Pittsburgh Cemeteries

Category: Smaller Graveyards

  • Bayer Angel, St. Mary’s Cemetery, Kennedy Township

    A marble recording angel whose businesslike attitude suggests to Father Pitt that she is checking boxes on a printed form. There are no inscriptions on the monument and no Bayer grave markers near it, so Father Pitt cannot date it except to say that it looks like the sort of thing that would have been put up in the beginning of the twentieth century. It is even possible that the plot was never used; we have seen examples of families that bought cemetery plots and put up monuments to themselves, and then moved elsewhere.

  • Marta Formoso Monument, St. Mary’s Cemetery, Kennedy Township

    St. Mary’s Cemetery, on a steep hill overlooking McKees Rocks, is one of the most ethnically diverse smaller cemeteries we have. It seems to have been shared by several Catholic parishes in McKees Rocks back in the days when Catholics segregated themselves by ethnic heritage. Some parts of the cemetery developed as little ethnic neighborhoods, and you can often tell the ethnicity of the neighborhood by the shapes of the monuments.

    Curiously, the Italians and the East Europeans tend to have the same taste in monuments: cross-topped tombstones with gracefully curved shoulders and, frequently, a photograph of the deceased. Some of these pictures have succumbed to the ravages of the elements or vandalism, but a surprising number remain fresh-looking today. Here is a young Italian woman who died at the age of about 22 almost a century ago, and we can still see her face as clearly as if she sat for her portrait yesterday.

    Father Pitt was not able to read the whole inscription, which has weathered badly. He was able to make out the name “Marta Formoso” (he is almost certain that the Christian name is not “Maria”) and the dates somethingth of April 1895 and somethingth of March 1917. The epitaph is mostly illegible, except for the words on the right-hand side; something about a flower and being sorrowful and memory. In a different light the rest of the inscription might come to life.

  • C. H. and W. H. Tombstone, Mount Pisgah Cemetery

    A priceless piece of folk art, this memorial to two children who died in the late 1800s was carefully carved by a barely literate family member or friend who makes the letter N backwards. The carver could not carve delicately enough to spell out the names, so we get only initials, which doubtless were enough for the family as long as memory endured.

    Old Pa Pitt calls this “priceless” not necessarily because of the skill involved—it is not an especially skillful work—but because it documents how ordinary people of the late 1800s imagined a tombstone should look. It is clearly an imitation of the tombstones of fifty years or more before, complete with a little tree laboriously scratched into the stone for each of the two deceased.

    Father Pitt is having a little trouble working out the dates. The obvious way of reading the stone is to divide it in left and right halves:

    C. H.
    BORN AUGUST
    26 • DIED
    OCT • 6
    1881

    W. H.
    BORN
    FEB • 19
    DIED•FEB
    1
    1891

    You can see the difficulty: this reading has W. H. dying before he was born. Perhaps the stonecutter has recorded only the birthdays and omitted the years of birth, in which case we do not know for certain even that these were children.

    The picture was taken when the stone was strongly backlit. Father Pitt has boosted the local contrast and used various other manipulations to make the inscription more legible.

    You might have trouble finding this stone if you went looking for it. It is well into the overgrown woods section of the Mount Pisgah Cemetery, and Father Pitt actually used his foot to hold back a hickory seedling in order to get an unobstructed picture.

  • Mount Pisgah Cemetery

    This is the churchyard of the Mount Pisgah Presbyterian Church in Green Tree. The little cemetery itself straddles the line between Green Tree and the Westwood neighborhood of Pittsburgh, and it is a curious fact that the section of the cemetery in Green Tree is neatly maintained, but the section in Pittsburgh is overgrown and forgotten—although some attempt had been made to clear some of the larger bushes from it when Father Pitt visited. Doubtless the true explanation of the phenomenon is that the overgrown section is not visible from the church, and thus can be allowed to go to ruin without making a spectacle of itself every Sunday.

    Tombstones litter the forest in the overgrown section. Much of the ground cover is Vinca minor, which is often called Cemetery Vine because it was such a popular planting in old cemeteries.

    In this section were some old family plots fenced with iron rails; we can still identify the Graham family plot, below:

    Note, again, the luxuriant growth of Vinca minor.

    There are tombstones here that go back to the 1840s at least, but most of the older ones are illegible, if they can be found at all. Here, however, is a legible tombstone from 1842 (forgive the strong backlighting):

    SACRED
    to the memory
    OF
    GEORGE P. RAMSEY
    Who departed this life
    July 27th 1842.
    In the 54th year of his age.
    —
    Remember man as you pass by
    As you are now so once was I;
    Repent in time, make no delay,
    For in a moment I was call’d away.

    The epitaph begins as one well-known funerary poem and ends as another; the last line has five feet instead of four. But it is still a powerful sentiment.

    In spite of the general neglect, someone cares enough to see that all the identifiable veterans have flags for their graves, so that little flashes of red, white, and blue light up the floor of the woods. Here is the grave of Corporal David Aston, a Civil War soldier whose birth and death dates are not mentioned:

  • Cneseth Israel Cemetery

    This is what a typical Jewish cemetery looks like in Pittsburgh: straight rows of graves with foot-wide alleys between, each grave given just enough space for the coffin and no more. They look like crowded urban neighborhoods, and they are designed to make the most use of the least space.

    For some reason, a large number of Jewish congregations in the city bought land for cemeteries in Reserve and Ross Townships north of the Allegheny. Many of them are not marked on maps, but a satellite view will reveal the distinctive tight rows of graves.

    Because of frequent vandalism, many Jewish cemeteries are gated and locked, with “NO TRESPASSING” signs on the gates—a sorry reminder that, even today, it is not always easy being Jewish. This cemetery, however, was open (Father Pitt would never walk past a “NO TRESPASSING” sign without permission of the owners).

    This cemetery is notable for the large number of stones with embedded photographs, and for a good number of rustic stumps crowded in with the rest of the monuments.