Hope, carrying her little anchor, gazes out into the distance. Her classical drapery is unusually splendid, and the decades of industrial grime give it added depth.
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Johnston Monument, Homewood Cemetery
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Kaiser Monument, Smithfield East End Cemetery
This statue, a flower-strewing mourner, shares the common fate of marble in city cemeteries, eroding into picturesque featurelessness. Catherine Kaiser died in 1865, and David in 1869; if they were buried in the Smithfield Cemetery, they would have been buried in the Troy Hill location (where the cemetery was located from 1860 to 1886) and moved here when the cemetery moved. The marble statue might date from that time, with a granite pedestal put under it when it was moved here.
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Reverend Charles Walther Monument, Smithfield East End Cemetery
This octagonal shaft includes a very unusual portrait head of the Rev. Mr. Walther, along with an open book on which there is an inscription that Father Pitt could not quite read. The date of birth appears to be 1784, but old Pa Pitt could not make out the date of death. The style of the monument is of the 1860s or so, and one suspects that this is one of the monuments moved here when the cemetery moved from Troy Hill. (The Smithfield Cemetery was originally downtown; it moved to Troy Hill in 1860 and to its final home in 1886—thus the name “Smithfield East End Cemetery,” to distinguish this location from its former locations.)
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Calbraith Perry Rodgers Monument, Allegheny Cemetery
In 1911, Calbraith Perry Rodgers became the first man to fly across the continent of North America, from Atlantic to Pacific—even though he had made his very first flight only a few months earlier. He flew a Wright Model EX biplane called the Vin Fiz Flyer, after the soda pop that sponsored his trip. The plane is immortalized in bronze on this monument (and the plane itself can be seen in the Air and Space Museum, Washington).
This was not a nonstop flight; it would be a long time before planes capable of flying that distance were built. There were 75 stops, of which 16 were technically crashes. But it was an epochal event in aviation; it showed, only eight years after the Wright Brothers’ first flight, that airplanes had matured to the point where practical long-distance travel was possible. The inscription tells the story of the flight.
Only the date of death tells the end of the story: the next year, in 1912, Rodgers became the first man to die in an airplane collision with a flock of birds. Even in death, he was a pioneer.
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Wherry Monument, Homewood Cemetery
A fine piece of sculpture, although in mourners there is a very fine line between contemplative and bored. The steps up to the family plot bear the name of James Wherry, who died in 1899, and from the style that seems like a good date for this monument.
