A towering pile of eclecticism topped by a curiously amateurish statue, this is by far the grandest monument in this little Lutheran cemetery in Mount Oliver. It marks a family plot that still retains its original stone fencing.
The eyes make this wreath-bearing mourner look as though someone just stuck a pin in her.
Louis Knoepp was just forty years old when he died and left this thing to remember him by.
He rests under this headstone next to his father and mother.
Louis Knoepp died in 1895 at the age of 40, and either he had already made enough of a fortune that this expense seemed appropriate to his heirs, or he came from a family with plenty of money already. The amateurish allegorical wreath-bearing statue on top suggests a client with more money than taste, but if the message to be delivered was that Louis Knoepp was the richest man in the cemetery, then the message has been delivered. Old Pa Pitt suspects that this monument was chosen from a monument dealer’s illustrated catalogue, forcing the monument dealer to come up with a monument he had never actually expected to have to build for anyone.
Either Louis Knoepp made quite a bit of money in a short time (he died at forty), or he had a rich family who remembered him fondly. This monument towers over everything else in this little Lutheran cemetery; in scale it resembles some of the grander monuments in the Allegheny or Union Dale cemeteries. The statue on top, however, is not of the first quality; in fact, its proportions are a bit odd. The head is large and broad, and the neck is unnaturally thick.
The style of the base is a bit hard to describe; it is classical with elements of Gothic.
As if it were not enough to be more magnificent than anything else in the cemetery, the monument is also surrounded by an elegant stone wall to separate Mr. Knoepp from the riffraff around him.
