Pittsburgh Cemeteries

Author: Father Pitt

  • Hanna (?) and Elisabeth Chambres Tombstone, South Side Cemetery

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    On its sketchy Web site, the South Side Cemetery claims to have been founded in 1873; but there are monuments older than that, suggesting either that there was a cemetery on this site before 1873, or that some gravestones were moved from an earlier site (which sometimes happened when an older cemetery was engulfed by the city). This stone is dated 1840, and it is definitely in the style of the 1840s, not much later. Time has badly damaged the inscription, but old Pa Pitt thinks he can reconstruct almost all of it:

    IN MEMORY OF
    HANNA, Consort of
    John Chambres
    who departed this life
    Sept. 9th, 1840
    aged 52 years.

    Also
    ELISABETH their daughter
    died January 8th 1840
    aged 18 years.

    And I heard a voice from heaven saying unto
    me, Write, Blessed are the dead which die in the
    Lord from henceforth: Yea, saith the Spirit, that
    they may rest from their labours; and their
    works do follow them. Rev. 14:13.

    The name “Hanna” and the year 1840 for the death of Elisabeth are not completely certain.

  • M. Agnes Brewster Monument, South Side Cemetery

    A kind of obelisk with a weirdly cartoony little statue of a lyre-playing woman at the summit. It seems the bereaved husband erected this monument to his young wife, who died at twenty-four; he lived nearly four more decades, but probably never remarried, as his name was engraved below hers by a different hand when he died.

  • Sunshine Mausoleum, South Side Cemetery

    The Sunshine mausoleum from 1897, with its patient mourner uncomplainingly enduring a roosting bird, is almost certainly another ordered-from-a-catalogue mausoleum. But who is not delighted to see the name “Sunshine” engraved in cheerfully rustic letters over the entrance to a tomb? The style is hard to pin down: it has the heaviness of Romanesque, but the pointed arch suggests Gothic ambitions.

  • Cargo Monument, Union Dale Cemetery

    This is one of the metal monuments in the Union Dale Cemetery, and Father Pitt would like to know more about them. They imitate the forms of stone in metal; are they cast replacements for original stone monuments? —An update: According to a Smithsonian article, these are made of zinc, or “white bronze” as the marketers called it, which was popular as a cheap alternative to stone or bronze for a while at the end of the nineteenth century.

    Thomas H. Cargo, a Civil War veteran, has a stanza from a favorite hymn—“Christ Will Gather In His Own,” by Nikolaus L. von Zinzendorf, translated by Catherine Winkworth—as his epitaph. The words may have been written from memory, since they differ slightly from the published version:

    Had He asked us, well we know
    We should cry, “O spare this blow!”
    Yes, with streaming tears should pray,
    “Lord, we love him, let him stay.”

    The last two lines are not from the hymn, but are a couplet that, in various versions, often appears on tombstones.

    The three young sons remembered on this side have as their epitaph a poem that appears on many children’s tombstones; it was probably once composed by some known poet, but Father Pitt has been unable to find it anywhere except as an epitaph. The exact words often vary slightly.

  • Bratt Mausoleum, Union Dale Cemetery

    An unusual sort of mausoleum in Pittsburgh, though the usual sort in New Orleans: the crypts are accessed directly from the outside. Dr. Bratt and two very young sons are buried here; curiously, there seems to be room for their mother, but no inscription indicates that she is here.