The spelling “Elenor” is unusual; but in the early 1800s, a rural Western Pennsylvanian might well have spelled her name several different ways, or not at all. The stonecutter has made some very elegant letters.
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Elenor Shaner Tombstone, Crossroads Cemetery
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James Horner Monument, Beulah Presbyterian Church Cemetery
Revolutionary War veteran James Horner’s descendants gave him a new granite monument in 1917; probably the old slate gravestone was already nearly illegible.
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Johnston Monument, Beulah Presbyterian Church Cemetery
This monument was put up in 1878, but it remembers the whole Johnston clan, going back to the nearly indestructible Jane Johnston, who was born in 1700 (or possibly 1699) and died in 1806 at the age of 106. During that time she surely had many interesting adventures, including crossing the Alleghenies to settle in the frontier of Western Pennsylvania when she must have been already an old woman.
We should note, by the way, that when a cemetery inscription says “in the 106th year of her age,” it almost always means “at the age of 106,” not (as it should) “at the age of 105.”
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Neville B. Craig Monument, Allegheny Cemetery
Neville B. Craig was born in Fort Pitt in 1787; he was mixed up with many of the old-money aristocratic families of Pittsburgh. In 1851, he published the first comprehensive history of Pittsburgh. It provoked a response from Henry Marie Brackenridge, son of Hugh Henry Brackenridge, who thought that his father’s memory was slandered by Craig’s “perverted and false” account of the Whiskey Rebellion. Craig was “representative of the ‘Neville connection,’” the anti-insurrectionist party that had called in troops from Washington; Brackenridge, on the other hand, had succeeded in gaining an amnesty for most of the insurrectionists. It is fascinating to see that, as late as the 1850s, the animosities of the Whiskey Rebellion were still very much alive among the old families in Pittsburgh.
Craig died in 1863 at his home, “Bellefield.” Today there is a section of Oakland called Bellefield, where Bellefield Avenue, Craig Street, and Neville Avenue are all parallel streets.
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Elisabeth Schmitt Tombstone, Zelienople Cemetery
It seems the Schmitts couldn’t afford even the fee for Zelienople’s proofreading-challenged resident stonecutter, but they succeeded in crafting a stone that has preserved Elisabeth Schmitt’s name for nearly two centuries. The N in “in” seems to have been cut backwards, and then corrected; or possibly it was cut forwards, and then corrected to backwards.
