This is an unusual Gothic shaft, probably dating from about 1850, when Sarah Pennock was buried here. There may have been inscriptions, but the raised letters spelling “Pennock” are the only legible marking now. Pennocks continued to be buried in this plot until 1929.
If you want to be remembered as a man of taste, you should be entombed in the Parthenon, or something very like it. This is very similar, but not identical, to the Eaton mausoleum in the Homewood Cemetery. Both are very correct Doric temples, bearing an even stronger resemblance to the Temple of Hephaestus in Athens than to the Parthenon. Alexander McBurney Byers was a titan of the iron industry, which you would never guess from this pristine white temple.
Oil baron William Frew died in 1880, and this monument was put up in 1882. The sculpture, of the mourner-and-consoler genre, is a very good one, if a little chunky in the 1880s manner. Father Pitt does not know the meaning of the motto “Straight down the middle,” but he suspects it has something to do with drilling for oil. He would be grateful if someone could enlighten him. UPDATE: A kind comment from Lisa Speranza (see below) tells us that the words refer—of course—to golf, a game of which Mr. Frew was very fond.
The monument is surrounded by mature boxwoods, the scent of which old Pa Pitt finds delightful. Some people hate it.
There is a bit of a mystery to the Samuel Montgomery monument: it gives the date of death as 1844, which is a year before the Allegheny Cemetery opened. Cemetery records say that Mr. Montgomery died in 1847. A close look at the base suggests that it might be a sort of marble palimpsest; the inscription is quite clear, and it may be a replacement for an inscription that was almost completely effaced. The stonecutter may have misread what was left of the earlier inscription. UPDATE: Commenter Lisa Speranza (see below) points out that a number of burials were moved here from other sites when the Allegheny Cemetery opened, which gives us another possible explanation, though it does not resolve the difference between the inscription and the cemetery records.
The Maria Smith is a quite elaborately and romantically mixed metaphor; a woman (now headless) standing, perhaps weeping, next to a broken classical column, sheltered in a Gothic alcove.
A moss-covered marble lectern with an open book, decorated with Masonic symbols on the sides. According to the inscription, Thomas Davage was born on the Isle of Wight, Christmas day, 1800, and died here in 1876.
