Not the oldest stone in this cemetery, but still very old for a legible tombstone in western Pennsylvania. Earlier tombstones tend to be shale, which does not last long.
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Michael Coppersmith Tombstone, St. John’s Lutheran Church, Cranberry Township
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John Henry Krebs Tombstone, St. John’s Lutheran Church, Cranberry Township
A stone hand-cut by local craftsmen and remarkably well preserved; this is still in the same tradition (conceivably even by the same craftsman, though the lettering style looks different) that produced the George Otto tombstone nearly three decades earlier. It is also one of the last of the locally made tombstones in this churchyard; soon mass production would take over.
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John V. Hoehn Monument, St. John’s Lutheran Church, Cranberry Township
A zinc monument similar, but not identical, to the Butzler monument in the Union Dale Cemetery; probably it came from the same company, and was built with many of the same standard pieces. Mr. Hoehn was born in “Alsace, Germany.” Alsace was indeed part of Germany in 1906, though it had been part of France in 1831. It is interesting to compare this to the Kubler monument in St. Michael’s Cemetery, which insists that Mr. Kubler was born in “Lorraine, France.” Is the difference in the fact that Mr. Kubler was Catholic, but Mr. Hoehn (like the Prussian rulers of Alsace in 1906) was Protestant?
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George Otto Tombstone, St. John’s Lutheran Church, Cranberry Township
One of the very oldest legible stones Father Pitt has found around here. There are much earlier graves in the churchyards of Trinity Cathedral and Old St. Luke’s, but they were marked with native shale, and time has obliterated the inscriptions. This stone is in excellent shape, and it makes old Pa Pitt nostalgic for the days when stonecutting, even for modest graves, was a craft, rather than a business providing uniform products to the deceased masses.