Category: Smaller Graveyards

  • Kennedy Stump, Mount Olivet Cemetery

    This hilltop cemetery has few really interesting monuments, but old Pa Pitt has a well-known weakness for rustic stumps. This looks like an early-twentieth-century stump, but all the Kennedys buried nearby died in the later twentieth century; we suspect, therefore, that the family bought the plot and erected the stump, and then went on to live long and prosperous lives for decades.

  • Michael Coppersmith Tombstone, St. John’s Lutheran Church, Cranberry Township

    Not the oldest stone in this cemetery, but still very old for a legible tombstone in western Pennsylvania. Earlier tombstones tend to be shale, which does not last long.

     

     

  • Turner Graveyard

    The second-oldest marked burial ground in the city (the oldest is Trinity Churchyard), this little plot holds the remains of a number of early settlers, some pre-Revolutionary. Many of the stones are completely illegible or missing; the oldest legible stone is Nancy Redding’s from 1816.

  • Fawcett Church, Cecil Township

    The congregation began as a house meeting in 1793 and was officially founded in 1812. The current church, which replaced an earlier log church, was built in 1843 and restored after a fire in 1944. Families of early settlers are buried in the churchyard.

    Father Pitt has never run across “Nazarene” as a male given name before. The stonecutter made some very elegant letters, but “May the 1th” was as wrong in 1839 as it is today.

    These pictures are made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, so no permission is needed to use them for any purpose whatsoever.

  • John Henry Krebs Tombstone, St. John’s Lutheran Church, Cranberry Township

    A stone hand-cut by local craftsmen and remarkably well preserved; this is still in the same tradition (conceivably even by the same craftsman, though the lettering style looks different) that produced the George Otto tombstone nearly three decades earlier. It is also one of the last of the locally made tombstones in this churchyard; soon mass production would take over.