Pittsburgh Cemeteries

Category: St. Peter’s Cemetery (Arlington)

  • Clergy Monument, St. Peter’s Cemetery (Arlington)

    Clergy plot

    St. Peter’s Cemetery is a small German Catholic cemetery in Arlington. (The German Lutherans have a cemetery, St. Paul’s, right behind this one in Mount Oliver, and they seem almost to have chosen their patron saints confrontationally.) This elaborate monument presides over the priests’ plot in the cemetery.

    Clergy plot
    Clergy monument
    Clergy monument
    The Good Shepherd
    Inscription

    “For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and in the last day I shall rise out of the earth. And I shall be clothed again with my skin, and in my flesh I will see my God.” (Job 19:25–26, the English translation taken from the Douay-Rheims version.)

    “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” (Psalm 89:14 in the Vulgate numbering, or 90:12 in the numbering used by most Bibles today. The English is from the King James Version; the Douay-Rheims version, following the Vulgate, is quite different.)

    Clergy monument

  • Moeslein Monument, St. Peter’s Cemetery (Arlington)

    Moeslein monument

    A big marble cross on a rustic base, with the inscription on an open book on the base. As with most monuments sold as “marble” in the 1800s, it was made from soft limestone that has eroded badly, so that the decorations on the cross are almost obliterated. The inscriptions are also weathering away, but right now they are still mostly legible. Meanwhile, the base, made of a different stone, still shows every chisel mark as sharply as when it was installed.

    Inscription on the Moeslein monument

    A. Moeslein
    May 13, 1824
    June 15, 1898

    Family
    L. B. Moeslein
    June 14, 1834
    Mar. 18[?], 1886

    A. E. Moeslein
    Apr. 29, 1858
    July 1, 1912

    Rose Moeslein
    Freb. 21, 1860
    July 17, 1931

    Moeslein monument

  • Melling Obelisk, St. Peter’s Cemetery (Arlington)

    Melling obelisk

    Magdalen Melling died in 1909; Charles Melling died in 1919. This obelisk was probably put up when Magdalen died, or possibly before, since she was about 79 when she died (Charles died at about 93), and the Mellings might have ordered the obelisk in anticipation of the inevitable, as was common in those days. The monument is a standard pattern, but a tasteful one. There are four faces for inscriptions, none of them used; instead, Charles and Magdalen have headstones next to the obelisk.

    Note Charles Melling’s monogram on the obelisk.

    Monogram

    We also have an earlier picture of the Melling obelisk, showing the cross and anchor on the front.

  • Biller Monument, St. Peter’s Cemetery (Arlington)

    Statue on the Biller monument

    The edge of the cemetery is right up against a city alley, giving this romantically eroded monument a less-than-romantic location. Ludwig Biller died in 1903, and that is probably the date of this monument. “Marble” monuments like this one were out of fashion in the high-rent cemeteries by then, but they seem to have been produced much later for the ethnic cemeteries.

    Monument and alley
    Statue

  • Louis Foster Monument, St. Peter’s Cemetery, Arlington

    A good stock Pietà marks the grave of a soldier who died just a month and a half before the end of the First World War. The rustic stone with scroll that serves as a base does not match very well, and may have ben a replacement after the monument was damaged. LOUIS FOSTER DIED SEPT. 29, 1918.
    CO. M. 319 INF. A. E. F.