In the nineteenth century, churches usually built their cemeteries outside the city. At the turn of the twentieth, when the rapidly expanding streetcar lines triggered a storm of new development all around Pittsburgh, many of those cemeteries ended up surrounded by crowded urban neighborhoods. This one in Beechview is not quite forgotten; someone comes to mow it two or three times a year, but much of it is so overgrown by now that it’s immune to the mower.
Pittsburgh’s earliest settlers are buried downtown in the churchyard of Trinity Cathedral, the Episcopal cathedral of Pittsburgh (or at least the cathedral of some Anglican diocese, though which one may be up in the air right now). Next door is First Presbyterian, another colonial-era congregation, and across the street is the Duquesne Club, forming a perfect triangle of old money.
Trinity Churchyard is half a block up Sixth Avenue from the Wood Street subway station.
Like a forgotten Khmer temple rising out of the jungle, this octagonal mausoleum in the Allegheny Cemetery is partly overgrown, sprouting small trees from its roof. The black-and-white pictures were taken with an old Agfa Isolette, the color picture with a Yashica-A TLR.
More and larger pictures are here.
General Alfred L. Pearson
Died January 6, 1903
Prominent in Civil and Military Life
Took active part in 28 great battles and many skirmishes during the War of the Rebellion, including Antietam, Fredericksburg, Peebles Farm, Gettysburg, Wilderness, and Appomattox. Brevetted a major general at 27 years of age, and awarded a medal of honor by Congress for conspicuous bravery.
A worthy friend or foe.
This striking angel is the work of Brenda Putnam, but the cemetery’s site is vague and confusing on dates. It says 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 site, died in 1921, and perhaps that gives us a better guess at the date of the sculpture.
