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.
St. Peter’s Cemetery is a small German Catholic cemetery in Arlington. (The German Lutherans have a cemetery, St. Paul’s, right behind this one in Mount Oliver, and they seem almost to have chosen their patron saints confrontationally.) This elaborate monument presides over the priests’ plot in the cemetery.
“For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and in the last day I shall rise out of the earth. And I shall be clothed again with my skin, and in my flesh I will see my God.” (Job 19:25–26, the English translation taken from the Douay-Rheims version.)
“So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” (Psalm 89:14 in the Vulgate numbering, or 90:12 in the numbering used by most Bibles today. The English is from the King James Version; the Douay-Rheims version, following the Vulgate, is quite different.)
Judge William Wilkins was the owner of the estate called Homewood, whose grounds are now the Homewood Cemetery. His mausoleum is the oldest in the cemetery, which was built around it, and it is a model of the original Mausoleum at Halicarnassus.
Older family gravestones are gathered around the monument, including the grave of Judge Wilkins’ father, Captain John Wilkins, who fought in the Revolution.
More pictures of the Wilkins mausoleum, including transcriptions of the four inscriptions.
A big marble cross on a rustic base, with the inscription on an open book on the base. As with most monuments sold as “marble” in the 1800s, it was made from soft limestone that has eroded badly, so that the decorations on the cross are almost obliterated. The inscriptions are also weathering away, but right now they are still mostly legible. Meanwhile, the base, made of a different stone, still shows every chisel mark as sharply as when it was installed.
A. Moeslein
May 13, 1824
June 15, 1898
Family
L. B. Moeslein
June 14, 1834
Mar. 18[?], 1886
A. E. Moeslein
Apr. 29, 1858
July 1, 1912
Rose Moeslein
Freb. 21, 1860
July 17, 1931
The Woodmen of the World, still selling life insurance today under the name WoodmenLife, guaranteed every member a grave monument in the form, appropriately, of a stump. The stump program ended about a hundred years ago, but a number of these stumps were installed in Pittsburgh cemeteries. This one marks the plot of the Bollenberg family, with a separate log for Frederick Bollenberg and an unnamed infant son. Mr. Bollenberg died at the age of about 32, and it is possible that he and the child died from the same cause.
The seal of the Woodmen of the World, whose local chapters were called “camps.” “Dum tacet clamat”: “Though he is silent, yet he cries out.” (The Woodmen usually translate this motto as “Though silent, he speaks.”)
