by Stephen Liss, Pittsburgh Tribune Review
September, 1997

Pittsburgh's Lawrenceville community today is hardly the same place where busy steel mills once lined the Allegheny River and promised every hard working immigrant a job. The endless number of bars on Butler Street no longer overflow with thirsty patrons, and the mill workers don't own every turn-of-the-century row house here.

Opened in 1844, Allegheny Cemetery is a classic example of the rural cemetery of the Romantic era with its winding roads, wooded areas, glades and lake. Today, the cemetery encompasses approximately 280 acres and is the oldest garden cemetery in the city.

One of Pittsburgh's most prominent architects, John Chislett, laid out the grounds in a fashionable Romantic English landscape style. And it was Chislett who designed the Butler Street gate and lodge in 1848. These structures were augmented by a towered chapel constructed between 1870 and 1873. To date, the gate, lodge and chapel are the finest examples of Gothic and Revival architecture in Pittsburgh.

The Penn Avenue entrance to the burial grounds also is an area landmark with its tower that ascends 135 feet. Designed in the Richardson Romanesque style around 1886, the entrance consists of an arched gateway flanked by the tower on the left and a group of buildings on the right that contain a reception area and living quarters for a gate-keeper.

Among those buried here are a number of Revolutionary War veterans whose graves were relocated. There are 302 marble headstones in the Civil War plot located in section 33, lot 66, near Butler Street. Among those graves are some slightly pointed headstones that mark the burial sites of five Confederate veterans who died while en route to prison.

Among the numerous graves in the picturesque cemetery are those of Revolutionary War hero Joshua Barney, Mexican War Lt. James Lawrence Parker, Gen. Alexander Hays, Capt. Galbraith Perry Rodgers, composer Stephen Foster, actress Lillian Russell Moore, Pittsburgh's first mayor Ebenezer Denny, Episcopal Bishop Cortland Whitehead, as well as members of the Mellon, Scaife, Vandergrift, Wilkins, Hunt and Oliver families.

Commodore Joshua Barney's Obituary

The following obituary appeared in American Traveler, a Pennsylvania newspaper, on 16 December 1818.