Pittsburgh Cemeteries

The Art and Architecture of Death

Robert Patterson tombstone

The letters are formed very well, but here (as in many other early-settler tombstones) we see that marking out the inscription in advance was not part of the stonecutter’s method. He runs out of space for the name of the deceased, and then again on the next line for the name of the town Canonsburgh (which we no longer spell with an H). He also left out the R in “MEMORY,” and the heading SACRED to the IN MEMOY OF is very decorative but grammatically nonsense.

This transcription preserves the eccentric spelling of the original:

SACRED to the IN MEMOY OF

ROBERT PATTERSON
Merchant of Canonsburgh
Who departed this life
January 31st A. D. 1833
in the 29th year of his age

He was a man of temperance and moral habits
as a man of buissness he was unrivell’d
as a friend he was truly candid and sincere
as a husband and parent [he was] kind & affec[tionate]


Father Pitt took this picture in 1999 with an Argus C3. The Chartiers Hill Cemetery is notable for interesting epitaphs.

McKee shaft

A tall shaft topped by an urn. The very Victorian design includes elaborate monograms and ample space for inscriptions, but no inscriptions were ever engraved. Instead, the McKees have individual headstones around the monument. Eleanor McKee died in 1877, and that may be the date of the monument as well; but from the style old Pa Pitt might guess that it is later, perhaps from 1892, when Eleanor’s husband John, the family patriarch, was buried. They had two children who died before either of them. All the McKees were buried with sentimentally illiterate rhymed epitaphs. The worst is for Samuel Sterrett McKee, who was born in 1861 and died in 1868:

CEASE DEAR PARENTS CEASE THY WEEPING
O’RE THE GRAVE WHERE I AM SLEEPING
FOR E’RE I LEFT MY HOME BELOW,
THE ANGELS WERE BECKONING ME TO GO.

Father Pitt counts two bad spellings and one grammatical error; he has given up the punctuation for lost.

Urn

Elizabeth Henry tombstone

Broken but still mostly legible, except where the stone has flaked away toward the right. We are almost certain of the surname “Henry,” because the stone lies near several other members of the Henry family. Here is how we reconstruct the inscription:

[In]
MEMORY OF
Elizabeth Hen[ry]
who departed t[his life]
June 10th 1839 in t[he --]
Year of her a[ge.]

Esteemed Deaugh[ter,]
this silent grave
Love and respect [?]
shall ever have.

This epitaph, such as it is, seems to be an original composition; Father Pitt has not found it anywhere else on the Web. The spelling “deaughter” is not unusual for Western Pennsylvania tombstones.

A particularly well-preserved monument in the romantic style of the 1860s, with two poetic epitaphs.

She was a mother good and kind
While she with us did stay
Life is short to all mankind
God’s call we must obey

Come, children, to my tomb and see
My name engraved here.
Remember, you must come to me.
Be like your mother dear.

IN
memory of
RICHARD COULTER
who departed this life
May 4th 1821, Aged 22 years
——— Long, long expected home, and lo:
Home he has scarcely come,
Till he is summon’d and must go
To his eternal home.

This is a fairly well-preserved tombstone from nearly two centuries ago, and that is of course interesting enough. The most interesting thing, however, is the poem, which is from a collection of poems by the very obscure James Meikle, this one being headed “On a gentleman who died after his return to his family from foreign parts, after an absence of twelve years.” The poem itself is dated 1768, but it was kept in manuscript until after the poet’s death in 1799. The only edition of the posthumous poems of Meikle Father Pitt has been able to find is one published in Pittsburgh in 1819, two years before the death of Richard Coulter; so that we know with near certainty that whoever specified the epitaph on this stone had read it in this particular book.

GOODMAN Y. COULTER, Jr.
Died in N. Orleans
March 1, 1851
interred here
March 21, 1851
in his 21 year.

To the young
He being dead yet speaketh.

A good example of the style of the 1850s; it must have looked very modern beside the traditional tombstones of ten years earlier. “He being dead yet speaketh” is a quotation from Hebrews 11:4.

This is the churchyard of the Mount Pisgah Presbyterian Church in Green Tree. The little cemetery itself straddles the line between Green Tree and the Westwood neighborhood of Pittsburgh, and it is a curious fact that the section of the cemetery in Green Tree is neatly maintained, but the section in Pittsburgh is overgrown and forgotten—although some attempt had been made to clear some of the larger bushes from it when Father Pitt visited. Doubtless the true explanation of the phenomenon is that the overgrown section is not visible from the church, and thus can be allowed to go to ruin without making a spectacle of itself every Sunday.

Tombstones litter the forest in the overgrown section. Much of the ground cover is Vinca minor, which is often called Cemetery Vine because it was such a popular planting in old cemeteries.

In this section were some old family plots fenced with iron rails; we can still identify the Graham family plot, below:

Note, again, the luxuriant growth of Vinca minor.

There are tombstones here that go back to the 1840s at least, but most of the older ones are illegible, if they can be found at all. Here, however, is a legible tombstone from 1842 (forgive the strong backlighting):

SACRED
to the memory
OF
GEORGE P. RAMSEY
Who departed this life
July 27th 1842.
In the 54th year of his age.

Remember man as you pass by
As you are now so once was I;
Repent in time, make no delay,
For in a moment I was call’d away.

The epitaph begins as one well-known funerary poem and ends as another; the last line has five feet instead of four. But it is still a powerful sentiment.

In spite of the general neglect, someone cares enough to see that all the identifiable veterans have flags for their graves, so that little flashes of red, white, and blue light up the floor of the woods. Here is the grave of Corporal David Aston, a Civil War soldier whose birth and death dates are not mentioned:

A grave of a girl who did not quite live to eleven years old. The Nixon family was prominent in the congregation of Old St. Luke’s, and this is one of the more elaborate memorials in the churchyard. The epitaph, which takes up both sections of the base of the headstone, seems to be original, not one of those circulating funerary poems we usually find on graves of the late 1800s: an Internet search finds the poem mentioned only in connection with this particular monument—transcribed in a text tour of the burial ground by Mr. Charles Nixon, and now here.

Her form is missing from its place,
And will not come for calling;
God only calleth back his own,
Why should our tears be falling?

The echo of the childish notes,
Have ceased their happy ringing.
We cannot catch a sound that floats,
From where she now is singing.

A marble monument in what we might call folk-romantic style. The recording angel has been eroded by pollution and time, but it does not look as though it was ever a very skillful carving, Nevertheless, the whole effect of the monument is very pleasing.

The epitaph (a poem commonly found on monuments of the era) reads:

Dear mother, rest in quiet sleep,
While friends in sorrow o’er thee weep,
And here their heartfelt offerings bring
And near thy grave thy requiem sing.

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.