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.
This striking angel is the work of Brenda Putnam, but the cemetery’s site (in an article that has since disappeared) was vague and confusing on dates. It said that the bronze angel was cast “after 1910” as a replica of an original granite sculpture. The earliest dated Putnam work listed in her sparse Wikipedia article is from 1917. Brenda Putnam would have been twenty years old in 1910; she would thus have been a teenager when the granite version was done, if the date “1910” means anything at all. Henry Kirke Porter, identified as “the best-known Porter here” by the cemetery’s site, died in 1921, and perhaps that gives us a better guess at the date of the sculpture.
If old Pa Pitt had to guess, he would imagine that those glorious wings were too heavy for granite, and the bronze cast was made when the original sculpture proved unstable.
An elaborately Victorian column with a recording angel at the top and statues of Hope and Faith on the lavish base. (We notice the absence of Charity, perhaps because the Rooks decided to take their money with them in the form of this monument.)
Note how the shadow of the angel is moving across the Lewis-Elliott monument behind it. If we wait just a few minutes…
Perfect.
