Another mausoleum in the style Father Pitt called “Doric Romanesque” when he saw it in the Davis mausoleum nearby. But this is, to his eye, a much more successful design. The Doric columns are fatter and support a heavy stone arch directly; there is no cacophony between light and heavy as on the Davis mausoleum. Everything looks weighty and primitive. It is not Father Pitt’s favorite style, but if we accept it as a style, this structure carries it off where the Davis mausoleum fails.
The first burial in this mausoleum seems to have been John Duncan Evans in 1921, and we can take that as a good guess at the date of the mausoleum. The style is distinctive: it is more secular Gothic—the Gothic of city gates and guildhalls—than the usual ecclesiastically inspired Gothic found in Pittsburgh mausoleums.
Mr. Edward Henry Jennings died in 1923, but if old Pa Pitt had to guess, he would say that he had this fine Doric mausoleum built for him some years earlier than that. Mr. Jennings was apparently a Successful American, because he appears in a 1900 magazine with that title:
An Art Deco interpretation of Gothic, with a very streamlined version of the requisite pointed arch. The cemetery’s on-line records do not list a Ferree as buried in a private mausoleum; the only Ferree listed is a Dr. David Ferree buried in 1917 in a grave in a completely different part of the cemetery. Father Pitt is therefore forced to guess the date by the style, so he will guess 1930s.
An Art Deco construction that reminds Father Pitt more than a little of the style he calls “American Fascist,” which was more usually applied to federal office buildings than to private mausoleums.
