A standard zinc or “white bronze” monument; note, in the picture below, the strong resemblance to the stone monument in the background. There are four panels waiting to be swapped out for custom inscriptions, but not one was ever used, leaving the name “Stewart” on the base as the only identification. Several Stewarts have headstones nearby, of whom Joseph S. Stewart (1847-1919) is perhaps of the right age for a zinc monument.
A standard zinc or “white bronze” monument, settled into a rakish angle but still standing. No other Grimms are remembered on any of the other panels; perhaps J. Emil lived past the time when new inscribed panels could readily be obtained.
The best way to describe this style is probably “Baroque”: it’s a splendid half-underground mausoleum, of the type usually called a “burial vault” in the days when such things were built. It’s the only one in the Chartiers Cemetery, which was founded in 1861.
The front bears the date 1874, which suggests that the vault was built originally for David C. Steen, who died at the age of 20 or 21 in that year. An Emma M. Lappe Steen died the next year, also at the age of 20 or 21; did a young widow never recover from her loss? In fact, the mere dates tell us a good deal about the appalling mortality even among the well-to-do in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In a list of eleven names, four lived past the age of thirty.
In a later article we have more pictures of the Steen mausoleum.
