An angel clutches a cross and gazes heavenward.
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Stucki Angel, Union Dale Cemetery
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Porter Monument, Allegheny Cemetery
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.
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Lockhart Cross, Homewood Cemetery
A simplified Celtic cross with more than a whiff of Art Deco; it was probably put up in the 1930s, since the earliest Lockhart here died in 1936. The cemetery’s site attributes the monument to the Campell-Horigan company of Pittsburgh.
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Stanley Zaksesks Cross, St. Anne Parish Cemetery
Stanley Zaksesks died in 1920 when he was eleven or twelve years old. Perhaps his father worked in the construction business; this monument appears to have been cast in concrete. The name and date are painted.
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J. Abate Cross, St. Anne Parish Cemetery
A fairly large cross for a seventeen-year-old whose family perhaps could not afford a professional monument. Note the one attempt at decoration: a small sun pattern (or something) at the top.
