There was a brief revival of early-nineteenth-century tombstone styles in the 1920s and 1930s, and it produced some very attractive designs. Several of them are in the Laughlin plot. The three above share a weeping-willow design patterned after folk-art tombstones of a hundred years earlier.
This later tombstone is made in the same shape as the others, but with a different decorative scheme.
In the same plot are some stones with bronze plaques commemorating Henry B. Laughlin and his two wives.
This striking angel is the work of Brenda Putnam, but the cemetery’s site (in an article that has since disappeared) was vague and confusing on dates. It said that the bronze angel was cast “after 1910” as a replica of an original granite sculpture. The earliest dated Putnam work listed in her sparse Wikipedia article is from 1917. Brenda Putnam would have been twenty years old in 1910; she would thus have been a teenager when the granite version was done, if the date “1910” means anything at all. Henry Kirke Porter, identified as “the best-known Porter here” by the cemetery’s site, died in 1921, and perhaps that gives us a better guess at the date of the sculpture.
If old Pa Pitt had to guess, he would imagine that those glorious wings were too heavy for granite, and the bronze cast was made when the original sculpture proved unstable.
Classicism pared down to the bones, severely elegant. The bronze doors are especially fine.
Considering that the Exodus is the central event in Israel’s sacred history, Egyptian Revival has always struck old Pa Pitt as an odd choice of styles for a Jewish cemetery. But with this particular mausoleum he can see the appeal. “You think you’re a god-king, Pharaoh? Well, how would you like to be a door handle for the rest of eternity? What do you think of that, Mr. Bricks-Without-Straw?”
A thorough history of the Sunsteins and Speyers is in the Jewish Encyclopedia of Western Pennsylvania.
Flower-dropping mourners are very common in our cemeteries, but this one is made of bronze and unusually fine.
