A simple stele with Art Deco flair. It is running out of space for Elliott Eugene Perritts. Enlarge the picture and note the three children remembered on the base. Three funerals in four years: that is what childhood mortality used to be like even among wealthy families before we figured out how to vaccinate against childhood diseases.
A classic Ionic temple with rusticated walls.
There was a brief revival of early-nineteenth-century tombstone styles in the 1920s and 1930s, and it produced some very attractive designs. Several of them are in the Laughlin plot. The three above share a weeping-willow design patterned after folk-art tombstones of a hundred years earlier.
This later tombstone is made in the same shape as the others, but with a different decorative scheme.
In the same plot are some stones with bronze plaques commemorating Henry B. Laughlin and his two wives.
The earliest Laughlin buried here died in 1882, but old Pa Pitt would guess that the family monument might be about a decade later. It is a sober classical base with a statue of Hope carrying the compact portable anchor she sometimes travels with.
A marble shaft in the style of the middle 1800s. The inscriptions are mostly legible, except for Jane Shepherd’s, which was probably the last added:
JOHN SHEPHERD
BORN IN IRELAND
DIED APR. 5, 1851
AGED 50 YEARS
JANE
WIFE OF
JOHN SHEPHERD
BORN ———-
DIED — 17, 1877
AGED — YEARS
JOHN, JR.
SON OF
JOHN & JANE SHEPHERD
BORN DEC. 16, 1826
DIED FEB. 3, 1862
AGED 26 YEARS
The younger John Shepherd died at the age of 26 during the Civil War, and it is natural to wonder whether he was killed in battle; but since no mention is made of service or sacrifice, he may have died of natural causes.
