Doubtless a memorial company’s stock model, this small mausoleum is encrusted with floridly Victorian Romanesque details in a rather weighty German style. A good architect would have displayed more taste, but would a real architect have been able to provide so many details for the money?
Almost certainly modeled after the Temple of Hephaestus in Athens, this is about as archaeologically correct as Doric architecture gets in Pittsburgh. It is one of the few peripteral mausoleum designs you will find in Pittsburgh cemeteries, peripteral meaning that it has columns on all sides.
This fine Byzantine monument has inscriptions in what looks to old Pa Pitt like Ukrainian. He would be delighted to have a translation in the comments. There are inscriptions on both sides, and here they are in high resolution:
An easily identified work of the Master of the Robinson Run Reliefs, whose trademarks are all present:
Interestingly, there is a Henry Huls buried in the Peters Creek Baptist Church Cemetery, whose tombstone is also by the Master of the Robinson Run Reliefs. We therefore know of at least three cemeteries in which this fine craftsman worked.
The inscription:
IN
memory of
AMELIA HULS
who departed this life
April 16th 1836 in the
49 year of her age
A monument for a girl who died at the age of fourteen. The weathered and damaged angel is probably much more picturesque in this condition than it was when it was new.
The base includes a photograph that is badly faded, but with the help of modern image-editing software we can restore a recognizable image.
