Mr. John Weakly Chalfant died in 1898, but in 1930 his heirs took it into their heads to have the Ecclesiastical Department of Tiffany Studios design this very elegant classical structure, in which he was reinterred. The whole design is clearly meant to show off a Tiffany stained-glass window, but the window was stolen more than thirty years ago.
James B. Hogg died in the sinking of the SS Arctic in 1854. The marble relief on his monument is badly eroded, but enough remains to tell the awful story of the last moments of the Arctic.
The bronze angel is by the well-known sculptor Henry Kirke Brown; according to the cemetery site, it was one of the first bronze statues cast by an American foundry. Since George Hogg died at the end of 1849, the angel probably dates from about 1850.
In some ways this is the oddest monument in the Allegheny Cemetery, though in that category it faces some very stiff competition. It is an Egyptian-style canopy of sandstone over a marble statue that has almost entirely disintegrated. In fact we know the name “Warden” only from the cemetery’s site. We can barely make out the words “Little George” under the remains of the statue.
The Egyptian style is remarkable enough for the middle 1800s, but this monument is odder than the few other remnants of the first Egyptian revival. The pattern of holes in the sandstone seems to have been made by an amateur with too much time on his hands. The winged sun disk or scarab is the earliest occurrence of that symbol Father Pitt has found anywhere in Pittsburgh; it would later become ubiquitous on mausoleums of the second Egyptian Revival in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
A huge rustic stump, probably the second-largest in Pittsburgh (without measuring, Father Pitt would say the Gilchrist stump in the Homewood Cemetery is probably taller). It is surrounded by graves of the Wilkins family, and each sawed-off branch is made to represent one dead Wilkins—a metaphor that old Pa Pitt thinks at least verges on tasteless, if it does not merrily dance on the grave of taste.
Whatever we think of its artistic merit, it does at least imitate the natural form of a stump with some success, and it is one of the few monuments in the cemetery that actually bear the name of the creator: W. C. Brown, signed in small plain letters on one of the roots.
