Pittsburgh Cemeteries

Tag: Obelisks

  • Winter Bros. Obelisk, St. Peter’s Cemetery (Arlington)

    This is an absolutely immense pointy thing; one site claims it’s a hundred feet tall. That is surprising enough in a little German Catholic cemetery in the middle of a city neighborhood, but the bigger surprise is that nobody is buried here. According to this page, the Winter Bros., Bavarian immigrants who founded a successful brewery on the South Side, bought this plot in 1889 and put up this towering obelisk, and then went and died somewhere else. Each of the three brothers has his name inscribed on one side of the obelisk: Michael, Wolfgang, and Alois.

  • Imling Monument, St. Michael’s Cemetery

    The obelisk with a cross is peculiar to Catholic cemeteries; it is almost never found in Protestant cemeteries. Here is a typical example from St. Michael’s Cemetery, the vertiginous burying-ground of a German Catholic parish on the South Side Slopes. As with many of the older monuments here, the inscriptions are in German.

    It appears that the family lost touch with this monument at some time between 1944 and, perhaps, 1960 or so; the death date of Anton Imling, born 1868, was never filled in.

  • Brehm Obelisk, South Side Cemetery

    This is a very good specimen of the more ornately Victorian sort of obelisk; but Father Pitt admits that he includes it here mostly because it made such a beautiful picture in the last rays of evening sunlight.

  • M. Agnes Brewster Monument, South Side Cemetery

    A kind of obelisk with a weirdly cartoony little statue of a lyre-playing woman at the summit. It seems the bereaved husband erected this monument to his young wife, who died at twenty-four; he lived nearly four more decades, but probably never remarried, as his name was engraved below hers by a different hand when he died.

  • Michel Obelisk, Union Dale Cemetery

    A good example of the popular draped obelisk, this one very sensibly including a carved cord to keep the carved drapery in place.