Category: St. Peter’s Cemetery (Arlington)

  • 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.

  • Amrhein Crucifix, St. Peter’s Cemetery (Arlington)

    Two of these mass-produced iron crucifixes from the 1880s can be found in St. Peter’s Cemetery [Correction: After another walk through the cemetery, we have found at least four]. Their weakness as monuments is that the individualized letters fall off, though “Hier ruhet” is molded in the metal and perfectly legible. Fortunately there are other Amrheins buried in the same plot with legible stone monuments, so we can be confident that the letters AMR—I- represent AMRHEIN. The first name (-ACK-B) is probably Jackob. The birth and death dates are also illegible, though we can make out the decade of death as 188-.

    The epitaph is perfectly legible, because it is cut in a stone base:

    Ruhe sanft in deiner Gruft
    bis dich Jesus wieder ruft.

    Rest softly in your grave
    till Jesus calls you again.

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

    This is an absolutely immense pointy thing; one site claims it’s a hundred feet tall. That is surprising enough in a little German Catholic cemetery in the middle of a city neighborhood, but the bigger surprise is that nobody is buried here. According to this page, the Winter Bros., Bavarian immigrants who founded a successful brewery on the South Side, bought this plot in 1889 and put up this towering obelisk, and then went and died somewhere else. Each of the three brothers has his name inscribed on one side of the obelisk: Michael, Wolfgang, and Alois.