Category: Minersville Cemetery

  • The Ethnic Diversity of the Hill District

    The Minersville Cemetery was the burying-ground of a German Lutheran congregation in the Hill District. But one corner of it is devoted to a wide variety of other ethnic groups. The Hill, which would become the legendary heart of African-American culture in Pittsburgh, was an extraordinary jumble of ethnicities a hundred years ago. The stone above is Slovak; the inscription is regrettably damaged, so that we cannot quite read the full name of the deceased.

    Slovaks were often Lutheran, and might have attended the German Lutheran church; but here is a Greek tombstone for one Nikolaos Tapinos. There are other Greek monuments as well, suggesting that this corner of the cemetery was opened to the Lutherans’ Greek Orthodox neighbors.

    Finally, here is an Arabic tombstone, the only one Father Pitt found in the cemetery. It probably belongs to a Lebanese or Syrian immigrant; there was a considerable Lebanese population in Pittsburgh a hundred years ago.

    The Hill, which was very crowded and not very wealthy, seems to have been hit hard by the Spanish Flu pandemic. A quick look around the Minersville Cemetery shows a very large number of burials of young adults in 1918 and the next two years.

  • Georg Kirner Monument, Minersville Cemetery

    In  spite of the damaged statue, this is an unusually beautiful monument, and the inscriptions are very good examples of German stonecutting in Pittsburgh.

    Georg Kirner
    Born Hoeffingen, Baden,
    April 17, 1831.
    Died in Pittsburg
    May 12, 1872.

    The language does not seem to be standard German (note, for example, the spelling “Maÿ” rather than “Mai”). Is it some Alemannic dialect? Perhaps someone more familiar with German can help old Pa Pitt by identifying the dialect and translating the other inscriptions:

    So leb denn wohl so zieh dahin
    Die Erde wartet dein
    Geh in des Todes stille Ruhe-Kammerein
    Shlaf eine sanfte süse Ruh’
    Die Hand der Liebe deckt dich zu,

    In his transcription, Father Pitt has made the assumption that a horizontal line over an N or M doubles the letter.

    Jeh empfand an deiner Seite
    Lebensfroh der Erde Glück
    Jinner geh mir dein Geleite
    Einen frohen augenblick.

    The base of the statue is marked “Mein Gatte” (“My  Husband).” The statue is probably ordered from a monument-dealer’s catalogue, with the simple Gothic letters already on the base. They are not nearly as elegant as the beautiful lettering by the local stonecutter.

  • Minersville Cemetery Comes Back from the Dead

    For literally decades it has been a small local scandal: the once-beautiful Minersville Cemetery, a German Lutheran burying ground in the Hill District, was overgrown with weeds and vandalized, and no one would step forward to take care of it.

    Now, at last, a group of Lutheran volunteers has taken on the cemetery. With the help of a bit of money from the cemetery’s upkeep fund and some more from Pittsburgh Area Lutheran Ministries, they have cleared the weeds, righted as many of the monuments as possible, and built a fine new iron gate to keep contractors with pickups from driving in to dump their garbage. (Pedestrians without garbage are still welcome.) The cemetery is beautiful again, an oasis of quiet repose in the middle of Herron Hill.

    Some work still to be done: toppled and broken monuments gathered on one of the cemetery drives.