Pittsburgh Cemeteries

Category: Allegheny Cemetery

  • Marshall Monument, Allegheny Cemetery

    Marshall monument and robin

    Archibald Marshall was a merchant, industrialist, and landscape architect whose most distinguished project was the beautiful landscape of West Park in Allegheny, now the North Side. He is the “Marshall” in the name of the neighborhood of Marshall-Shadeland. His monument also remembers his wife and three children who did not live to be ten years old. We wonder whether the child in the sculpture is meant to represent one of them. We wonder whether the child is looking up from his book to say, “Mother, you have a robin on your head.”

    Marshall monument

  • Sutmeyer Mausoleum, Allegheny Cemetery

    Sutmeyer mausoleum

    A small stock mausoleum with indeterminate medievalish details. The cross-bearing angel on top has weathered into picturesque abstraction, looking far more otherworldly now than it did when it was new.

    Angel on the Sutmeyer mausoleum

  • Lillian Russell Moore Mausoleum, Allegheny Cemetery

    Lillian Russell Moore mausoleum

    This is the Lillian Russell who was widely considered the most beautiful woman in the world in the late 1800s and into the 1900s. Her fourth and last husband was Alexander Pollock Moore, who owned the Leader in Pittsburgh. When she died unexpectedly in 1922, he gave her this tiny but tasteful mausoleum; he was buried with her later, but her name is the one above the columns, and the epitaph is hers: “The world is better for her having lived.”

    Lillian Russell and Alexander Pollock Moore

    Mrs. Moore’s opinion as “Immigration Inspector” was that Europe was sending us its worthless dregs; she is sometimes blamed for the restrictive immigration policies that followed, but it is very likely that the Harding administration appointed her to reinforce and not to create anti-immigrant prejudice. She injured herself in a very minor way on the trip back, but died unexpectedly from complications.

    Initials in bronze

    The initials of both residents are rendered in bronze on the doors.

    Stained glass in the mausoleum

    The simple stained glass has suffered some damage, which should be fairly easy to repair.

  • Obelisks in Allegheny Cemetery

    Obelisks in Allegheny Cemetery

    Above, a forest of obelisks before a forest of forest; below, a pleasant stroll among the mausoleums and monuments.

    Stroll past the Flower mausoleum

  • Statue on the Graham Monument, Allegheny Cemetery

    Statue on the Graham monument

    Father Pitt thinks this picture of mourning and consolation (no one seems to know who the sculptor was) is one of the finest things in the cemetery, and fall colors add much to the effect.