The earliest Laughlin buried here died in 1882, but old Pa Pitt would guess that the family monument might be about a decade later. It is a sober classical base with a statue of Hope carrying the compact portable anchor she sometimes travels with.
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Shepherd Shaft, Allegheny Cemetery
A marble shaft in the style of the middle 1800s. The inscriptions are mostly legible, except for Jane Shepherd’s, which was probably the last added:
JOHN SHEPHERD
BORN IN IRELAND
DIED APR. 5, 1851
AGED 50 YEARSJANE
WIFE OF
JOHN SHEPHERD
BORN ———-
DIED — 17, 1877
AGED — YEARSJOHN, JR.
SON OF
JOHN & JANE SHEPHERD
BORN DEC. 16, 1826
DIED FEB. 3, 1862
AGED 26 YEARSThe younger John Shepherd died at the age of 26 during the Civil War, and it is natural to wonder whether he was killed in battle; but since no mention is made of service or sacrifice, he may have died of natural causes.
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Aull–Martin Monument, Homewood Cemetery
A granite monument with a crumbling marble statue on top; it was probably allegorical, but one of the arms would have held the key to the allegory, and both are gone. If old Pa Pitt had to guess, he would suggest that this was a statue of Hope, with the left arm holding up an anchor and the right pointing heavenward. This is certainly a good demonstration of the different aging properties of the two kinds of stone.
The statue may date from 1878, the year the cemetery opened, when the first Martin was buried here; old Pa Pitt suspects that the base is later, replacing an earlier base that had been damaged or become illegible. The individual gravestones in front of the monument are matching in style, and look like the style of the early twentieth century, though they include dates back to 1878. Father Pitt’s guess is that the original base bore inscriptions for all the Martins and Aulls buried up to the time of its replacement.
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Weber Monument, Homewood Cemetery
An angel steps out of a rusticated boulder to drop a flower on the hallowed ground of the Weber family’s graves.
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Porter Monument, Allegheny Cemetery
This striking angel is the work of Brenda Putnam, but the cemetery’s site (in an article that has since disappeared) was vague and confusing on dates. It said that the bronze angel was cast “after 1910” as a replica of an original granite sculpture. The earliest dated Putnam work listed in her sparse Wikipedia article is from 1917. Brenda Putnam would have been twenty years old in 1910; she would thus have been a teenager when the granite version was done, if the date “1910” means anything at all. Henry Kirke Porter, identified as “the best-known Porter here” by the cemetery’s site, died in 1921, and perhaps that gives us a better guess at the date of the sculpture.
If old Pa Pitt had to guess, he would imagine that those glorious wings were too heavy for granite, and the bronze cast was made when the original sculpture proved unstable.
