Pittsburgh Cemeteries

Tag: Early Settlers

  • Gideon Miller Tombstone, Prospect Cemetery

    This is one of the earlier burials that were moved from nearby churchyards to Prospect Cemetery in Brackenridge, and it is probably the most artistic early-settler tombstone Father Pitt has yet found in this area. The style is a close and extraordinarily skillful imitation of nineteenth-century decorative penmanship styles, so we shall call this craftsman the Master of the Brackenridge Flourishes. And although Father Pitt admits to using the title “Master” a bit facetiously for some of the other local craftsmen, it is entirely deserved here.

    In Memory of
    GIDEON MILLER
    Who departed this life,
    February –th, 1820
    in the –th Year
    [Of his Age]

    [Epitaph]

    The stone may be later than its 1820 date, but it is almost certainly not later than the 1840s. A matching stone beside it, obviously by the same artist, is too badly damaged to read.

  • Richard Coulter Tombstone, Bethany Cemetery

    IN
    memory of
    RICHARD COULTER
    who departed this life
    May 4th 1821, Aged 22 years
    ———
    Long, long expected home, and lo:
    Home he has scarcely come,
    Till he is summon’d and must go
    To his eternal home.

    This is a fairly well-preserved tombstone from nearly two centuries ago, and that is of course interesting enough. The most interesting thing, however, is the poem, which is from a collection of poems by the very obscure James Meikle, this one being headed “On a gentleman who died after his return to his family from foreign parts, after an absence of twelve years.” The poem itself is dated 1768, but it was kept in manuscript until after the poet’s death in 1799. The only edition of the posthumous poems of Meikle Father Pitt has been able to find is one published in Pittsburgh in 1819, two years before the death of Richard Coulter; so that we know with near certainty that whoever specified the epitaph on this stone had read it in this particular book.

  • Master of the Curlicue I in Canonsburg

    Oak Spring Cemetery

    In memory of
    James R. Sinclair
    who departed this life
    Jan. the 21, AD 1843.
    aged 5 months.

    Two early-settler graveyards at opposite ends of Canonsburg have tombstones inscribed by some of the same local craftsmen. One of them, who worked in the 1830s and 1840s, is very easy to identify by three obvious quirks of his style:

    1. He writes almost exclusively in italic letters.
    2. He begins each inscription with a very distinctive capital I with curlicues.
    3. He makes the abbreviation “AD” into a single character, with the right-hand stroke of the A serving as the left-hand stroke of the D.

    In addition, if you paid him well enough, he was capable of some fine decorative folk-art reliefs.

    The Giffin family, buried in Speer Spring Cemetery, employed him almost exclusively:

    In memory of
    ROBERT H. GIFFIN
    who departed this life
    in the 19 year of his
    —age—
    April 22 AD 1842

    In memory of
    ANDREW GIFFIN
    who departed this life
    in the 53d year of his
    —age—
    Aug. 12, AD 1841.

    In
    memory of
    Samuel Webster Giffin
    who departed this life
    Sept. 18th, AD 1838, aged
    9 months and 25 days
    —

    In
    memory of
    ELIZABETH McCOY
    Consort of Andrew H. Giffin
    who departed this life
    May the 15th AD 1842, in
    the 36th year of her age
    — — —

    Following his usual method of naming anonymous craftsmen after a distinguishing characteristic of their work, Father Pitt will call this artist the Master of the Curlicue I.

    To round out the Giffin family plot, we include one broken tombstone done by a different craftsman:

    IN
    Memory of
    ANDREW RAY
    GIFFIN, who—
    departed this life,
    Febr. 11th, 1836
    in the 13th year of
    his age.

  • Sarah Ransom Grave, Trinity Churchyard

    This little stone lay hidden under the ground until 2008, when a landscaper almost literally stumbled on it. It marks the grave of a small child who died in 1794, and that is all we know about her. But the stone and its inscription are very fine for the era, so we suspect her parents had some money. This Post-Gazette article by Ann Rodgers has the story of the stone’s discovery.

  • Dr. Nathaniel Bedford Monument, Trinity Churchyard

    Dr. Nathaniel Bedford was the first physician in Pittsburgh. He came with the British to Fort Pitt and stayed. Here are two paragraphs from the Standard History of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania (1898):

    Shortly after I770 Dr. Nathaniel Bedford, surgeon in the British Army, resigned his commission and took up his permanent residence in the town, being attracted by the wonderful beauty of the place before the iron hand of Industry had stripped the verdure from the hills, seamed and scarred the lovely bosom of the earth, defiled the sparkling waters and spread a sooty pall across the sky.

    Dr. Bedford was a man of polished manners, thoroughly educated in his profession, as his commission in the British Army attested, and of scholarly habits. His success was rapid and complete and he accumulated a modest fortune in the form of several tracts of land on the south side of the Monongahela, now within the city limits. Shortly after the beginning of the present [nineteenth] century he retired from practice. In the city directory of 1815 his name appears as “Nathaniel Bedford, gentleman, Birmingham.” He never married [this is incorrect; see below], and after his death the Freemasons, of which fraternity he was a prominent member, erected a monument to his memory in the form of an iron urn, which still stands, or did until recently, on the hillside immediately under the track of the South Twelfth Street Inclined Railway.

    The assertion that Dr. Bedford never married is incorrect. He married very well indeed: his wife was Jane Ormsby, heiress of the Ormsby family, and through her he inherited the land that became the town of Birmingham—named for Birmingham in England, near which Dr. Bedford was born. In other words, Dr. Bedford owned the South Side, or at least the part of it out to 17th Street, where an awkward kink in the street grid and the sudden broadening of Carson Street mark the beginning of the former separate borough of East Birmingham. Dr. Bedford and his wife had no children, however, and it was his Masonic lodge that erected this memorial when Dr. Bedford died in 1818. He was probably buried under it, in a spot that would have been verdant and semi-rural in 1818, but rapidly developed into one of the most crowded neighborhoods in the city of Pittsburgh. The monument stood neglected under the Knoxville (or South Twelfth Street) Incline until 1901, when the Pennsylvania Railroad needed the land. Then the dilapidated monument was moved here to Trinity Churchyard, probably with the remains of Dr. Bedford (sources seem to differ on whether his remains were discovered).

    The Daughters of the American Revolution added this plaque in 1909. It reproduces the poem originally inscribed on the monument.

    These Masonic symbols in relief have eroded considerably, but are still recognizable.

    More about Dr. Nathaniel Bedford, including a biography in PDF format, can be found here.