The Butler Street gatehouse was part of the original design of the cemetery in the 1840s, and it serves its function perfectly. From a busy city street we enter a romantic fantasy landscape that might have come straight from Sir Walter Scott. The contrast is almost as great as the contrast between life and afterlife.
The Eberhardt and Ober brewery in Dutchtown was a Pittsburgh institution. Its beer was affectionately known as E & O—for “Early & Often,” as the advertisements put it. Mr. Eberhardt and Mr. Ober now rest side by side in the Allegheny Cemetery in matching but not identical mausoleums.
According to the cemetery’s site, this fantastic and imaginative mausoleum seems to have been built for James Kennedy Moorhead; it was designed by Louis Morgenroth and built in 1862, though Moorhead lived twenty-two years after that. The vegetation rising from the roof only adds to the mystery and romance, as if one had stumbled across a lost Gothic Khmer temple deep in the jungle. The name “Moorhead” appears over the door on one side, and “Murdoch” on the opposite side.
J. B. Ford, founder of Pittsburgh Plate Glass, has one of the grandest mausoleums in the Allegheny Cemetery, which is saying a good deal. The town of Ford City is named for him. It would be an interesting study to survey the Allegheny Cemetery and find how many of its residents have towns named after them; one might well find that there are more people with towns named after them here than in any other cemetery in the country.
A tasteful little fantasy-Gothic chapel with a statue of Hope (note her little anchor) standing guard at the top.
