Pittsburgh Cemeteries

Author: Father Pitt

  • John and Lette S. Hall Tombstones, Union Cemetery

    John Hall tombstone

    John Hall was a Revolutionary War private. The year on his stone is crusted over with lichens; from the style of the stone, Father Pitt might guess it was carved in the 1820s.

    John Hall tombstone
    John Hall marker

    This marker probably has birth and death dates on a last line invisible under the lawn. When he returns to the cemetery, old Pa Pitt will try to remember to pull away the growth.

    Lette S. Hall

    Lette S. Hall, probably John’s wife, is buried next to him. We believe we are reading the stone correctly, but some erosion in the middle makes us a little uncertain. She died September 11, 1836; we cannot read her age with an certainty. It might be 54, in which case she would have been during the Revolution and might have been an unmarried daughter instead of a wife.

  • Joseph and Jane Porter Tombstones, Union Cemetery

    Joseph Porter tombstone with Union Church in the background

    Joseph Porter served as a private in the Revolutionary War, perhaps beginning when he was a teenager. When he died in 1843 at the good old age of 83, he was given a hand-crafted tombstone by a traditional local craftsman—a craft that would soon die out even way out here in the wilds of Robinson Township. Unfortunately much of the inscription is obliterated, but the church has taken care to mark all the graves of its Revolutionary War veterans.

    Marker for Private Joseph Porter
    Joseph Porter tombstone

    When Joseph’s wife Jane died in 1857 at the age of 86, the old hand-crafted stones were out of style, and all the old craftsmen were retired or dead. She was given a tombstone in what old Pa Pitt calls the “poster style,” popular in the middle nineteenth century, which mixes different styles of lettering after the manner of posters of the same period.

    Jane Porter tombstone

  • Brown Pyramid, Homewood Cemetery

    Brown Pyramid

    Alden & Harlow, the highest-class high-class architects in Pittsburgh, designed this mausoleum, certainly the most photographed monument in the Homewood Cemetery, for William Harry Brown. It is festooned with Egyptian-style symbols, but the pyramid itself is in the proportions of the Pyramid of Cestius in Rome.

    Inscription over the entrance
    Entrance
    Urn with flowers

    More pictures of the Brown pyramid, and more, and more.

  • Heinz Mausoleum, Homewood Cemetery

    Heinz mausoleum

    Generations of H. J. Heinzes have been buried here, and the large underground chamber still has room for more. The architects were Vrydaugh & Wolfe, who also designed Warwick House, Howard Heinz’ mansion in Squirrel Hill.

    Ionic capital
    Heinz mausoleum

    More pictures of the Heinz mausoleum.

  • Donald Baird Tombstone, Homewood Cemetery

    Donald Baird, 1926–2011, with Hadronector donbairdi engraved on the stone

    This is an ordinary-looking grave marker, except that it is probably the only one in Pittsburgh with an engraving of an extinct fish, and almost certainly the only one with an extinct fish named after the deceased. Donald Baird was a paleontologist who grew up in Pittsburgh, spent his career as a professor at Princeton, and retired to Pittsburgh to putter in the Carnegie Museum’s huge collection of fossils in basement drawers. The fish was named for him by one of his admiring colleagues.