Pittsburgh Cemeteries

Two women in the Boyd family were given these bed-like romantic graves; the one for Irene Boyd is grander and more ornate, but this one is perhaps in better taste.

This glorious creation is what happens when monument makers design monuments the way illustrators imagine them: a very romantic interpretation of classical forms, including stylized Ionic capitals, swags, a shrouded urn, and classical foliage. Unfortunately the inscriptions have eroded into illegibility, but in certain lights some of the burial dates seem to be from the 1860s.

The variation in colors is mostly the result of using two different cameras.

A particularly florid example of the romantic style that was popular in the middle 1800s. In its current state, it does not seem to have any dates for Irene Boyd: the name “Boyd” is on the back, and the name “Irene” on the front, with the rest of the stone given over to decorative elements. The footstone remembers a child, A. E. Boyd, who was born in 1855 and died in 1872.

Inscription on the footstone.

The back of the headstone.

A matched pair of monuments in a late version of the romantic style that was popular in the middle 1800s. August Abbott was born in Saxony, but his inscription is in English, suggesting that his family—unlike many German immigrant families—Americanized in one generation.

The monuments are signed by the stonecutters, and the signatures are different.

Boggs & Lindsey, if we read correctly.

Alex. Boggs—again if we read correctly. Perhaps Lindsey retired or died.

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.

A certain strain of romanticism is common in monuments of the 1800s, but few go to such extremes of romanticism as this. The profusion of vine-covered vines overwhelms the composition so much that at first it is hard to make any visual sense of the thing. How many different kinds of vines can you identify? Father Pitt finds at least passionflowers, morning glories, and ivy, and the top may be roses, although the erosion makes it hard to tell. If the enormous urn-flower at the foot end came from a vine, it was a vine that wants to eat you.

If there was ever an inscription, it is illegible now; but since the monument occupies a space in the Lewis family plot, we may presume that it belongs to some Lewis or other.

A romantic (and diminutive, though the picture does not convey the small scale of it) tombstone for a little girl who died at not quite ten years old. The single rose and foliage are still well preserved. It is in or next to the Voegtly family plot, and the inscription is in German; but the name Adams is not very German at all. Perhaps this was a granddaughter of Mathias Voegtly; he might have had a daughter who married outside the Swiss-German community.

Father Pitt has not sorted out the whole history of the Voegtly Cemetery. The style of the tombstone is right for 1864, and it may have been moved from the original churchyard in Dutchtown when the cemetery on Troy Hill was established. Not every grave was moved; in fact, more than seven hundred were left to be discovered under a city parking lot. If this was moved, it suggests that the little girl came from a family with money (like the Voegtly family).

John Park Hickman, volunteer soldier, died in Virginia just after Lee’s surrender ended the Civil War. We do not know whether he died of injuries sustained in battle, but the lack of any mention of a particular battle suggests to Father Pitt that he was one of the many victims of disease. His monument is not large but splendidly romantic in a fashionably 1860s way.