The Art and Architecture of Death
On the North Side next to the larger Union Dale Cemetery, this cemetery has a few mausoleums worth seeing, and is especially notable for its picturesquely steep hills.
A sort-of-classical, sort-of-medieval urn-topped monument for a clergyman (who died on a train crossing Wyoming) and his family. with an epitaph from Deuteronomy. As is almost usual for family monuments from the nineteenth century, it includes the names of several children who did not survive to adulthood.
A typical obelisk from the late 1800s; Rebecca Bubb died in 1896, and Father Pitt suspects that is when the obelisk was raised. It is mostly an excuse to show off a glorious maple tree.
A small classical mausoleum in very good taste; the Boston ivy is always a picturesque touch, but especially in the fall. The name “Taylor” was added to the pediment later.
A landscape with fall colors in the Highwood Cemetery, which is hilly even by Pittsburgh standards.
Here is the very last gasp of the Egyptian style. The mausoleum is thoroughly modern and simple, but still has the shape and winged sun disk to show that it is meant to be Egyptian.
In-ground burial vaults like this had gone out of fashion in most of our cemeteries by the late nineteenth century, but there are two later ones in the Highwood Cemetery. This one, with its rustic stone, is indescribably picturesque and looks like a relic of some vanished ancient culture, but it probably dates from about 1880.
