Pittsburgh Cemeteries

Tag: Churchyards

  • Fawcett Church, Cecil Township

    The congregation began as a house meeting in 1793 and was officially founded in 1812. The current church, which replaced an earlier log church, was built in 1843 and restored after a fire in 1944. Families of early settlers are buried in the churchyard.

    Father Pitt has never run across “Nazarene” as a male given name before. The stonecutter made some very elegant letters, but “May the 1th” was as wrong in 1839 as it is today.

    These pictures are made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, so no permission is needed to use them for any purpose whatsoever.

  • John Henry Krebs Tombstone, St. John’s Lutheran Church, Cranberry Township

    A stone hand-cut by local craftsmen and remarkably well preserved; this is still in the same tradition (conceivably even by the same craftsman, though the lettering style looks different) that produced the George Otto tombstone nearly three decades earlier. It is also one of the last of the locally made tombstones in this churchyard; soon mass production would take over.

  • Lawall Monument, St. John’s Lutheran Church, Cranberry Township

    Another well-preserved zinc monument. Although Christina and Jacob Lawall died in 1876 and 1883, the front of the monument bears the date 1902, suggesting that their descendants replaced an original cheaper monument with this zinc creation after nineteen years or so. Two of the sides are taken up with custom inscriptions, leaving two other sides for the installation of standard-order symbolic panels.

  • John V. Hoehn Monument, St. John’s Lutheran Church, Cranberry Township

    A zinc monument similar, but not identical, to the Butzler monument in the Union Dale Cemetery; probably it came from the same company, and was built with many of the same standard pieces. Mr. Hoehn was born in “Alsace, Germany.” Alsace was indeed part of Germany in 1906, though it had been part of France in 1831. It is interesting to compare this to the Kubler monument in St. Michael’s Cemetery, which insists that Mr. Kubler was born in “Lorraine, France.” Is the difference in the fact that Mr. Kubler was Catholic, but Mr. Hoehn (like the Prussian rulers of Alsace in 1906) was Protestant?

  • George Otto Tombstone, St. John’s Lutheran Church, Cranberry Township

    One of the very oldest legible stones Father Pitt has found around here. There are much earlier graves in the churchyards of Trinity Cathedral and Old St. Luke’s, but they were marked with native shale, and time has obliterated the inscriptions. This stone is in excellent shape, and it makes old Pa Pitt nostalgic for the days when stonecutting, even for modest graves, was a craft, rather than a business providing uniform products to the deceased masses.