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.
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.
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.
MARGARETA
daughter of
SAMUEL & SARAH
LINHART
died Dec. 10, 1845
Aged 1 Year
5. Mos. 10 Ds.
A good example of what Father Pitt calls the “poster style” that became popular in the 1840s and 1850s: a plain rectangle on which the inscription is engraved in a wide variety of lettering styles, like an advertising poster of the same era.
DIED
Sept. 18, 1856
In the 56th Yr.
of her age
MARTHA
Wife of
JOSEPH McMURRAY
The influence of printing on grave markers in the 1850s is especially obvious in this one, which, in its broad variety of lettering styles—a different one for each line—looks very much like a printed poster from the same era. Father Pitt cannot quite read the epitaph.
