The last person interred at the Minersville Cemetery in the Upper Hill District went under 40 years ago and his name was Walter F. Getz.
He was the husband of the late Louise Smouse, brother of Marie Wertheimer, Edward and Woodrow Getz and Margaret Schubert. He was a machinist who was born in Pittsburgh, and that’s all I know about Walter. He passed through this life like most everybody does, without fanfare, leaving it at age 72.
He would have been 14 during the 1918 flu pandemic that killed upwards of 50 million people, many of them young and otherwise healthy. A significant number of markers in the Minersville Cemetery indicate the deaths of people who were young in those years.
Some died on battlefields in Europe. Many buried there were infants and immigrants. Some graves are inscribed in Arabic, Slovak and Greek. But most of the markers not written in English are in German.
The cemetery was established in 1852 by the Second St. Paul Lutheran Church on Pride Street, Uptown — now home of Shepherd’s Heart, a shelter for people without homes. The church closed in 1981.
The seven pastoral acres that hold the remains of former congregants, among others, spread over a slope bordered by Shawnee and Vancroft streets, behind Pittsburgh Milliones 6-12, also known as University Prep. The cemetery has a view of Downtown.
Vandals destroyed headstones in 1967. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette headline read: “Hoodlums Desecrate Graveyard.”
After that, a few dozen people were buried in Minersville, then it lay forgotten and overgrown until congregants from local Lutheran churches rediscovered it five years ago. They cleared it of weeds, litter and piles of debris that had been dumped there.
A $7,300 grant from the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and $2,400 in local donations helped establish a maintenance fund.
A before-and-after video on YouTube reveals gravestones that had been hidden under waist-high overgrowth. Some that were toppled and displaced have been laid along a cemetery path.
Debra Terhune, a retired teacher who wrote for grants to pay for an entrance gate, road markers and path repairs, also produced the video. It describes the “CPR Project” — for care, preservation and restoration. Volunteers created it as a strategic plan, said the Rev. Douglas Spittel, a board member of the Pittsburgh Area Lutheran Ministries, or PALM.
The plan reads like a wish list waiting for funding, which depends mostly on the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, into whose ownership the cemetery reverted in 1982.
Deaconess Cheryl Naumann; her son, the Rev. Edward Naumann; and Ms. Terhune made up the first cemetery committee.
As the group raises money, it moves through its wish list. So far, a maintenance schedule has kept the lawn dignified and righted many fallen tombstones. Some markers remain leaning.
Ms. Terhune said the disarray has been caused by roots of dying trees. The plan slates these trees for removal. The group paid to get a sonogram with ground penetrating radar to determine who is where, because part of the project is to create a book and a map so people can come in and find their loved one.
“Everyone working on this is a volunteer with day jobs, so it’s a slow process,” she said.
The Rev. William Passavant bought an entire section in the cemetery for paupers’ graves. He founded the Pittsburgh Infirmary on the North Side in 1849. Its current iteration, Passavant Hospital, opened in McCandless in 1964.
One body in Minersville belonged to a Major League Baseball pitcher, Frank “Piano Mover” Smith.
“He threw a couple of no-hitters for the [Chicago] White Sox in the early 1900s, one against my Detroit Tigers,” said the Rev. Brian Westgate, pastor at Redeemer Lutheran in Oakmont and current chair of the cemetery committee.
Because Smith tended to be wild — on the mound and off — White Sox management sent him packing in 1908 but welcomed him back the next season. His drinking got him shuttled to one team after another before he retired in 1915. He returned to Pittsburgh and his old career in the moving business. He died in 1952 at age 73.
Rev. Westgate said the attention paid by volunteers in recent years has reactivated the cemetery.
“When Denzel Washington was filming August Wilson’s ‘Fences,’ they filmed a scene in Minersville,” he said. “A student group was recently up there, the Students for Sustainability from Pitt. They planted flowers.”
Diana Nelson Jones: djones@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1626.
First Published: December 11, 2017, 4:50 a.m.
