Pittsburgh Cemeteries

Tag: Poster Style

  • W. H. Crawford Tombstone, Prospect Cemetery

    IN
    Memory of
    W.H. CRAWFORD,
    Who departed this life
    July 29, 1846,
    Aged 22 Yrs. 6 mos. 5 ds.

    A tombstone in the “poster style,” as Father Pitt likes to call it; this is probably one of the ones moved here from older graveyards.

  • Joseph McMurray Tombstone, Bethany Cemetery

    JOSEPH
    McMURRAY
    D i e d
    Sept. 16, 1839
    Aged 46 years
    10 mo. & 11 day

    An early example of the “poster style,” with each line in a different style of lettering.

  • James McKnight Tombstone, St. Clair Cemetery

    In memory of
    JAMES McKNIGHT
    Who departed this life
    August 22, 1844
    In the 51 Year
    of his age

    This eroded tombstone in the mid-nineteenth-century poster style is almost illegible most of the day; but if you catch it just as the sun is hitting at its most oblique angle, you can just about read the inscription.

  • Ross Foster Tombstone, St. Clair Cemetery

    A well-preserved tombstone in the “poster style,” as Father Pitt calls it, that was popular in the 1840s and 1850s. This one adds a very woodcutty weeping willow.

  • White Family Plot, Oak Spring Cemetery

    Oak Spring Cemetery in Canonsburg has a number of slab stones elevated into table-like structures—an arrangement common in some old cemeteries. Obviously the props under these stones are newer than the stones, but they may have replaced older ones that were original. Old Pa Pitt simply doesn’t know whether these slab stones were always elevated or whether graveyard caretakers elevated them later, when they began to vanish under the ground.

    SACRED
    to the
    MEMORY OF
    SAMUEL WHITE
    Who departed this life
    May 12th 1837, In the
    82nd year of his
    age.

    Samuel White, Sr. was a veteran of the Revolutionary War. He married a considerably younger woman named Mary:

    SACRED
    to the
    MEMORY
    of
    MARY WHITE
    wife of
    SAMUEL WHITE
    DIED
    JUNE 12th, 1841 in the
    76th year of her age.

    In the short time between the death of Samuel in 1837 and the death of Mary in 1841, a new fashion in tombstones had swept over Western Pennsylvania. Samuel’s is a simple slab stone of the sort that had been made here since the late 1700s, but Mary’s is in what Father Pitt calls the “poster style,” with each line in a different style of lettering, like an advertising poster of the same era.