Pittsburgh Cemeteries

Category: Union Dale Cemetery

  • John Mendel Monument, Union Dale Cemetery

    An ordinary stone, but with an interesting German epitaph. Unfortunately the last two lines are buried in the ground, and Father Pitt was unwilling to dig for them.

    Ja du hast jetzt überstanden
    Manche schwere harte Stunden,
    Manchen Tag und manche Nacht
    Hast du in Schmerzen zugebracht.

    Standhaft hast du sie ertragen
    Deine Schmerzen, deine Plagen…

    Old Pa Pitt’s German is sketchy at best, but this is how he translates it:

    Yes, now thou hast withstood
    many heavy, hard hours;
    many a day and many a night
    hast thou spent in pain.

    Steadfast hast thou borne it,
    thy pain, thy plague…

    This appears to be one of those circulating funerary poems of the nineteenth century that were like Facebook memes today: they keep showing up on monuments in slightly different wording, and nobody knows where they came from.

  • John Arbuckle Monument, Union Dale Cemetery

    John Arbuckle was born in Scotland and died here in 1861. So much we can read, but the soft stone of his monument is eroding, and the inscription is hard to make out.

  • Kelley Monument, Union Dale Cemetery

    A particularly fine mourner, black with sooty Pittsburgh history, strewing flowers over the grave.

  • Ingles Monument, Union Dale Cemetery

    James Ingles, born in Scotland, died here in 1863. This is a fine example of Civil-War-era Gothic style.

  • McIntosh Monument, Union Dale Cemetery

    This is a standard urn-on-the-top monument, and Father Pitt mentions it mostly because it includes a name that, as far as he can tell, is entirely unique: “Elspacious,” Mr. McIntosh’s son, who died at the age of 27 or 28 in some terrible accident (“burned to death at Oil City,” says the History of Allegheny County, which has a short biography of Laughlan McIntosh). Google finds no other men named Elspacious on the entire World-Wide Web.