Pittsburgh Cemeteries

Tag: Relief

  • Dr. Nathaniel Bedford Monument, Trinity Churchyard

    Dr. Nathaniel Bedford was the first physician in Pittsburgh. He came with the British to Fort Pitt and stayed. Here are two paragraphs from the Standard History of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania (1898):

    Shortly after I770 Dr. Nathaniel Bedford, surgeon in the British Army, resigned his commission and took up his permanent residence in the town, being attracted by the wonderful beauty of the place before the iron hand of Industry had stripped the verdure from the hills, seamed and scarred the lovely bosom of the earth, defiled the sparkling waters and spread a sooty pall across the sky.

    Dr. Bedford was a man of polished manners, thoroughly educated in his profession, as his commission in the British Army attested, and of scholarly habits. His success was rapid and complete and he accumulated a modest fortune in the form of several tracts of land on the south side of the Monongahela, now within the city limits. Shortly after the beginning of the present [nineteenth] century he retired from practice. In the city directory of 1815 his name appears as “Nathaniel Bedford, gentleman, Birmingham.” He never married [this is incorrect; see below], and after his death the Freemasons, of which fraternity he was a prominent member, erected a monument to his memory in the form of an iron urn, which still stands, or did until recently, on the hillside immediately under the track of the South Twelfth Street Inclined Railway.

    The assertion that Dr. Bedford never married is incorrect. He married very well indeed: his wife was Jane Ormsby, heiress of the Ormsby family, and through her he inherited the land that became the town of Birmingham—named for Birmingham in England, near which Dr. Bedford was born. In other words, Dr. Bedford owned the South Side, or at least the part of it out to 17th Street, where an awkward kink in the street grid and the sudden broadening of Carson Street mark the beginning of the former separate borough of East Birmingham. Dr. Bedford and his wife had no children, however, and it was his Masonic lodge that erected this memorial when Dr. Bedford died in 1818. He was probably buried under it, in a spot that would have been verdant and semi-rural in 1818, but rapidly developed into one of the most crowded neighborhoods in the city of Pittsburgh. The monument stood neglected under the Knoxville (or South Twelfth Street) Incline until 1901, when the Pennsylvania Railroad needed the land. Then the dilapidated monument was moved here to Trinity Churchyard, probably with the remains of Dr. Bedford (sources seem to differ on whether his remains were discovered).

    The Daughters of the American Revolution added this plaque in 1909. It reproduces the poem originally inscribed on the monument.

    These Masonic symbols in relief have eroded considerably, but are still recognizable.

    More about Dr. Nathaniel Bedford, including a biography in PDF format, can be found here.

  • Morgan Tombstones, Bethany Cemetery

    In Memory of
    BILLINGSLEY MORGAN
    Who departed this life
    [Marc]h the 7th 1836
    [in the —]th year of his age

    Here is a pair of tombstones by the same extraordinary folk artist—and, because he actually signed one of them, we know his name: H. Savage. Both are badly damaged, but they form a pair side by side, so old Pa Pitt guesses that the illegible stone marks the resting place of Mrs. Billingsley Morgan. Unlike most Western Pennsylvania tombstones of the 1830s, these are handsomely carved in relief, much like the famous New England tombstones of the colonial era, but without the flying skulls.

    Even this unusually artistic and ambitious stonecutter did not sketch out his lettering before beginning the inscription, so that he ran out of space for the name “MORGAN” on Billingsley Morgan’s tombstone.

  • James McKown Tombstone, Bethany Cemetery

    The 1840s were a time when the old art of tombstone-cutting was dying out, and new styles came into vogue—styles that, in many ways, imitated the styles of engravings of the era. Here is a good example: a large tombstone from 1848 that looks very much like an engraved title page of the same era. It no longer has the handmade look of even the best local craftsmen’s work, and it is executed in more expensive stone that turned out to be much less permanent. With some difficulty, we can make out most of the inscription except the epitaph:

    JAMES McKOWN
    DIED
    Feb. 25, 1848
    In the 60th year
    of his age

    The surname “McKown” is damaged, but there are several other McKowns buried in this graveyard, so there is little question about the reading.

  • Lewis Grave, Allegheny Cemetery

    A certain strain of romanticism is common in monuments of the 1800s, but few go to such extremes of romanticism as this. The profusion of vine-covered vines overwhelms the composition so much that at first it is hard to make any visual sense of the thing. How many different kinds of vines can you identify? Father Pitt finds at least passionflowers, morning glories, and ivy, and the top may be roses, although the erosion makes it hard to tell. If the enormous urn-flower at the foot end came from a vine, it was a vine that wants to eat you.

    If there was ever an inscription, it is illegible now; but since the monument occupies a space in the Lewis family plot, we may presume that it belongs to some Lewis or other.

  • Crecencia Lutz Monument, St. Mary’s Cemetery, Ross Township

    This towering monument is in a style all its own. What shall we call it? Pittsburgh German Rococo? The inscription, cut by a local stonecutter (a tradition that survived among the Germans here decades longer than it did among English-speakers) quotes from Job: in the words of the King James Version, “Seeing his days are determined, the number of his months are with thee, thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass.“ The German translation of the first line would be more closely rendered as “Short are the days of man,” which is a more striking sentiment that seems tailor-made for an epitaph.

    The relief is a bit elementary, like something that would have been turned out by the second-best student in a community-college sculpture class. The overall composition, however, is unforgettable. The blackness of industry has only added to the impression that this monument is something colossal and important.