Here is another Doric temple, not extraordinary but in good taste. One of the best things about it is the site: the mausoleum sits in front of tall evergreens that make a deep green curtain behind it. According to cemetery records, Charles Meyran, the earliest occupant, was buried in 1891.
There is nothing extraordinary about this design; it is just a very well proportioned Doric mausoleum that shows good conservative taste. Mr. Alfred Hicks, its first resident, was a coal baron in the Allegheny valley, and, like many industrialists, also a banker. Being president of a bank seems to have been considered a logical part-time job for a rich industrialist.
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:
