An exceptionally beautiful monument obscured by another John Munhall’s ostentatious Gothic tomb right in front of it. The angel brings a palm and wreath to the Munhalls’ Romanesque grotto carved out of a rustic boulder. This John Munhall is the man for whom the borough of Munhall is named.
Perhaps one of the oldest monuments in the cemetery, which opened in 1849, the year Michael McCullough died. It is a striking and harmonious Gothic composition whose prominent cross seems an organic part of the design rather than an afterthought.
What began in 1899 as a standard rusticated temple in the “modern Ionic” style was expanded in 1973 by the very unusual addition of left and right wings, where the crypts are accessible directly from the outside. The bronze doors have grilles with a striking passionflower pattern. According to the cemetery’s Web site, Mr. Robert Davidson King made his fortune in county government, which was a profitable business in those days.
A fine example of the mid-Victorian marble monument, and very well preserved: the industrial atmosphere of Pittsburgh in its full-tilt hell-with-the-lid-off phase was generally not kind to marble. As with many of the older monuments in St. Michael’s, a German Catholic cemetery, it bears inscriptions in German. (But an inscription from after World War I is in English.)
The Nusser monument in the South Side Cemetery is identical, except that there is also an ornate pinnacle; perhaps this one has lost its top.
Almost all the monuments in St. Michael’s Cemetery are standard items from monument catalogues. (A century or so ago, you could even order cemetery monuments from Sears Roebuck, the way you ordered everything else from Sears.) This one is almost certainly a standard item, too, but it is a very unusual one, probably one of the more expensive monuments in the cemetery. The curving text of the inscriptions is a distinctive touch. There is space for a good many more inscriptions than were ever cut. The Kublers were born in “Lorraine, France”—an interesting distinction that is a little hard to interpret. When the Kublers were born, all of Lorraine belonged to France, but when they died a large part of it belonged to the German Empire, the fruit of the disastrous (for France) Franco-Prussian War.
Some of the pictures here were taken in 2014, and the rest in 2022. We also have some more recent pictures of the Kubler monument.
