Category: Homewood Cemetery

  • Fall Colors in the Homewood Cemetery

  • Riter Mausoleum, Homewood Cemetery

    A large Doric temple near the entrance to the cemetery. It is very much a gentleman’s mausoleum: it is most distinguished by its lack of distinguishing features, concentrating instead on getting every detail of the style perfectly correct.

  • Perritt Monument, Homewood Cemetery

    Perritt monument

    A simple stele with Art Deco flair. It is running out of space for Elliott Eugene Perritts. Enlarge the picture and note the three children remembered on the base. Three funerals in four years: that is what childhood mortality used to be like even among wealthy families before we figured out how to vaccinate against childhood diseases.

  • Hemphill Mausoleum, Homewood Cemetery

    Hemphill mausoleum with fall leaves

    A classic Ionic temple with rusticated walls.

    Hemphill mausoleum
  • Aull–Martin Monument, Homewood Cemetery

    Statue

    A granite monument with a crumbling marble statue on top; it was probably allegorical, but one of the arms would have held the key to the allegory, and both are gone. If old Pa Pitt had to guess, he would suggest that this was a statue of Hope, with the left arm holding up an anchor and the right pointing heavenward. This is certainly a good demonstration of the different aging properties of the two kinds of stone.

    The statue may date from 1878, the year the cemetery opened, when the first Martin was buried here; old Pa Pitt suspects that the base is later, replacing an earlier base that had been damaged or become illegible. The individual gravestones in front of the monument are matching in style, and look like the style of the early twentieth century, though they include dates back to 1878. Father Pitt’s guess is that the original base bore inscriptions for all the Martins and Aulls buried up to the time of its replacement.

    Aull-Martin Monument
    Statue, full-length
    Face of the statue