Several of the damaged tombstones in the Montours Cemetery have been duplicated in modern granite, which is a very good idea but costs some money. The broken stone of Ann Burns is still completely legible, and as a bonus it includes the name of the craftsman who inscribed it: Lanston S. Wilkins of Pittsburgh.
IN
Memory
OF
ANN BURNS
Who departed this life
Nov. 3rd 1840
In the 88 year
of her age.
Lanston S. Wilkins
Pitt••
The grieving husband of a wife who died far too young quotes Proverbs 31:12, translating it into Picksburgh dialect.
IN
Memory of
MARGARET McMAHAN
who departed this Life
February 17th 1828 in the 24
[year] of her age.
And she done him good and not harm all the days of her life.
John Hall was a Revolutionary War private. The year on his stone is crusted over with lichens; from the style of the stone, Father Pitt might guess it was carved in the 1820s.
This marker probably has birth and death dates on a last line invisible under the lawn. When he returns to the cemetery, old Pa Pitt will try to remember to pull away the growth.
Lette S. Hall, probably John’s wife, is buried next to him. We believe we are reading the stone correctly, but some erosion in the middle makes us a little uncertain. She died September 11, 1836; we cannot read her age with an certainty. It might be 54, in which case she would have been during the Revolution and might have been an unmarried daughter instead of a wife.
Joseph Porter served as a private in the Revolutionary War, perhaps beginning when he was a teenager. When he died in 1843 at the good old age of 83, he was given a hand-crafted tombstone by a traditional local craftsman—a craft that would soon die out even way out here in the wilds of Robinson Township. Unfortunately much of the inscription is obliterated, but the church has taken care to mark all the graves of its Revolutionary War veterans.
When Joseph’s wife Jane died in 1857 at the age of 86, the old hand-crafted stones were out of style, and all the old craftsmen were retired or dead. She was given a tombstone in what old Pa Pitt calls the “poster style,” popular in the middle nineteenth century, which mixes different styles of lettering after the manner of posters of the same period.
One of the early settlers of the Carrick area. We are not absolutely sure of the first name, since the first letter of it is obliterated. “Jenny” is by far the most likely possibility. Here is Father Pitt’s transcription, which is partly speculative:
IN MEMORY OF
JENNY O’NEAL
who departed this life
—— 20th, A.D. 1836
[Aged — years and —] months
Below, a black-and-white picture with a different camera.
