Pittsburgh Cemeteries

An unusual design: a full-length grave with a kind of miniature Corinthian temple as the headstone.

Oak Spring Cemetery in Canonsburg has a number of slab stones elevated into table-like structures—an arrangement common in some old cemeteries. Obviously the props under these stones are newer than the stones, but they may have replaced older ones that were original. Old Pa Pitt simply doesn’t know whether these slab stones were always elevated or whether graveyard caretakers elevated them later, when they began to vanish under the ground.

SACRED
to the
MEMORY OF
SAMUEL WHITE
Who departed this life
May 12th 1837, In the
82nd year of his
age.

Samuel White, Sr. was a veteran of the Revolutionary War. He married a considerably younger woman named Mary:

SACRED
to the
MEMORY
of
MARY WHITE
wife of
SAMUEL WHITE
DIED
JUNE 12th, 1841 in the
76th year of her age.

In the short time between the death of Samuel in 1837 and the death of Mary in 1841, a new fashion in tombstones had swept over Western Pennsylvania. Samuel’s is a simple slab stone of the sort that had been made here since the late 1700s, but Mary’s is in what Father Pitt calls the “poster style,” with each line in a different style of lettering, like an advertising poster of the same era.

Henry Marie Brackenridge, son of the famous Hugh Henry Brackenridge, founded the borough of Brackenridge, and his family has an honored place in the middle of the circle at the entrance to Prospect Cemetery.

The obelisk once bore a number of inscriptions, but they are almost obliterated by time.

Henry Marie’s own grave is marked by a very modest headstone. Father Pitt was not able to read the epitaph, although it might be clearer in morning light.

Cornelia Brackenridge McKelvy, on the other hand, who died in 1882 at the age of 29, has a very expensive grave with a life-size statue. Is it meant to be a portrait of the deceased?

This window commemorates the famous Bay Psalm Book, the first book printed in British America. Everyone learned to sing these rhymed versions of the Psalms, because it was not legal under the rule of the Puritans to sing anything else.

This is a fine piece of work in the engraved-title-page style of the 1850s, but cut in the native stone (sandstone, Father Pitt believes, but he is happy to be corrected by someone better informed on the subject of rocks) that by this time had almost been abandoned in favor of limestone and marble. If it remains intact, the native stone preserves an inscription indefinitely, so that we can appreciate every flourish wrought by this talented artist.

A young and slightly bored-looking angel holds a banner with the words “In Memoriam.” It is an unusually good piece of sculpture. The monument may have been put up in 1911, when Ida May Haudenshield died.

MARGARETA
daughter of
SAMUEL & SARAH
LINHART
died Dec. 10, 1845
Aged 1 Year
5. Mos. 10 Ds.

A good example of what Father Pitt calls the “poster style” that became popular in the 1840s and 1850s: a plain rectangle on which the inscription is engraved in a wide variety of lettering styles, like an advertising poster of the same era.

These particularly fine monuments are very unusual: conscious imitations of the tombstones of a century or more before, but in a very 1930s style. The craftsman is too skillful to imitate the natural irregularity of our early stonecutters’ work; he has to resort to deliberate irregularities, such as occasional capital letters stuck in among the minuscules.

Edward Rynearson was principal of Fifth Avenue High School, Uptown. In 1921, he founded the National Honor Society, which he obviously regarded as his crowning achievement as an educator.