By far the grandest monument in the cemetery, this one is surmounted by a figure pointing upward, like the traditional representations of Hope, except that there is no anchor. Instead, she holds a stem of lilies. Whatever she represents, she is a fine piece of sculpture, all the more surprising for being the only notable piece of sculpture in the whole cemetery.
An Art Deco interpretation of Gothic, with a very streamlined version of the requisite pointed arch. The cemetery’s on-line records do not list a Ferree as buried in a private mausoleum; the only Ferree listed is a Dr. David Ferree buried in 1917 in a grave in a completely different part of the cemetery. Father Pitt is therefore forced to guess the date by the style, so he will guess 1930s.
A splendid Gothic construction in marble. Although marble was ultimately banished from cemeteries by fashion, and in some cases by cemetery regulation, its very instability gives it a charm that polished granite lacks. The longer this monument stands, the more it seems an organic part of the landscape.
A zinc or “white bronze” Gothic monument to Harriet Dunseath Ingold, mourned by her husband—but there is no indication that he was buried with her. Zinc was, according to the cemetery’s Web site, forbidden in the Allegheny Cemetery, but several plot owners managed to sneak in zinc monuments anyway. They are all still in good shape, with their inscriptions as legible as when they were installed—more than can be said for many of the much more expensive marble monuments nearby.
Because we have the catalogue, we know that this style of monument was the Monumental Bronze Company’s Design No. 122.
What a strange contrast in monuments: Peter Wilbert and his wife Christina died only two years apart, but he gets a splendidly artistic Gothic marble monument, and she gets as plain a block of granite as you’ll find in this section of the cemetery. One wonders whether the monuments were chosen to reflect the personalities of the deceased. Christina was born in 1818; she was six years older than her husband, and she came from Germany (so we read the inscription, but the ambiguous wording could also mean that Peter Wilbert came from Germany).
