Pittsburgh Cemeteries

Tag: Zinc

  • Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, McKeesport and Versailles Cemetery

    This huge tower of zinc may be the biggest zinc monument in the Pittsburgh area. The zinc monument makers sold statues like these to municipalities all over the country as a relatively inexpensive way to have a very impressive Civil War memorial. Huge though they are, they are built on the same principles as the zinc cemetery monuments offered to ordinary families, with various interchangeable parts that can be mixed and swapped to make any composition you like. This one was donated by the citizens of McKeesport, and it lives up to the monument salesman’s most extravagant claims: here we are, more than a century later, and the thing still looks magnificent.

  • Dr. S. Harper Smith Monument, Richland Cemetery

    A really splendid zinc monument, something like a royal tomb in a medieval cathedral. Since zinc monuments like this seem not to have been made after World War I (although the panel inserts continued to be made for decades), this monument was probably installed before Dr. Smith and Mrs. Smith died, with the appropriate panels ordered later.

  • Zinc Calvary Group, St. John Vianney Parish Cemetery

    Old Pa Pitt seeks out zinc monuments, so he is especially delighted to bring you a fine Calvary group in zinc. He does not know the date exactly, but he would guess from the style, and from the fact that zinc statues of this sort have not been readily available for almost a hundred years, that it dates from the early twentieth century.

  • Wilson Monument, Union Dale Cemetery

    A fine zinc spire from the 1870s; like most zinc monuments, it looks remarkably fresh today.

  • Ingold Monument, Allegheny Cemetery

    A zinc or “white bronze” Gothic monument to Harriet Dunseath Ingold, mourned by her husband—but there is no indication that he was buried with her. Zinc was, according to the cemetery’s Web site, forbidden in the Allegheny Cemetery, but several plot owners managed to sneak in zinc monuments anyway. They are all still in good shape, with their inscriptions as legible as when they were installed—more than can be said for many of the much more expensive marble monuments nearby.

    Because we have the catalogue, we know that this style of monument was the Monumental Bronze Company’s Design No. 122.