Pittsburgh Cemeteries

This plot includes the tombstone of the Rev. David Philips, minister and Revolutionary War captain; clearly it belongs to a family of some influence, and it is still kept separate from the rest of the cemetery by a metal railing of comparatively recent vintage (which is to say within the past century).

The Carnahan family has been prominent in the near South Hills for a long time, and this plot, with its chunky rusticated monument, is lovingly maintained with a garden of ornamental grasses.

The only legible stone in this well-maintained plot belongs to Conrad Reich, who died in 1896. A damaged stone next to his is probably for his wife Gertrude, who died in 1910. They had children who are buried in this cemetery, but the ones old Pa Pitt could trace were buried in other plots. So it seems that Mr. and Mrs. Reich have quite a bit of room in here to stretch their legs.

This plot bears the name “Trautman” on the threshold, but there are no memorials of any kind inside it. Old Pa Pitt wonders whether any Trautmans are actually buried here; sometimes a plot is bought and then left empty when the buyer moves elsewhere. At any rate, there is something admirable about the defiant squareness of this plot in a landscape that does not reward rectilinear thinking.

Almost all the walls and fences that used to surround family plots in Allegheny Cemetery have been taken down, but there is an important exception to the rule. In one section of the cemetery are several circular plots where the low stone walls are maintained. Most of them have a central monument with individual graves orbiting it around the edge of the circle; one or two have no central monuments.

The Head plot (above) and the Fitzsimons-Morrison plot (below) are two good examples of the style.

A family plot with a romantic Gothic marble monument, now illegible but still grand in its way. It was once surrounded by an iron fence, but like almost all such fences it has been removed to make life easier for groundskeepers.

We can see where the iron fence once fitted into the stone gateposts.

Almost all the fences and barriers that used to demarcate family plots in the nineteenth century were removed in Allegheny Cemetery, but this one has somehow survived the loud protests of groundskeepers. You will note, however, that the groundskeepers seem to be deliberately avoiding the interior of the plot.

Oak Spring Cemetery in Canonsburg has a number of slab stones elevated into table-like structures—an arrangement common in some old cemeteries. Obviously the props under these stones are newer than the stones, but they may have replaced older ones that were original. Old Pa Pitt simply doesn’t know whether these slab stones were always elevated or whether graveyard caretakers elevated them later, when they began to vanish under the ground.

SACRED
to the
MEMORY OF
SAMUEL WHITE
Who departed this life
May 12th 1837, In the
82nd year of his
age.

Samuel White, Sr. was a veteran of the Revolutionary War. He married a considerably younger woman named Mary:

SACRED
to the
MEMORY
of
MARY WHITE
wife of
SAMUEL WHITE
DIED
JUNE 12th, 1841 in the
76th year of her age.

In the short time between the death of Samuel in 1837 and the death of Mary in 1841, a new fashion in tombstones had swept over Western Pennsylvania. Samuel’s is a simple slab stone of the sort that had been made here since the late 1700s, but Mary’s is in what Father Pitt calls the “poster style,” with each line in a different style of lettering, like an advertising poster of the same era.