A building can be functional and still be attractive; that is the lesson of this Tudor-style maintenance building in the Homewood Cemetery.
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Shoemaker Mausoleum, Homewood Cemetery
A very simple rustic design with a snatch of classical detailing. It is attractive and dignified, so Father Pitt hopes it will not be taken as insulting when he says that it looks a bit like a garden shed.
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John C. Hill Monument, Prospect Cemetery
A bilingual zinc or “white bronze” monument for a native of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (now part of Thuringia): English on one side, German on the other. Unusually it gives us two dates: the date of death (1877) and the date the monument was erected (1880).
Kisselbach is a very small town: Wikipedia gives its current population as 586.
The epitaph seems to be from an old folk song. Father Pitt appends his own attempt at a translation, but anyone who knows German better is welcome to improve it.
Lebe wohl du mutterliche Erde,
Nimm mich auf in deinen kühlen Schoos,
Dass mein Herz nach kummer nach beschwerden,
Ruhen möge unterm kühlen Moos.Farewell, thou motherly earth,
Take me in thy cooling lap,
So that after all my trials and pains,
My heart may rest under the cooling moss.
This particular style of monument is the Monumental Bronze Company’s Design No. 8.
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Gutbub-Guttbub-Goodboy Plot, Zion Cemetery
Here in Zion Cemetery, Whitehall, is an interesting document in the German-American immigrant experience.
George and Sophia (Klotz) Gutbub had a number of children who did not survive to adulthood, all buried in a row in the family plot. Those children all died with the name Gutbub—but their father did not.
In 1896, Sophia died as well, and was buried under the spelling “Guttbub”:
George later married a much younger woman, and at some point they decided that “Gutbub” was entirely too German. Father Pitt suspects that point may have come during the First World War, when some German-American families had good reason to fear for their lives.
So they Anglicized their name to “Goodboy,” and the name has stuck with their family ever since.
The plot is still in use, and all subsequent burials bear the name Goodboy. And, as you see in the picture at the top of this article, the family monument has had “Goodboy” added at the bottom, so that all the Gutbubs become Goodboys retroactively.
Thus the story of one family becomes the story of the Americanization of the Germans in America, who are America’s largest, but arguably America’s least visible, immigrant group.
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Senn Family Plot, Rosedale Cemetery
The Senn family plot carries the rustic-stump metaphor to an odd extreme. One central stump is surrounded by small stumps, one for each deceased family member. If the stump represents a life cut off, then the most descriptive term for the metaphor applied to a whole family this way is “deforestation.”
