Tag: Bible Verses

  • Moses Chess Monument, Chartiers Cemetery

    This imposing monument is notable for its particularly fine uncial inscription at the top. Moses Chess has a separate headstone that gives 1895 as his date of death.

  • Mawhinney Monument, Union Dale Cemetery

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    A particularly fine Gothic monument most notable for the absolutely splendid lettering on all four sides. The verses are from Psalm 34.

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  • Prell Monument, Spring Hill Cemetery

    Monuments have stories to tell; sometimes they gossip, and sometimes they proclaim the achievements of the deceased. Every once in a while the story is unbearably sad. Here, on this unusually splendid zinc shaft, is one of those stories.

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    Edward and Elizabetha Prell had a daughter Sophia, whom they must have loved very much. In 1874, while Elizabetha was well along in her pregnancy with a younger sister for Sophia, the little girl died at the age of five. A month and a half later, the baby was born, and named Sophia again, in honor of her so recently departed sister.

    In 1876, three days before the colossal celebrations that marked the hundredth anniversary of American independence, the second Sophia died, a month shy of two years old.

    A week later, on July 8, Elizabetha died as well. She may have been carried off by the same disease that killed her daughter. Or she may have, as the Victorians would say, died of grief; and who can blame her?

    The monument makes the best possible use of the standard panels in the “white bronze” dealer’s catalogue. What could be better than the image of Christ welcoming the little children? Two angels are also appropriate. And the clasped hands…well, they were in the catalogue, too.

    The statue of Hope (we presume; she has lost her symbolic attribute, probably an anchor) bolted to the top of the monument seems to be of a different material.

    This is actually the first German-language “white bronze” monument old Pa Pitt has run across. The German-speaking population was huge in the late 1800s, so it made good sense for monument-makers to have stock epitaphs in German.

  • Good Shepherd Monument, St. Peter’s Cemetery (Arlington)

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    This monument, festooned with Bible verses in German, marks the section of the cemetery where parish priests are buried.

  • Hanna (?) and Elisabeth Chambres Tombstone, South Side Cemetery

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    On its sketchy Web site, the South Side Cemetery claims to have been founded in 1873; but there are monuments older than that, suggesting either that there was a cemetery on this site before 1873, or that some gravestones were moved from an earlier site (which sometimes happened when an older cemetery was engulfed by the city). This stone is dated 1840, and it is definitely in the style of the 1840s, not much later. Time has badly damaged the inscription, but old Pa Pitt thinks he can reconstruct almost all of it:

    IN MEMORY OF
    HANNA, Consort of
    John Chambres
    who departed this life
    Sept. 9th, 1840
    aged 52 years.

    Also
    ELISABETH their daughter
    died January 8th 1840
    aged 18 years.

    And I heard a voice from heaven saying unto
    me, Write, Blessed are the dead which die in the
    Lord from henceforth: Yea, saith the Spirit, that
    they may rest from their labours; and their
    works do follow them. Rev. 14:13.

    The name “Hanna” and the year 1840 for the death of Elisabeth are not completely certain.