Tag: Marshall (Mary Bell and Archibald)

  • Marshall Monument, Allegheny Cemetery

    Marshall monument and robin

    Archibald Marshall was a merchant, industrialist, and landscape architect whose most distinguished project was the beautiful landscape of West Park in Allegheny, now the North Side. He is the “Marshall” in the name of the neighborhood of Marshall-Shadeland. His monument also remembers his wife and three children who did not live to be ten years old. We wonder whether the child in the sculpture is meant to represent one of them. We wonder whether the child is looking up from his book to say, “Mother, you have a robin on your head.”

    Marshall monument
  • Marshall Monument, Allegheny Cemetery

    Marshall monument
    The original image is missing: this one was taken in 2022.

    This monument was put up in 1889. The sculpture is slightly chunky in that particular 1880s way, but it is a fine work: the woman is idealized, but the boy is true to life in his squirmy attitude. One is tempted to say that he has exactly the look of a child who has been bribed to sit still for an artist and has had just about enough of it.

    A pair of urns decorated the steps to the Marshall family plot, but one is cracked and the other missing.