Pittsburgh Cemeteries

Category: Bethany Cemetery

  • Rev. Wm. Jeffery Family Plot, Bethany Cemetery

    The Rev. William Jeffery, D.D., was pastor of Bethany Presbyterian Church for 34 years. He retired in 1855, as he was approaching the age of eighty; but he lived almost another seventeen years after that, dying at ninety-six in 1872. From the style, we guess that this obelisk was put up when he died.

    Pastor Jeffery’s wife is also marked by this obelisk, and so is a daughter Elizabeth, who died at not quite five years old in 1831.

    Elizabeth also has her own fine tombstone in the style of forty years earlier, which tells us that she died of that great scourge of nineteenth-century childhood, scarlet fever:

    The only proper reaction to such a loss is the one Pastor Jeffery had cut into her tombstone: to quote from the book of Job.

  • Joseph Alexander Tombstone, Bethany Cemetery

    This skillfully cut stone from 1824 is, so far, the only tombstone of its era Father Pitt has seen that is signed by the stonecutter: “J. Sumny sculpturemingo.”

    We suspect that “Mingo” (a name often used for local Indians) is the name of a settlement, now vanished; and that “sculpture” is the stonecutter’s incorrect expansion of the often-seen abbreviation “sculp.” after an artist’s name, which stands for the Latin “sculpsit.” We also suspect that this is not the only tombstone by J. Sumny in the cemetery; several others look like his work.

    Note the curious curved square cut to the right of the number 32. Father Pitt’s guess is that this is a correction: the stonecutter may have incorrectly cut “aged 32d years.”

  • Bethany Cemetery, South Fayette Township

    The Bethany Cemetery was originally the churchyard of Bethany Presbyterian Church, now located on Washington Avenue in Bridgeville. It was founded in 1814 and continued to receive burials until 1943. Many of the early tombstones from 1830 and before are still quite legible.

    Visiting this cemetery is a bit of an adventure. It sits above the Presto-Sygan Road, and just to the south of the cemetery there is a little space in the weeds where one can pull off and park—if no one else is parked there. One must then walk back along the road, squashed against the stone wall, until one reaches the steps up into the cemetery.