Duncan Heights has no single archive — its story survives in scattered newspaper clippings, county deed searches, and the memories of neighbors who've spent decades trying to piece it together. This timeline draws on all of them.
Duncan Heights Cemetery, Inc. was announced in the Pittsburgh Courier — the city's leading African American newspaper — as the "finest and most beautiful cemetery in Pennsylvania," situated on newly paved Duncan Avenue at Thompson Run Road, within a thirty-minute drive of anywhere in Pittsburgh. According to local historian Beth Burrell, the land's owner, who was Jewish, specifically designed it as a place for the African American community to bury their dead at a time when cemetery plots sold to Black families elsewhere were often "less than desirable" under segregation.
The corporation's articles of incorporation promised a perpetual care fund built from at least 10 percent of lot sale proceeds. No bank was ever named, and no proof the fund existed has ever surfaced.
Sources: The Pittsburgh Courier, Jul. 4 & Jun. 20, 1931 · TribLive, May 6, 2022 · Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, May 25, 2000
About ten years after founding, the cemetery opened its gates to burials from any community, not only Black families. A section near the entrance was specifically dedicated to war veterans — the row of stones that survives best today, closest to Duncan Avenue.
Source: TribLive, May 6, 2022
A Works Progress Administration survey that June reported roughly 400 graves at Duncan Heights, including 10 identified veterans — a rare official snapshot of a cemetery whose own records would soon vanish for good.
Source: Skwarecki, "A descriptive analysis of the oldest burials in Pittsburgh's Duncan Heights cemetery," SocArXiv, 2023
Myer Sparks, a Penn Hills man who had bought the land for $12,000 and incorporated the cemetery in 1931, died having made no mention of Duncan Heights on the handwritten index card that served as his will. His property passed to his widow, Rose Sparks — and with it, the cemetery's ownership trail effectively went cold.
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, May 25, 2000
Robert and Evelyn Schilling took over as president and secretary of a company by a similar name in 1959, but were soon occupied running a different cemetery in McKees Rocks — and this is roughly when Duncan Heights "began going to seed," in the words of the town's attorney decades later. The last known burial took place around 1961. William Sirlin, a North Side mortician who had been involved in operating the grounds, would later die in 1972 leaving no heirs and no cemetery records behind.
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, May 25, 2000
Shaler homemaker Toni Gizzi organized her 45-boy Cub Scout troop to clear the cemetery for Memorial Day — twenty fathers with mowers, weed cutters, and axes cut paths to the graves, and each Scout "adopted" a soldier's grave to care for. One boy practiced taps for weeks so he could play it at their ceremony. That same fall, the Pittsburgh Press published an investigation, "Weeds, Past Bury Cemetery Clues in McCandless," documenting the same ownership mystery that persists to this day.
Sources: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, May 25, 2000 · The Pittsburgh Press, Oct. 12, 1977
Korean War veteran Harry Bishoff of Hampton cleared and began mowing the roughly 200-foot front lawn section in 1994, keeping it up for years afterward. In 2000, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter Diana Nelson Jones profiled neighbors George and Mary Ann Bigelow, who by then had spent ten years combing Allegheny County deeds, wills, and property maps trying to identify a legal owner — and coming up empty at every turn. By 1997 the land had been valued at zero for tax purposes and was $13,604 delinquent in back taxes; the lien had been bought by a firm that trades in delinquent property liens.
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "Abandoned, overgrown cemetery defies efforts to find who's responsible," May 25, 2000
Six years later, another Post-Gazette feature — "A North Hills resting place is nearly forgotten" — found little had changed. Flooding and small landslides had shifted headstones; vandals had moved and broken others; a feral cat nested in old flags left behind by veterans' groups. A prior push to restore the cemetery, backed by a coalition of neighbors, politicians, lawyers, and the Army Corps of Engineers, had stalled on the same intransigent fact as always: the land was private property owned by no one. The Bigelows were still searching.
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "A North Hills resting place is nearly forgotten," May 28, 2006
Neighbor Beth Burrell began GPS-documenting individual grave sites after stumbling on the cemetery while walking her dog, and started organizing community cleanup days. In 2022, 16-year-old North Allegheny student Ralph Abdel-Massih made restoring the cemetery his Eagle Scout project, leading a work day that cleared dead brush and trash and drew far more volunteers than expected. Since then, regular cleanup days — organized through the "Friends of Duncan Heights Cemetery" Facebook page — have continued uncovering headstones buried for decades, including several marking the graves of African American war veterans, among them Capt. Moses M. Warrick, a WWI veteran and Pittsburgh fire marshal. Survey flags now mark newly found grave sites as the volunteer effort slowly works outward from the cleared front section.
Sources: TribLive, May 6, 2022 & May 18, 2023