Pittsburgh Cemeteries

If an illustrator wanted to draw a typical cemetery monument of the middle 1800s, it would look like this. Rich but not extravagantly ornate, these shafts were popular because they easily direct the family to the plot, and they have abundant surface for inscriptions, meaning that one expensive monument can take the place of any number of tombstones, an expense that adds up over the years as scarlet fever and cholera take their toll.

Unfortunately, the material—limestone or marble—erodes over the decades, so that the inscriptions become illegible after a while. Our readers are welcome to try their hands at reading the inscription for James M. Henry below, but poor old Pa Pitt gave up. The inscription may remember a child who was born in 1831 and died in 1837, but Father Pitt is not willing to stand by that reading.

This truly monumental monument is the tallest private memorial in the cemetery; only the Civil War monument is taller. It is nevertheless a monument-dealer’s stock item; an identical monument can be found in Allegheny Cemetery. It marks the family plot of the Gormleys, whose patriarch was named James for several generations, until the last James Gormley was finally buried under the epitaph “THE LAST OF THE LINE.”

A very Victorian towering shaft topped with an urn. It probably dates from 1891, when A. R. Sloan died.

There is nothing else remotely like this in Pittsburgh. This huge mausoleum supports a towering shaft with a recording angel at the top taking notes. It was designed by Theophilus P. Chandler Jr. (which always sounds to old Pa Pitt like the name of the villain in a Marx Brothers farce), the tastemaker of Philadelphia, and the architect of First Presbyterian Church downtown.

A big urn on a towering shaft seems like a mixed metaphor, but it certainly makes the Kloman plot easy to find. It was probably put up in about 1879, when the first Kloman buried here died. There is generous space on the base for inscriptions, but nothing has ever been inscribed.