This striking angel is the work of Brenda Putnam, but the cemetery’s site is vague and confusing on dates. It says 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 site, died in 1921, and perhaps that gives us a better guess at the date of the sculpture.
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Porter Angel, Allegheny Cemetery
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Moorhead Column, Allegheny Cemetery
Erected in 1877, this column is unusual in carrying two distinguished works of sculpture in different media. The bronze relief is by Carl Conrads (who actually signed it); the cemetery site does not attribute the stone statue, and old Pa Pitt’s eye for sculptural style is not good enough to say whether it is or is not Conrads’ work.
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Oliver Cross, Allegheny Cemetery
The Oliver family came from Ireland, and this striking Celtic cross stands in the middle of their plot to remind them of their ancestry.
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Moorhead Mausoleum, Allegheny Cemetery
According to the cemetery’s site, this fantastic and imaginative mausoleum seems to have been built for James Kennedy Moorhead; it was designed by Louis Morgenroth and built in 1862, though Moorhead lived twenty-two years after that. The vegetation rising from the roof only adds to the mystery and romance, as if one had stumbled across a lost Gothic Khmer temple deep in the jungle. The name “Moorhead” appears over the door on one side, and “Murdoch” on the opposite side.
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William Teese Monument, Allegheny Cemetery
Even the cemetery’s own site knows almost nothing about this monument and the man it memorializes. It is much eroded by time (it dates from 1850 or so), but it is a unique design, and the decay gives it a certain air of romantic mystery.