The Pitts Family Plot

Alex Langley Religion 167 Project 2 The Pitts Family Plot Located at the top of the hill directly to the south of Mt. Hope Cemetery s northeast entrance is a toppled obelisk. Resting among the fallen leaves of plot 21E, the monument saddened me as I approached and realized that it sits atop of the graves of three individuals all of whom were younger than me when they died. On the other side of the plot a tombstone for the family patriarch, John Avery Pitts, lies face down in the grass. The Pitts family moved to Rochester sometime before 1845, and their monuments have been around long enough for time to begin taking its toll. Emma Jane was the only daughter buried in the Pitts family plot. She was the second child born, and tragically, the second to die at only fifteen years old. Emma was born on November 13, 1829, and passed away from inflamed bowels in Rochester on February 28, 1845 (Interment Records). The phrase inflamed bowels seems rather ambiguous and may indicate 1

that the source of her disease could not be identified by her doctors. Inflammatory Bowel Disease is an autoimmune disease that includes both Crohn and ulcerative colitis, although both are rarely fatal (wikipedia.org). Another possibility is that when she died a physician was not present and the family misdiagnosed appendicitis, not knowing the cause of death. Although Emma Jane passed away far too early, she did outlive her brother George Washington Pitts. George W. died, one week before his first birthday, on November 22, 1835. According to the Mt. Hope plot records his body is buried in the cemetery, although his name does not appear in the interment records, and he died before the cemetery opened in 1838. It is possible that his remains were exhumed and moved to Mt. Hope sometime after his death. Like the rest of his siblings, he was born in Winthrop, Maine where the family had its origins. The family then moved to then Albany, before heading further west to Rochester and next to Springfield, Ohio, before settling in Buffalo (Wright State University Libraries). Of the Pitts children buried in Mt. Hope, Horatio lived the longest life. Born March 31, 1827 Horatio Wade Pitts passed away in Havana, Cuba on February 26, 1858. Cuba was serving 2

as a stop over location for a return from a business trip in Chile, when the 21 year old died from tuberculosis (Union and Advertiser, March 11 th, 1858). His father John Pitts founded the Buffalo Pitts Company in 1851, an agricultural firm which had business in South America (Buffalo Press). It is possible that the younger Pitts was in Chile on behalf of his father s business interest. Regardless of the nature of his trip to South America, the family was able to pay the cost to embalm and ship Horatio from Havana to Rochester (Union and Advertiser, March 11 th, 1858). The body arrived in Rochester a little over a month later, and the body was interred on April 8 th (Interment records). John Bemen Pitts is the only member on the family monument not buried in Mt. Hope Cemetery. He passed away from cholera in 1866 during the disease s last rampage through North America (Union and Advertiser, October 25 th, 1866)(Wikipedia.org). John B. died in Dayton, Ohio, a little over 30 miles from Springfield, where his family had lived before moving to Buffalo (Wright State University Libraries). John B. married Belle Perrin; together they had two children, John and Belle (Burrage, Stubbs 155). His body is buried in Buffalo, where his father s business was headquartered and where both his parents died. John Avery Pitts was born in Clinton, Maine on December 8, 1799 to Abiel and Abiah Wade Pitts (Burrage, Stubbs 155). His family moved to Winthrop when John was young, and Winthrop is declared his hometown on the family monument. The Pitts family can trace its origins to Edmond Pitts who moved to Massachusetts with his wife, child, and brother from Norfolk England in 1639 (rootsweb.com) (Cushings, 25 28). John A. and his twin brother Hiriam were inventors and each held multiple patents. Most of their inventions involved farm 3

machinery and formed the basis for Pitts Agricultural Works, later the Buffalo Pitts Company. Buffalo Pitts, founded in 1851 was a major player in the steam tractor industry, and eventually had manufacturing facilities throughout the United States, supplying both domestic and international customers (Buffalo Press). The twins experienced moderate success before they perfected their major invention, a wheat thresher, patented in 1837, that combined both threshing and separating wheat into one portable machine run by horsepower (Witmer, 1935). John A. would go onto win a gold medal at the Paris Exposition in 1855 for a threshing machine that utilized an innovative means for bagging wheat as it was threshed (A Brief History of Winthrop). John Avery Pitts died of paralysis due to stroke on July 1 s, 1859 (Interment Records). By this point his inventions must have earned enough to have his son s body shipped from Cuba, and possibly to have his youngest son s remains exhumed and moved from Maine. The Buffalo Pitts Company would survive until going into bankruptcy and merging with a rival in 1915 (Vossler, 1). John Avery and Mary Jennings Pitts had another daughter who is not mentioned on the family monument in Mt. Hope. Mary Ann Pitts outlived her parents; she was born on January 8, 1831 in Winthrop, and passed away on December 11, 1890 at the age of fifty nine (Burrage, Stubbs 155). She inherited her father s stake in the Buffalo Pitts Company, which she passed on to her daughters (Burrage, Stubbs 155). Mary Jennings Pitts outlived her husband by seventeen years, and outlived three of her children. She was born in North Wayne, Maine on October 20, 1801, and like her husband she passed away in Buffalo; the couple was married on March 22, 1826 (Burrage, 155). She died of 4

old age on September 15, 1876 (Interment Records). She was interred at Mt. Hope three days later, the last of her family to claim a resting spot in the cemetery. Her grave marker is the most elaborate of the five in plot. Comprised of a near life size coffin with a cross laid across the top and information about her life and death going around the sides of the coffin, her personal monument is both simple and impressive. Also the shape of the coffin s lid invokes the image of a cathedral, which along with the cross, give the stone an undeniable Christian appeal. By the time of Mary s death the Egyptian revival movement of the family monument had gone out of style, and a strong anti Masonic movement had given Egyptian styles an undeserved reputation of satanic imagery, and evil in general (Smoot). 5

Obelisks can be seen in nearly every part of the cemetery and the obelisk in the Pitts plot was what first grabbed my attention. Simple straight lines are intended to draw the eye upward, appropriate in a Christian culture. The style inspires awe in its grandeur, and is associated with a timelessness not rivaled elsewhere in our culture, all of which may explain why so many people choose to have the symbols on their graves. The base of the Pitts Family monument carries the names and dates for the five Pitts buried there, and for John B. Pitts as well. The children s monuments are simple and traditional. Small, unadorned, stones with rounded tops bearing the child s name stand in quiet contrast to the large pedestal and obelisk. There is a stone catching perfectly the tragedy of this part of the plot. In Memory of Our Little Ones is truly heart wrenching, while the diminutive size and blank nature of the stones themselves helps the observer to imagine how those buried beneath were themselves small and whose lives were still a blank slate. John A. Pitts stone has toppled during the intervening years since his passing. Mt. Hope s plot books label the grave as his, and the location next to his wife makes sense for his 6

resting place. His marker is an arch shaped tablet topped by a fleur de lis cross. The back has no engravings, and anything that may be on the front side of the stone is no longer visible. It is my hope that writing this paper may help bring some much needed restoration to the Pitts family plot. The plot is technically under perpetual care, and for a family that took so much care to maintain its roots with Rochester, even after leaving the city, it would be fitting to have them remembered appropriately. Also I find myself personally vested in knowing what is on the underside of John A. s stone. A captain of industry who helped western New York boom in the 1850s, and whose machines helped to harvest the Midwest, John Avery Pitts had a reason for burying his family in a city where he no longer lived, and perhaps the other side will help explain his loyalty. The Pitts Family monument is elegantly simple in its delivery, and represents everything that is so beautiful about Mt. Hope. Situated among trees at the top of a hill, their resting place is a perfect place to think about those who have come before, to take stock of one s life, and unfortunately to see how tragically fleeting life can be. 7

Bibliography Burrage, Henry S., and Albert R. Stubbs. Genealogical and Family History of the State of Maine. Vol. 1. New York: Lewis Historical Company, 1909. 11 Nov. 2007 <https://mail.rochester.edu/cgi bin/webmail_3.1n/webmail/webmail.cgi?cmd=url&xdata=~2 d94e230180addb66151cc428f6439ab6f687a0f4e2d4e691cdc5e300&url=http!3a!2f!2fbooks.google.co m!2fbooks!3fid=ldryytrj8tgc!26pg=pa155!26lpg=pa155!26dq=!2522john!2ba!2bpitts!2522!26source =web!26ots=tjpfv3uaoi!26sig=c1zzl8fxgc1rqyjkmkww09jojmm>. "Cholera." Wikipedia.Org. 11 Nov. 2007. Wikipedia.Org. 11 Nov. 2007 <https://mail.rochester.edu/cgi bin/webmail_3.1n/webmail/webmail.cgi?cmd=url&xdata=~2 d94e230180addb66151cc428f6439ab6f687a0f4e2d4e691cdc5e300&url=http!3a!2f!2fen.wikipedia.org! 2Fwiki!2FCholera!23History>. Cushing, Daniel. "Daniel Cushing's Record of Early Settlers." New England Historical and Genealogical Register 15 (1861): 25 28. Rootsweb. Rochester. 11 Nov. 2007. Keyword: Edmond Pitts. "Dayton Miami Valley Inventors and Inventions." Wright State University: University Libraries. 2003. Wright State University. 11 Nov. 2007 <http://libnet.wright.edu/find/gov/patent/miamivalleyinventors.html>. "Inflammatory Bowel Disease." Wikipedia.Org. 25 Nov. 2007. Wikipedia. 06 Dec. 2007 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/inflammatory_bowel_disease#prognosis>. "Made in Buffalo: Best Distributing Point on Earth and the Presentation of Its Greatest Industrial Names." Buffalo Press 16 Sept. 1901: 1. "Mt. Hope Plot Map." Map. Rochester, NY, 1876. Rochester. Parks, Recreation, and Human Services. Mt. Hope Internment Records. Rochester, NY, 1860. 8

Rootsweb. 2007. Ancestory.Com. 11 Nov. 2007 <https://mail.rochester.edu/cgi bin/webmail_3.1n/webmail/webmail.cgi?cmd=url&xdata=~2 d94e230180addb66151cc428f6439ab6f687a0f4e2d4e691cdc5e300&url=http!3a!2f!2fwc.rootsweb.co m!2fcgi bin!2figm.cgi!3fop=ped!26db=!3a1921131!26id=i4821!26xstyle=table>. Smoot, Fred. "Egyptian Revival Period Grave Markers: the Obelisk, Pyramid, Etc." Sickness and Death in the Old South. 2002. USGenNet. 12 Nov. 2007 <http://www.tngenweb.org/darkside/egyptian.html>. Thurston, David. A Brief History of Winthrop, From 1764 to October 1855. 1855. 11 Nov. 2007 <https://mail.rochester.edu/cgi bin/webmail_3.1n/webmail/webmail.cgi?cmd=url&xdata=~2 d94e230180addb66151cc428f6439ab6f687a0f4e2d4e691cdc5e300&url=http!3a!2f!2fbooks.google.co m!2fbooks!3fid=mszq43ughioc!26pg=pa89!26lpg=pa89!26dq=!2522john!2bavery!2bpitts!2522!26sou rce=web!26ots=mvcdukjfw_!26sig=9fpz_ ZlP5eNnimf9hoUoP5VD70>. Union and Advertiser 11 Mar. 1858: 3. Union and Advertiser 25 Oct. 1866: 2. Vossler, Bill. "Gone Like the Buffalo." Farm Collector. 11 Nov. 2007 <https://mail.rochester.edu/cgi bin/webmail_3.1n/webmail/webmail.cgi?cmd=url&xdata=~2 d94e230180addb66151cc428f6439ab6f687a0f4e2d4e691cdc5e300&url=http!3a!2f!2fwww.farmcollect or.com!2farticles!2fsteam engines!2fgone like the buffalo 2003 09 01.html>. Witmer, J S. "Evolution of the Thresher." Steamtraction os (1992). Steam Traction Archive. Rochester. 11 Nov. 2007. Keyword: John A. Pitts. 9

Title: The Pitts Family Plot Author: Alex Langley Keywords: Mt. Hope, obelisk, Buffalo Pitts Company, inflamed bowels, cholera, Winthrop Maine, Albany New York, Springfield Ohio, Rochester New York, Buffalo New York Abstract: Description of the Pitts Family monument, with details on their lives and deaths, with particular emphasis on the family patriarch John A. Pitts: includes his wife Mary Jennings, and their children (Horatio Wade, Emma Jane, George Washington, John Bemen, and Mary Ann). John Avery Pitts 12/8/1799 7/1/1859 Mary Jennings Pitts 10/20/1801 9/15/1876 Emma Jane Pitts 11/13/1829 2/28/1845 Horatio Wade Pitts 3/31/1827 2/26/1858 John Bemen Pitts?/?/1833 10/22/1866 George Washington Pitts 11/29/1834 11/22/1835 Mary Ann Pitts 1/8/1831 12/11/1890 10