St. Michael’s was a German parish, but it must have had a small Hungarian contingent as well, or it shared its cemetery with a Hungarian parish. This statue of Christ blessing visitors as they enter the cemetery (it is placed in the middle of a circle at the entrance) stands on a base with the inscription EGO SUM RESURRECTIO ET VITA in Latin and three other languages: German, English, and Hungarian.
One of the early settlers of the Carrick area. We are not absolutely sure of the first name, since the first letter of it is obliterated. “Jenny” is by far the most likely possibility. Here is Father Pitt’s transcription, which is partly speculative:
IN MEMORY OF
JENNY O’NEAL
who departed this life
—— 20th, A.D. 1836
[Aged — years and —] months
Below, a black-and-white picture with a different camera.
Father Pitt is not entirely sure of the middle initial; the best he can say is that it looks more like an I than like any other letter he can think of. Here is a lavishly romantic monument typical of the taste of the middle 1800s, when Carrick was a country settlement along the road to Brownsville.
Here is Father Pitt’s attempt at a transcription, but he would be delighted to be corrected, since the stone has eroded to the point where some parts are not easily legible.
In memory of
Grace I. Bell
Wife of Samuel Wallace
Died Aug. 27, 1862.
In the 66. year of her age
—
Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord,
From henceforth, yea, saith the Spirit,
That they may rest from their labors.
The epitaph is from Revelation 14:13. It leaves out the last words of the verse: “and their works do follow them.”
To improve the chance of legibility, we reproduce the monument in both color and black and white.
We have seen this extravagant structure more than once before, but it is always worth trying to improve on our images. Here it is again. It was designed by John Russell Pope, architect of the Jefferson Memorial, National Archives, National Gallery of Art, &c., &c., and it is nearly identical to the F. W. Woolworth mausoleum in the Bronx.
Archibald Marshall was a merchant, industrialist, and landscape architect whose most distinguished project was the beautiful landscape of West Park in Allegheny, now the North Side. He is the “Marshall” in the name of the neighborhood of Marshall-Shadeland. His monument also remembers his wife and three children who did not live to be ten years old. We wonder whether the child in the sculpture is meant to represent one of them. We wonder whether the child is looking up from his book to say, “Mother, you have a robin on your head.”
