Not the oldest stone in this cemetery, but still very old for a legible tombstone in western Pennsylvania. Earlier tombstones tend to be shale, which does not last long.
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Michael Coppersmith Tombstone, St. John’s Lutheran Church, Cranberry Township
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Turner Graveyard
The second-oldest marked burial ground in the city (the oldest is Trinity Churchyard), this little plot holds the remains of a number of early settlers, some pre-Revolutionary. Many of the stones are completely illegible or missing; the oldest legible stone is Nancy Redding’s from 1816.
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Joesph Allan Obelisk, Chartiers Cemetery
Early settler Joseph Allan is remembered on a simple and elegant marble obelisk. The inscription uses a surprising variety of lettering styles, after the manner of a Victorian poster, all of them cut with taste and skill, and harmonized perfectly.
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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.
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Andrew McFarlane Tombstone, St. Clair Cemetery
The McFarlanes were early settlers in the South Hills; in fact a McFarlane donated some of the land for this burying-ground. This child died at five and a half years old; and though his epitaph is partly buried, it is a famous quotation, which we give here in full:
Read this and weep—but not for me;
Lament thy longer misery.
My life was short, my grief the less;
Blame not my haste to happiness.This poem was quoted by Benjamin Franklin (from whom perhaps the McFarlanes took it) and many others as occurring on a tomb in a small English village, and so it did. But Father Pitt, with the aid of the all-knowing Internet, has done a bit of original research for you, and believes that he has traced the source ultimately to a poem in the back pages of a magazine.
In a very scholarly book of Admissions to the College of St. John the Evangelist, we find a note saying that the poem occurs on a monument in the church of Elton, Northamptonshire, where a child named Elizabeth Richardson Standish was buried; she died in May (the date was illegible) of 1731.
But old Pa Pitt has found the poem published in the Gentleman’s Magazine for April 1731. What could be more natural than that the bereaved father should remember a consoling poem titled “An EPITAPH on the Tomb Stone of an Infant” from last month’s magazine, and cause it to be engraved on his daughter’s monument?
As for this tombstone, it is a splendid effort by the local stonecutter, with a tree (perhaps a weeping willow?) and some fine pen-like flourishes. Those things more than make up for the little difficulty with fitting the final E in the name “McFarlane.” Following his usual method, Father Pitt calls this artist the Master of the Extended Bowls, from his easily identified trick of extending the bowls of letters like P, R, and D upward into a swooping flourish. We also find his work at least as far out as Canonsburg.
