The Art and Architecture of Death
A German Catholic cemetery whose most notable monument, an immense obelisk to the Winter Bros. (brewers on the South Side), does not mark a grave: the brothers ended up elsewhere. The Good Shepherd monument that marks the section for parish priests is worth seeing.
A good stock Pietà marks the grave of a soldier who died just a month and a half before the end of the First World War. The rustic stone with scroll that serves as a base does not match very well, and may have ben a replacement after the monument was damaged.
Two of these mass-produced iron crucifixes from the 1880s can be found in St. Peter’s Cemetery [Correction: After another walk through the cemetery, we have found at least four]. Their weakness as monuments is that the individualized letters fall off, though “Hier ruhet” is molded in the metal and perfectly legible. Fortunately there are other Amrheins buried in the same plot with legible stone monuments, so we can be confident that the letters AMR---I- represent AMRHEIN. The first name (-ACK-B) is probably Jackob. The birth and death dates are also illegible, though we can make out the decade of death as 188-.
The epitaph is perfectly legible, because it is cut in a stone base:
Ruhe sanft in deiner Gruft
bis dich Jesus wieder ruft.
Rest softly in your grave
till Jesus calls you again.
This is an absolutely immense pointy thing; one site claims it’s a hundred feet tall. That is surprising enough in a little German Catholic cemetery in the middle of a city neighborhood, but the bigger surprise is that nobody is buried here. According to this page, the Winter Bros., Bavarian immigrants who founded a successful brewery on the South Side, bought this plot in 1889 and put up this towering obelisk, and then went and died somewhere else. Each of the three brothers has his name inscribed on one side of the obelisk: Michael, Wolfgang, and Alois.
