Beyond the gates in front of you lies Allegheny Cemetery, one of the finest examples of the rural cemetery movement in America. Founded in 1844 and designed in the picturesque landscape tradition of Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Allegheny Cemetery covers three hundred acres of rolling hills that were outside the city when they were set aside for the dead. The rural cemetery movement was a radical idea: instead of burying the dead in town churchyards, create large parklike spaces where the dead could rest in beauty and the living could come for contemplation.
Allegheny Cemetery served both purposes and was a popular Sunday destination throughout the nineteenth century. Stephen Foster, who wrote Oh Susanna, Beautiful Dreamer, and My Old Kentucky Home, is buried here — a Pittsburgh native who gave America some of its most enduring songs while dying in poverty in New York at age 37. The graves of industrialists, politicians, and ordinary steelworkers who built Pittsburgh are all here, the social hierarchy of the steel city preserved in marble and granite.
Walk the roads slowly. The distance between the monuments of mill owners and the simple markers of the workers who served them is measured in yards.