Pittsburgh Cemeteries – Page 77 – The Art and Architecture of Death

Morgan Tombstones, Bethany Cemetery

In Memory of
BILLINGSLEY MORGAN
Who departed this life
[Marc]h the 7th 1836
[in the —]th year of his age

Here is a pair of tombstones by the same extraordinary folk artist—and, because he actually signed one of them, we know his name: H. Savage. Both are badly damaged, but they form a pair side by side, so old Pa Pitt guesses that the illegible stone marks the resting place of Mrs. Billingsley Morgan. Unlike most Western Pennsylvania tombstones of the 1830s, these are handsomely carved in relief, much like the famous New England tombstones of the colonial era, but without the flying skulls.

Even this unusually artistic and ambitious stonecutter did not sketch out his lettering before beginning the inscription, so that he ran out of space for the name “MORGAN” on Billingsley Morgan’s tombstone.
Art Deco in the Homewood Cemetery

Art Deco was popular only for a few decades in the early and middle twentieth century, and it never became a very popular style for cemetery monuments. But among the wealthy residents of the Homewood Cemetery, a restrained and tasteful Art Deco was quite fashionable in the years from roughly 1930 to 1950. In many cases it takes the form of a streamlining and radical simplification of classical and Gothic styles. Some of these monuments look like pieces of sets from the world’s most somber RKO musical.
Schaffer Plot, Ridgelawn Cemetery

As Father Pitt has mentioned earlier, Ridgelawn Cemetery preserves its stone-fenced family plots, once a feature of every “rural” cemetery, more perfectly than any other cemetery in the area. Here we have a typical plot, except for its unusual shape: a main monument in the rear center is surrounded by various smaller monuments for individual members of the family, and the stone wall breaks for an entrance inscribed with the name of the patriarch of the family.
Anthony Boly Tombstone, Bethany Cemetery

Here is a stone inscribed by someone who obviously did not make a living creating tombstones. Yet the work is done well enough that the stone is perfectly legible nearly two centuries later.
Elizabeth Zedel Monument, St. Paul’s Lutheran Cemetery (Mount Oliver)

Readers who have explored this site know already that Father Pitt collects zinc monuments. They were mass-produced and considerably cheaper than stone monuments of equivalent size, so that they were often condemned as tasteless and excluded from cemeteries for the better classes of dead people. But they live up to the zinc monument vendors’ extravagant claims: they are as permanent as bronze, or more so, and could be bought in a huge variety of shapes with interchangeable reliefs on the panels.

Here is one of the more modest zinc monuments Father Pitt has found, but it is very well preserved, though many of the stones around it are eroded and illegible.