Pittsburgh Cemeteries

Tag: Obelisks

  • Voegtly Obelisk, Voegtly Cemetery

    Father Pitt assumes that this is a descendant or other relative of the Voegtly who donated the land for the original Voegtly Church in Dutchtown, whose name this cemetery perpetuates. The name of Mathias Voegtly is still quite visible, but the rest of the inscription is badly eroded. We can just make out the name of Elizabeth Voegtly, but the rest is difficult.

    However, the graves of the Voegtlys are also marked with expensive granite memorials, and though they are overgrown with wild grapes (you can see the mound of grape vines to the right of the obelisk), Father Pitt pushed back the grapes enough to collect these data:

    Mathias Voegtly: Born November 26, 1811; died January 17, 1884

    Elizabeth Voegtly: Born July 28, 1805; died October 2, 1890.

  • Rev. Wm. Jeffery Family Plot, Bethany Cemetery

    The Rev. William Jeffery, D.D., was pastor of Bethany Presbyterian Church for 34 years. He retired in 1855, as he was approaching the age of eighty; but he lived almost another seventeen years after that, dying at ninety-six in 1872. From the style, we guess that this obelisk was put up when he died.

    Pastor Jeffery’s wife is also marked by this obelisk, and so is a daughter Elizabeth, who died at not quite five years old in 1831.

    Elizabeth also has her own fine tombstone in the style of forty years earlier, which tells us that she died of that great scourge of nineteenth-century childhood, scarlet fever:

    The only proper reaction to such a loss is the one Pastor Jeffery had cut into her tombstone: to quote from the book of Job.

  • Crump Obelisk, Richland Cemetery

    A splendid Victorian obelisk, rich in the kind of ornamentation that would be repudiated a generation later. Note especially the monogram halfway up. Stephan S. Crump died in 1912 at the age of 82; we suspect that he bought this obelisk for himself earlier, perhaps twenty years before he died.

  • Schusler Family Plot, Allegheny Cemetery

    There are some forgotten corners of the Allegheny Cemetery that look as though they might have originally been small graveyards later absorbed into the cemetery. The Schusler plot is in one of those corners. The plot is marked by an obelisk, probably erected in 1872; but a monument to an eighteen-year-old daughter (whose statue is sadly mutilated) is scarcely less grand.

    Religion filled her soul with peace
    Upon a dying bed.
    Let faith look up. Let sorrow cease
    She lives with Christ o’erhead.
    We miss thee from our home, Maggie,
    We miss thee from thy place.
    A shadow o’er our life is cast,
    We miss thy smiling face.

  • G. H. Meyer Obelisk, Mount Royal Cemetery

    A sumptuously draped obelisk. Two G. H. Meyers are remembered here; the older one died in 1897, four years before the cemetery opened in 1901. Either he was moved here or his remains are interred somewhere else.