Pittsburgh Cemeteries

Category: St. Peter’s Cemetery (Arlington)

  • 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.

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

    Pity this poor mourner. We have found the identical, or nearly identical, statue in the Mount Lebanon Cemetery and twice in the South Side Cemetery (Baxmyer and Nickel), and she is almost always missing her hands; only once, in the Allegheny Cemetery, has Father Pitt found the statue intact. The wrists were clearly a weak point in the design. Here she presides over a matched pair of graves with a stone outline, evidently sold as a package deal with the statue, since the same grouping occurs in the South Side Cemetery.

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

    Iron monuments are rare, but in this little German Catholic cemetery this same ornate iron cross occurs twice. it was not a good idea from a genealogical point of view: the letters are separate pieces, and they fall off as bits of the monument rust. Today we can guess the surname “Amrhein” because the cross occurs in a group with a double granite monument, but there is not enough information to fill in the first name or the birth and death dates (18— to 188-).

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

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    This monument, festooned with Bible verses in German, marks the section of the cemetery where parish priests are buried.