Founder of Dead Poets Society of America wraps up his latest tour, visiting his 500th grave

YORK, Pa. – A Maine man who travels the nation to document the final resting places of poets has completed a summer tour in which he visited his 500th grave.

Dead Poets Society of America founder Walter Skold wrapped up Friday at the graves of Philip Pendleton Cooke in Millwood, Virginia, and Marianne Moore in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He also visited his father’s grave in York, Pennsylvania. He’s heading back home to Freeport, Maine.

Most of his time was in the Deep South. He says he visited 97 graves over 70 days, bringing his total to 530.

He says the most memorable event was a memorial to four girls killed in a church bombing in 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, where he read Dudley Randall’s “Ballad of Birmingham.”

The society’s name was partly inspired by the 1989 Robin Williams movie “Dead Poets Society.”