Alden & Harlow, the highest-class high-class architects in Pittsburgh, designed this mausoleum, certainly the most photographed monument in the Homewood Cemetery, for William Harry Brown. It is festooned with Egyptian-style symbols, but the pyramid itself is in the proportions of the Pyramid of Cestius in Rome.
More pictures of the Brown pyramid, and more, and more.
Generations of H. J. Heinzes have been buried here, and the large underground chamber still has room for more. The architects were Vrydaugh & Wolfe, who also designed Warwick House, Howard Heinz’ mansion in Squirrel Hill.
This is an ordinary-looking grave marker, except that it is probably the only one in Pittsburgh with an engraving of an extinct fish, and almost certainly the only one with an extinct fish named after the deceased. Donald Baird was a paleontologist who grew up in Pittsburgh, spent his career as a professor at Princeton, and retired to Pittsburgh to putter in the Carnegie Museum’s huge collection of fossils in basement drawers. The fish was named for him by one of his admiring colleagues.
St. Peter’s Cemetery is a small German Catholic cemetery in Arlington. (The German Lutherans have a cemetery, St. Paul’s, right behind this one in Mount Oliver, and they seem almost to have chosen their patron saints confrontationally.) This elaborate monument presides over the priests’ plot in the cemetery.
“For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and in the last day I shall rise out of the earth. And I shall be clothed again with my skin, and in my flesh I will see my God.” (Job 19:25–26, the English translation taken from the Douay-Rheims version.)
“So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” (Psalm 89:14 in the Vulgate numbering, or 90:12 in the numbering used by most Bibles today. The English is from the King James Version; the Douay-Rheims version, following the Vulgate, is quite different.)
Judge William Wilkins was the owner of the estate called Homewood, whose grounds are now the Homewood Cemetery. His mausoleum is the oldest in the cemetery, which was built around it, and it is a model of the original Mausoleum at Halicarnassus.
Older family gravestones are gathered around the monument, including the grave of Judge Wilkins’ father, Captain John Wilkins, who fought in the Revolution.
More pictures of the Wilkins mausoleum, including transcriptions of the four inscriptions.
