An 1821 tombstone that appears to be another work of the Master of the Erratic Centering, whom we identify by his erratic centering and his aversion to capitalization—note, for example, the spelling “december.”
In
memory
of
JAMES OWENS
who departed this life
december 17th 1821
aged 56 years
An 1829 tombstone typical of the Hiland Cemetery. We can identify this particular stonecutter by two very distinctive traits: his erratic centering and his avoidance of capital letters and punctuation. We shall call him the Master of the Erratic Centering.
In spite of the damaged statue, this is an unusually beautiful monument, and the inscriptions are very good examples of German stonecutting in Pittsburgh.
Georg Kirner
Born Hoeffingen, Baden,
April 17, 1831.
Died in Pittsburg
May 12, 1872.
The language does not seem to be standard German (note, for example, the spelling “Maÿ” rather than “Mai”). Is it some Alemannic dialect? Perhaps someone more familiar with German can help old Pa Pitt by identifying the dialect and translating the other inscriptions:
So leb denn wohl so zieh dahin
Die Erde wartet dein
Geh in des Todes stille Ruhe-Kammerein
Shlaf eine sanfte süse Ruh’
Die Hand der Liebe deckt dich zu,
In his transcription, Father Pitt has made the assumption that a horizontal line over an N or M doubles the letter.
Jeh empfand an deiner Seite
Lebensfroh der Erde Glück
Jinner geh mir dein Geleite
Einen frohen augenblick.
The base of the statue is marked “Mein Gatte” (“My Husband).” The statue is probably ordered from a monument-dealer’s catalogue, with the simple Gothic letters already on the base. They are not nearly as elegant as the beautiful lettering by the local stonecutter.
For literally decades it has been a small local scandal: the once-beautiful Minersville Cemetery, a German Lutheran burying ground in the Hill District, was overgrown with weeds and vandalized, and no one would step forward to take care of it.
Now, at last, a group of Lutheran volunteers has taken on the cemetery. With the help of a bit of money from the cemetery’s upkeep fund and some more from Pittsburgh Area Lutheran Ministries, they have cleared the weeds, righted as many of the monuments as possible, and built a fine new iron gate to keep contractors with pickups from driving in to dump their garbage. (Pedestrians without garbage are still welcome.) The cemetery is beautiful again, an oasis of quiet repose in the middle of Herron Hill.
Some work still to be done: toppled and broken monuments gathered on one of the cemetery drives.
Greentree Cemetery is a German cemetery on Greentree Road in Green Tree. (After a century of indecision, the borough seems finally to have decided to spell its name as two words—which is wrong, since the name is universally pronounced as one word. But Father Pitt digresses.)
Here are three tombstones in a row remembering three sons of Sebastian and Maria Hotz. Louis August’s stone in the center has a small alcove that shelters a sleeping child, now quite eroded and almost unrecognizable. The dates are hard to read, and Father Pitt is not sure that he believes the dates these volunteer transcribers found in cemetery records. Georg Philipp’s stone is the most legible; he seems to have died in 1876 at the age of seven. Louis August’s is nearly hopeless. Heinrich was born in 1867 and died either in 1867 or—as the records apparently say—1887. That would make him a young adult, but everything about this triple tombstone suggests three children. Might the handwritten cemetery records have said 1867, and a later transcriber misread the date?
Note, incidentally, that the triple tombstone appears to be one monument all set up at the same time. It is possible that the three stones were bought separately and later arranged in a row, but the whole looks too much like a carefully arranged composition to Father Pitt.
