This is a fairly standard obelisk with some extra ornamentation to make sure it is not too plain for Victorian taste. There must be an interesting family story in the inscription. Alfred McKown married a woman more than thirty years younger than he was. When he died, it seems that the 29- or 30-year-old widow married a man named Clark. She did not live to see forty, and she is memorialized here. If she is buried here, one wonders what became of Mr. Clark.
The name “Blacks” appears below the inscription; is it the name of the stonecutter or monument dealer?
Probably the most famous beauty in American history, Lillian Russell married four times. Her fourth marriage was to Alexander Pollock Moore, publisher of the Leader in Pittsburgh, and it seems to have been a happy union. When Lillian died in 1922, her mourning husband put up this mausoleum, with the simple epitaph “The world is better for her having lived.” Mr. Moore later went on to be ambassador to Spain and then to Peru, but when he finally joined his wife, she still got top billing. His initials on the door are the only external indication that Mr. Moore is buried here, too.
Zinc monuments like this were cheap substitutes for stone; they were sold as “white bronze” by the monument dealers. High-class cemeteries considered them vulgar and often prohibited them outright, as apparently the Allegheny Cemetery did; but somehow some families managed to sneak them in anyway. As it turns out, they last better than the expensive marble from which many of the best monuments were made. They were constructed from interchangeable parts, so that one could choose from a huge variety of symbols, epitaphs, canned rhymes, and Bible verses to be included in the monument, and the manufacturer would oblige simply by screwing in the proper plates. Custom inscriptions were also much cheaper to make by stamping letters in standard plates than by cutting them in stone.
Here is a particularly spledid zinc monument, nine feet tall, festooned with as many slogans and symbols as the bereaved husband could afford. In spite of a clumsy restoration attempt—never, never restore a zinc monument with concrete, the Smithsonan warns—it is overall in excellent condition after 134 years or so.
In front are two little zinc headstones for “Mother” and “Father.”
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A prickly Gothic monument to an officer killed in the Civil War. “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” says the epitaph, although it probably didn’t feel all that good at the time.
