Captain Porter died in 1859, and this is a very well-preserved example of what we might call a romantic soldier’s monument.
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Captain John Porter Monument, Allegheny Cemetery
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Wood Shaft, Allegheny Cemetery
In this section of the Allegheny Cemetery are several circular burial plots, in which there is usually a prominent central monument—like an obelisk—with a number of graves orbiting it, all inside a stone ring. The Wood plot includes this somewhat elaborate shaft, which originally supported an urn at the top; the urn has fallen, and old Pa Pitt sure is glad he wasn’t there when it happened.
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Calbraith Perry Rodgers Monument, Allegheny Cemetery
In 1911, Calbraith Perry Rodgers became the first man to fly across the continent of North America, from Atlantic to Pacific—even though he had made his very first flight only a few months earlier. He flew a Wright Model EX biplane called the Vin Fiz Flyer, after the soda pop that sponsored his trip. The plane is immortalized in bronze on this monument (and the plane itself can be seen in the Air and Space Museum, Washington).
This was not a nonstop flight; it would be a long time before planes capable of flying that distance were built. There were 75 stops, of which 16 were technically crashes. But it was an epochal event in aviation; it showed, only eight years after the Wright Brothers’ first flight, that airplanes had matured to the point where practical long-distance travel was possible. The inscription tells the story of the flight.
Only the date of death tells the end of the story: the next year, in 1912, Rodgers became the first man to die in an airplane collision with a flock of birds. Even in death, he was a pioneer.
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Neville B. Craig Monument, Allegheny Cemetery
Neville B. Craig was born in Fort Pitt in 1787; he was mixed up with many of the old-money aristocratic families of Pittsburgh. In 1851, he published the first comprehensive history of Pittsburgh. It provoked a response from Henry Marie Brackenridge, son of Hugh Henry Brackenridge, who thought that his father’s memory was slandered by Craig’s “perverted and false” account of the Whiskey Rebellion. Craig was “representative of the ‘Neville connection,’” the anti-insurrectionist party that had called in troops from Washington; Brackenridge, on the other hand, had succeeded in gaining an amnesty for most of the insurrectionists. It is fascinating to see that, as late as the 1850s, the animosities of the Whiskey Rebellion were still very much alive among the old families in Pittsburgh.
Craig died in 1863 at his home, “Bellefield.” Today there is a section of Oakland called Bellefield, where Bellefield Avenue, Craig Street, and Neville Avenue are all parallel streets.
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Riddle Monument, Allegheny Cemetery
This monument seems more appropriate for a husband and wife; but it is for two Riddle men who appear to have been father and son, the son having died in his early twenties, though after his father. Two columns are bound together by a garland; one bears an Ionic capital, and the capital of the other is hewn off. It really does look like the sort of monument a mourning spouse might put up, but perhaps it was in the catalogue and caught somebody’s eye.
