We have seen this monument to steel baron B. F. Jones before, but the splashes of sun and shade, and the November colors, seemed picturesque enough to warrant seeing it again.
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B. F. Jones Monument, Allegheny Cemetery
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Clergy Monument, St. Peter’s Cemetery (Arlington)
St. Peter’s Cemetery is a small German Catholic cemetery in Arlington. (The German Lutherans have a cemetery, St. Paul’s, right behind this one in Mount Oliver, and they seem almost to have chosen their patron saints confrontationally.) This elaborate monument presides over the priests’ plot in the cemetery.
“For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and in the last day I shall rise out of the earth. And I shall be clothed again with my skin, and in my flesh I will see my God.” (Job 19:25–26, the English translation taken from the Douay-Rheims version.)
“So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” (Psalm 89:14 in the Vulgate numbering, or 90:12 in the numbering used by most Bibles today. The English is from the King James Version; the Douay-Rheims version, following the Vulgate, is quite different.)
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George Hogg Monument, Allegheny Cemetery
“Angel of the Resurrection” was the sculptor’s name for this bronze angel. Henry Kirke Brown was the sculptor, and he was one of the first Americans to cast his own full-size bronzes. When his statue of De Witt Clinton was unveiled in 1855, it was reported to be the first full-length statue cast in bronze by an American; this angel, however, is older, though a little less than life size (if angels have a life size). By some reckonings, then, this is the first large bronze statue cast in America. It was cast in about 1850, since George Hogg died in 1849.
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James Laughlin Monument, Allegheny Cemetery
A fine statue of Hope with her portable anchor surmounts the monument to steel baron James Laughlin (of Jones & Laughlin), who died in 1882.
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B. F. Jones Monument, Allegheny Cemetery
Like a stone mushroom, this is the visible outcropping of an underground mausoleum. Instead of a heroic statue of steel baron Benjamin Franklin Jones, we get a contemplative allegorical pair, one laying a wreath and palm of victory where his body is buried, the other looking upward hoping to find the real B. F. Jones in that direction. Old Pa Pitt hopes so, too.
We have more pictures of the B. F. Jones monument from 2014.
