According to the cemetery’s site, this fantastic and imaginative mausoleum seems to have been built for James Kennedy Moorhead; it was designed by Louis Morgenroth and built in 1862, though Moorhead lived twenty-two years after that. The vegetation rising from the roof only adds to the mystery and romance, as if one had stumbled across a lost Gothic Khmer temple deep in the jungle. The name “Moorhead” appears over the door on one side, and “Murdoch” on the opposite side.
Even the cemetery’s own site knows almost nothing about this monument and the man it memorializes. It is much eroded by time (it dates from 1850 or so), but it is a unique design, and the decay gives it a certain air of romantic mystery.
An exceptionally beautiful and tasteful contemplative mourner put up about 1890 for Wilson Miller, head of the Pittsburgh Locomotive Works. Note the interesting hybrid classical-Gothic base.
In many city neighborhoods you’ll find a cemetery or two much older than the neighborhood itself. Cemeteries were established in the countryside outside the city; the city grew to engulf them, but they often remain little oases of rural stillness in the urban bustle. The South Side Cemetery has graves going back well before the Civil War, when Carrick was farmland and wilderness, and the hilly location gives us spectacular views in all directions. The contrast between the dense and cluttered urban neighborhood and the calm peace of the cemetery seems as though it ought to be a metaphor for something.
J. B. Ford, founder of Pittsburgh Plate Glass, has one of the grandest mausoleums in the Allegheny Cemetery, which is saying a good deal. The town of Ford City is named for him. It would be an interesting study to survey the Allegheny Cemetery and find how many of its residents have towns named after them; one might well find that there are more people with towns named after them here than in any other cemetery in the country.
