An elaborately Victorian column with a recording angel at the top and statues of Hope and Faith on the lavish base. (We notice the absence of Charity, perhaps because the Rooks decided to take their money with them in the form of this monument.)
Note how the shadow of the angel is moving across the Lewis-Elliott monument behind it. If we wait just a few minutes…
Perfect.
An editor’s work is never done. Here is Daniel O’Neill, owner and editor of the Dispatch, still at work 145 years after his death in 1877. Though he died at the young age of 47, he had already built the Dispatch into Pittsburgh’s most respected newspaper, a position it held until the great newspaper massacre of the early 1920s, when paper shortages and rising costs forced hundreds or thousands of papers across the country out of business. Before that there had been at least a dozen English dailies in Pittsburgh, not to mention three in German and several in other languages.
The monument itself is a harmoniously eclectic mix of styles in the Victorian manner: classical elements dominate, but Mr. O’Neill’s desk rests on an Egyptian pedestal.
St. Michael’s was a German parish, but it must have had a small Hungarian contingent as well, or it shared its cemetery with a Hungarian parish. This statue of Christ blessing visitors as they enter the cemetery (it is placed in the middle of a circle at the entrance) stands on a base with the inscription EGO SUM RESURRECTIO ET VITA in Latin and three other languages: German, English, and Hungarian.
One of the early settlers of the Carrick area. We are not absolutely sure of the first name, since the first letter of it is obliterated. “Jenny” is by far the most likely possibility. Here is Father Pitt’s transcription, which is partly speculative:
IN MEMORY OF
JENNY O’NEAL
who departed this life
—— 20th, A.D. 1836
[Aged — years and —] months
Below, a black-and-white picture with a different camera.
Father Pitt is not entirely sure of the middle initial; the best he can say is that it looks more like an I than like any other letter he can think of. Here is a lavishly romantic monument typical of the taste of the middle 1800s, when Carrick was a country settlement along the road to Brownsville.
Here is Father Pitt’s attempt at a transcription, but he would be delighted to be corrected, since the stone has eroded to the point where some parts are not easily legible.
In memory of
Grace I. Bell
Wife of Samuel Wallace
Died Aug. 27, 1862.
In the 66. year of her age
—
Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord,
From henceforth, yea, saith the Spirit,
That they may rest from their labors.
The epitaph is from Revelation 14:13. It leaves out the last words of the verse: “and their works do follow them.”
To improve the chance of legibility, we reproduce the monument in both color and black and white.
