The Art and Architecture of Death
This unusual round Doric temple, unlike a closed mausoleum, invites cemetery visitors to step up and under the roof. There the names of the Baum family members interred here are inscribed in an open stone book on a lectern.
A monument to a pastor of the Voegtly Church and his son, both killed in a railroad accident near Altoona in 1864. The polished-granite monument seems to be later than that date, and probably dates from after the time when the Voegtly Church moved its cemetery from the churchyard in Dutchtown to the top of Troy Hill.
The Rev. William Jeffery, D.D., was pastor of Bethany Presbyterian Church for 34 years. He retired in 1855, as he was approaching the age of eighty; but he lived almost another seventeen years after that, dying at ninety-six in 1872. From the style, we guess that this obelisk was put up when he died.
Pastor Jeffery’s wife is also marked by this obelisk, and so is a daughter Elizabeth, who died at not quite five years old in 1831.
Elizabeth also has her own fine tombstone in the style of forty years earlier, which tells us that she died of that great scourge of nineteenth-century childhood, scarlet fever:
The only proper reaction to such a loss is the one Pastor Jeffery had cut into her tombstone: to quote from the book of Job.