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.
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.
The Woodmen of the World, still selling life insurance today under the name WoodmenLife, guaranteed every member a grave monument in the form, appropriately, of a stump. The stump program ended about a hundred years ago, but a number of these stumps were installed in Pittsburgh cemeteries. This one marks the plot of the Bollenberg family, with a separate log for Frederick Bollenberg and an unnamed infant son. Mr. Bollenberg died at the age of about 32, and it is possible that he and the child died from the same cause.
The seal of the Woodmen of the World, whose local chapters were called “camps.” “Dum tacet clamat”: “Though he is silent, yet he cries out.” (The Woodmen usually translate this motto as “Though silent, he speaks.”)
