The extended Pettebone family has left monuments of one sort or another throughout this part of Pennsylvania and particularly in Forty Fort Cemetery in Forty Fort, Pennsylvania.
Here we have a grand and costly granite obelisk in the Egyptian revival style (figure 1). Stylized Egyptianizing motifs frame the die; inverted lotus flowers are the easiest to make out along the upper border (figure 2).
One imagines that Payne Pettebone’s death occasioned the raising of the monument in 1888. But a branch of the family, the Dicksons, also used part of the plot (figure 3); we find the long-lived Kate Pettebone Dickson (1851-1930), daughter, I think, of the principals, along with her husband Allan Hamilton Dickson (1851-1893, age 41) and their two short-lived children Caro Pettebone Dickson (1877-1883, age 5) and Hugh Sheridan Dickson (1889-1893, age 3).
Kate lost Allan and Hugh in a cluster in January 1893, and had their names, along with Caro’s, inscribed onto the Pettebone monument, which had gone up but a few years before. Kate was added many years later, at the bottom, after the epigram:
They were lovely and pleasant in their lives,
and in their death they were not divided.
The epigram is taken from 2 Samuel 1:23:
Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided: they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions.
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