Pittsburgh Cemeteries

Category: South Side Cemetery

  • Hanna (?) and Elisabeth Chambres Tombstone, South Side Cemetery

    KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA

    On its sketchy Web site, the South Side Cemetery claims to have been founded in 1873; but there are monuments older than that, suggesting either that there was a cemetery on this site before 1873, or that some gravestones were moved from an earlier site (which sometimes happened when an older cemetery was engulfed by the city). This stone is dated 1840, and it is definitely in the style of the 1840s, not much later. Time has badly damaged the inscription, but old Pa Pitt thinks he can reconstruct almost all of it:

    IN MEMORY OF
    HANNA, Consort of
    John Chambres
    who departed this life
    Sept. 9th, 1840
    aged 52 years.

    Also
    ELISABETH their daughter
    died January 8th 1840
    aged 18 years.

    And I heard a voice from heaven saying unto
    me, Write, Blessed are the dead which die in the
    Lord from henceforth: Yea, saith the Spirit, that
    they may rest from their labours; and their
    works do follow them. Rev. 14:13.

    The name “Hanna” and the year 1840 for the death of Elisabeth are not completely certain.

  • M. Agnes Brewster Monument, South Side Cemetery

    A kind of obelisk with a weirdly cartoony little statue of a lyre-playing woman at the summit. It seems the bereaved husband erected this monument to his young wife, who died at twenty-four; he lived nearly four more decades, but probably never remarried, as his name was engraved below hers by a different hand when he died.

  • Sunshine Mausoleum, South Side Cemetery

    The Sunshine mausoleum from 1897, with its patient mourner uncomplainingly enduring a roosting bird, is almost certainly another ordered-from-a-catalogue mausoleum. But who is not delighted to see the name “Sunshine” engraved in cheerfully rustic letters over the entrance to a tomb? The style is hard to pin down: it has the heaviness of Romanesque, but the pointed arch suggests Gothic ambitions.

  • Nusser Monument, South Side Cemetery

    In memory of Christian (so we interpret “CHRIST.”) Nusser and his wife Barbara. Barbara’s inscription is clearly later and by a different hand, so we conclude that this monument was probably put up shortly after Christian’s death in 1874.

    The Benz monument in St. Michael’s Cemetery is identical, but without the pinnacle; perhaps the top was a separate piece.

  • Vallowe Monument, South Side Cemetery

    A recording angel sits on a tall shaft, writing in the Book of Life. The dates are in English, but the base of the monument bears an inscription from the Luther Bible: “Sondern wir glauben, durch die Gnade des Herrn Jesu Christi selig zu werden” (“But we believe that through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ we shall be saved,” Acts 15:11).