Author: Father Pitt

  • Frauenheim Family Plot, St. Mary’s Cemetery

    Frauenheim family plot

    Though old Pa Pitt tends to focus on individual monuments, there is an art to arranging a family plot. This one is arranged very artistically. Everything is made from the same stone, which is dark now, although that may be the result of a century and a half of heavy industry. A large Gothic monument dominates it in the rear, so that the family has no trouble finding the plot. Stone steps—superfluous from a practical point of view now, but there was probably a stone fence around the plot before the groundskeepers had their way—lead us up into the sacred precinct. There the Frauenheims lie in a row in their own matched beds. The earliest burial here seems to be Edward Frauenheim, who died in 1891, and that may be a good guess for the date of the main monument.

  • Adamson Monument, St. Clair Cemetery

    Adamson monument

    It is hard to pick a name for this style: it is almost machine-age modern, and it is both romantic and modernist in its deliberate break from any recognizable style of the past. The etched floral decorations soften what might otherwise be a forbiddingly severe composition.

  • Hemphill Mausoleum, Homewood Cemetery

    Hemphill mausoleum

    A simple but elegant Ionic mausoleum, seen here with the much more extravagant Brown pyramid in the background.

  • Martha Boyd Grave, St. Clair Cemetery

    Martha Boyd grave

    Two women in the Boyd family were given these bed-like romantic graves; the one for Irene Boyd is grander and more ornate, but this one is perhaps in better taste.

    Headstone
    Rear of the headstone
  • Sutton Monument, Union Dale Cemetery

    Sutton monument

    This glorious creation is what happens when monument makers design monuments the way illustrators imagine them: a very romantic interpretation of classical forms, including stylized Ionic capitals, swags, a shrouded urn, and classical foliage. Unfortunately the inscriptions have eroded into illegibility, but in certain lights some of the burial dates seem to be from the 1860s.

    The variation in colors is mostly the result of using two different cameras.