Pittsburgh Cemeteries

Tag: Urns

  • Robert and Abigail Hopper Monuments, Bethany Cemetery

    A pair of matched urn-topped ,marble monuments—matched, but not quite. It looks as though Robert’s heirs could not get exactly the same design when he died three and a half years after his wife. The epitaphs were clearly inscribed by different artists. (The tree in the background had just fallen the night before Father Pitt visited, fortunately doing no damage to the monuments.)

    The epitaph:

    Dearest Mother, thou hast left us,
    And thy loss we deeply feel;
    But ’tis God that hast [sic] bereft us.
    He can all our sorrows heal.

    The epitaph:

    It is not death to die,
    To leave this weary road,
    And midst the brotherhood on high
    To be at home with God.

  • 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.

  • Shaw Mausoleum, McKeesport and Versailles Cemetery

    Yet another mausoleum in this cemetery whose style is hard to define; we shall call it Romanesque, because of the rusticated stone, the medieval columns, and the divided arch in the bronze doors. The huge urn on top is almost cartoonish. Two bronze ornaments flanking the inscription have been stolen, probably to be melted down for their trivial worth in metal.

    The earliest interment listed here was in 1896, and the most recent in 2001.

  • McLean Monument, Highwood Cemetery

    A very luxurious combination of polished granite and bronze, this monument is hard for Father Pitt to date. A William McLean who died in 1873 has a headstone in this plot, but that seems too early for this style of monument. Three McLean children were buried here in the 1890s, but even that seems early. If Father Pitt had to guess from the style, he might say that the monument itself was erected in the 1920s, perhaps replacing an earlier marble monument from 1873 that had already eroded beyond recognition.

  • Becker Monument, Beechview German Lutheran Cemetery

    One of the grandest monuments in this half-forgotten cemetery, and one of the small number with German rather than English inscriptions. It memorializes a number of Beckers, but Jacob Becker is the only one who gets a “Hier ruhet” (“Here lies”). Are the Becker children buried elsewhere? If they are buried here, they must be among the earliest burials at this site.

    Room is left to fill in the death date of Mathilda Becker, who was born in 1874 and is presumably still alive today at the age of 140. We may guess that Mathilda lived past 1907, at any rate, when the most recent date on the stone was carved. Jacob and Margaretha Becker had six children, of whom four died in early childhood, one died in adolescence, and Mathilda apparently survived them.