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.
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.
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).
In many city neighborhoods you’ll find a cemetery or two much older than the neighborhood itself. Cemeteries were established in the countryside outside the city; the city grew to engulf them, but they often remain little oases of rural stillness in the urban bustle. The South Side Cemetery has graves going back well before the Civil War, when Carrick was farmland and wilderness, and the hilly location gives us spectacular views in all directions. The contrast between the dense and cluttered urban neighborhood and the calm peace of the cemetery seems as though it ought to be a metaphor for something.
The South Side Cemetery in Carrick does not have monuments by famous architects like the ones in the Allegheny Cemetery, but some of its residents did have good taste in sculpture.
