemetery—to give the cemetery a new public face and encourage more residents to visit as people did in the Victorian days. The nonprofit also won a grant to restore the stained-glass windows within the cemetery’s Gothic Revival gatehouse built in 1877.
“We’re trying to get more people to come here and use it as a green space,” said Michele Butchko, president of the organization.
Although the Weird N.J. story caused a resurgence of interest in Munn, her posthumous celebrity didn’t begin there. It actually dates back to 1986 when a story about Munn appeared on the front page of the Star Ledger. The newspaper interviewed Carmine Cicurelli, a former Barringer High School teacher, who had researched Munn’s story and spoke to the newspaper about discovering the statue during a walk through the National Register-listed cemetery.
“It moved me to try to find something about her life and times as a sort of memorial to all those anonymous children who died in 19th-century epidemics,” Cicurelli told the newspaper.
Cicurelli did much more than find something — he tracked down Maud’s genealogy, discovering the address of her Newark home on Burnet Street, her grandfather’s role fighting against Confederates in the Civil War, and her ancestor’s role founding the City of Orange. The family is memorialized in the street name Munn Avenue that runs through the Oranges and Newark.
Cicurelli even revealed the mystery behind the ballet slippers — Munn was a ballerina at a local dance school and participated in a recital days before she fell ill. She was buried on the same day she died to avoid further contagion, according to Weird N.J.
The story brought to life the importance of the Munn family to local history and the tragedy of her life cut short by the sort of epidemics that raged on until the advent of antibiotics in the midcentury.
“In those days, there was nothing like the newspaper to give you a good story — and if you had a good story people came out,” said Liz Del Tufo, a well-known preservationist and president of the Mount Pleasant Cemetery’s board.
The thought of Munn as a monument to those who died of epidemics is appropriate as Newark led the nation in mortality at this time to epidemics like scarlet fever, diphtheria, typhoid, and smallpox.
It is also timely as the nation has now emerged from another deadly pandemic and brushed itself off much like Perrone did to Munn’s statue.
The public’s fascination with Munn is notable given that she is buried among so many towering history-makers, including Titanic survivors, inventor Seth Boyden, Thomas Edison’s first wife, Mary Stillwell Edison, and suffragette Florence Eagleton — all of whom will be portrayed during he tours. Despite the company of these titans, Munn, whose life had only just begun, is still one of the biggest draws during the tour.
“There are a lot of mausoleums and stones in Mount Pleasant Cemetery, but to see a white marble statue of a little girl is moving to people,” said Linda Morgan, who will play Munn’s mother, Mary, alongside her husband Phil Haws, who will play Munn’s father, Albert.
