Many Werners are buried in this plot, but the statue of what could easily be a fourteen-year-old girl is probably a portrait of Stella D. Werner, who died at not quite fifteen years old in 1890. That is about the right date for this style of monument.
A small rustic Romanesque mausoleum made almost top-heavy by the large statue of Hope holding her anchor. Father Pitt knows nothing about Martin Lappe except that he died in 1896 and his name is on this mausoleum.
This monument was put up in 1889. The sculpture is slightly chunky in that particular 1880s way, but it is a fine work: the woman is idealized, but the boy is true to life in his squirmy attitude. One is tempted to say that he has exactly the look of a child who has been bribed to sit still for an artist and has had just about enough of it.
A pair of urns decorated the steps to the Marshall family plot, but one is cracked and the other missing.
At last we find that exceedingly popular flower-strewing mourner with both her hands. We have seen her in the Mount Lebanon Cemetery, in the South Side Cemetery (on the Nickel and Baxmyer monuments), and in St. Peter’s Cemetery (Arlington), but always with her hands broken off. Below we see that fragile flower-strewing hand, which old Pa Pitt has photographed quite close for the sake of anyone who would like to restore one of those other statues.
This is a different Alexander King from the Alexander King who was Richard Mellon Scaife’s great-grandfather.
We also have more recent pictures of the Nickel plot from 2022.
The statue, stones, and concrete planter are apparently a package deal; an identical grouping is in St. Peter’s Cemetery in Arlington.
There is a tragic story here. Two very young Nickel children both died in 1912; perhaps the same disease carried them off. Lina Nickel, their mother, died about four years later in 1916, at the age of 29 or 30; she may never have recovered completely from either the disease or the loss of her children. The bereaved husband (probably William Nickel, since one of the children is William Jr.) ordered this matched set of gravestones so that he could be buried with his beloved wife when his time came. “I shall never marry again,” he vowed. But he is not here, or at least there is no inscription for him; life went on, and perhaps the young widower had vowed too soon.
The female mourner was very popular; the same statue occurs elsewhere in this cemetery, in the Mount Lebanon Cemetery, and (as already mentioned) in St. Peter’s Cemetery. The hands are almost always missing; Father Pitt has found one intact statue in the Allegheny Cemetery. Evidently the maker of these statues had not solved the problem of structurally stable arms; the angel who presides over the sons’ graves is also handless.
