The Art and Architecture of Death
A Lutheran cemetery tucked into the back streets of a city neighborhood, which probably grew up around it.
A prominent granite monument in this German Lutheran cemetery. John and Elizabeth are identified as “Uncle” and “Aunt,” suggesting that they had no children of their own.
Louis Knoepp died in 1895 at the age of 40, and either he had already made enough of a fortune that this expense seemed appropriate to his heirs, or he came from a family with plenty of money already. The amateurish allegorical wreath-bearing statue on top suggests a client with more money than taste, but if the message to be delivered was that Louis Knoepp was the richest man in the cemetery, then the message has been delivered. Old Pa Pitt suspects that this monument was chosen from a monument dealer’s illustrated catalogue, forcing the monument dealer to come up with a monument he had never actually expected to have to build for anyone.
A particularly fine shrouded-urn monument, with the U. S. Steel Tower in the distance.
It appears that the Rohrkastes had six children, all of whom died before their father, though half lived into adulthood.
Readers who have explored this site know already that Father Pitt collects zinc monuments. They were mass-produced and considerably cheaper than stone monuments of equivalent size, so that they were often condemned as tasteless and excluded from cemeteries for the better classes of dead people. But they live up to the zinc monument vendors’ extravagant claims: they are as permanent as bronze, or more so, and could be bought in a huge variety of shapes with interchangeable reliefs on the panels.
Here is one of the more modest zinc monuments Father Pitt has found, but it is very well preserved, though many of the stones around it are eroded and illegible.
