The Rev. William Jeffery, D.D., was pastor of Bethany Presbyterian Church for 34 years. He retired in 1855, as he was approaching the age of eighty; but he lived almost another seventeen years after that, dying at ninety-six in 1872. From the style, we guess that this obelisk was put up when he died.
Pastor Jeffery’s wife is also marked by this obelisk, and so is a daughter Elizabeth, who died at not quite five years old in 1831.
Elizabeth also has her own fine tombstone in the style of forty years earlier, which tells us that she died of that great scourge of nineteenth-century childhood, scarlet fever:
The only proper reaction to such a loss is the one Pastor Jeffery had cut into her tombstone: to quote from the book of Job.
This skillfully cut stone from 1824 is, so far, the only tombstone of its era Father Pitt has seen that is signed by the stonecutter: “J. Sumny sculpturemingo.”
We suspect that “Mingo” (a name often used for local Indians) is the name of a settlement, now vanished; and that “sculpture” is the stonecutter’s incorrect expansion of the often-seen abbreviation “sculp.” after an artist’s name, which stands for the Latin “sculpsit.” We also suspect that this is not the only tombstone by J. Sumny in the cemetery; several others look like his work.
Note the curious curved square cut to the right of the number 32. Father Pitt’s guess is that this is a correction: the stonecutter may have incorrectly cut “aged 32d years.”
The Bethany Cemetery was originally the churchyard of Bethany Presbyterian Church, now located on Washington Avenue in Bridgeville. It was founded in 1814 and continued to receive burials until 1943. Many of the early tombstones from 1830 and before are still quite legible.
Visiting this cemetery is a bit of an adventure. It sits above the Presto-Sygan Road, and just to the south of the cemetery there is a little space in the weeds where one can pull off and park—if no one else is parked there. One must then walk back along the road, squashed against the stone wall, until one reaches the steps up into the cemetery.
“Pastor Russell,” as his followers called him, founded the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society and the International Bible Students Association, the organization that—after various schisms and defections—came to be known as Jehovah’s Witnesses. He was born in Allegheny (now the North Side), and when he died he was buried in what is now (after a number of changes of ownership) the Rosemont, Mt. Hope, & Evergreen United Cemeteries in Ross Township.
His fairly modest grave monument includes a photograph of Pastor Russell, lovingly preserved (and perhaps replaced more than once over the years).
Note the inscription identifying Pastor Russell as the Laodicean Messenger, or “the angel of the church of the Laodiceans,” as the King James Bible translates it (Revelation 3:14). Russell’s followers believed that he himself was that messenger.
Russell died in 1916. In 1921, some of his followers erected a showier monument in the form of a pyramid. One of Russell’s odd beliefs was that the Great Pyramid in Egypt was designed by God himself as a prophecy in stone. Like most such prophecies, it was meant to be uninterpretable until the correct clever interpreter came along—in this case, Pastor Russell.
This is actually one of the few cemetery pyramids in the Pittsburgh area whose proportions are Egyptian rather than classical Roman. It is meant to have the same proportions as the Great Pyramid, and in particular the capstone is carefully proportioned to match the Great Pyramid’s capstone, which in Pastor Russell’s interpretation represents the Christ.
The pyramid was meant as a marker not only for Russell, but for a number of other members of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, who owned this plot in the cemetery. A few names are inscribed in the open Bibles on the four sides of the pyramid, but most of the blank space was never used. It seems that the separate ownership of this plot has been preserved through the various changes of ownership the rest of the cemetery has gone through.
Another mausoleum in this cemetery whose style is hard to pin down. The shape is classical, but the capitals on the columns are more like a medieval interpretation of Corinthian capitals than they are like classical Corinthian capitals. Below we see this mausoleum as it stands in a row with the Redfern and Shaw mausoleums, just inside the Fifth Avenue gate.
