Pittsburgh Cemeteries

Category: McKeesport and Versailles Cemetery

  • Hartman Mausoleum, McKeesport and Versailles Cemetery

    Another unusual design from this cemetery. We shall call the style Romanesque because of the prominent round arch and the rusticated stone, but once again the architect has refused to meet our expectations of the Romanesque in the details. You will find nothing quite like it in the Pittsburgh city cemeteries. According to cemetery records, this mausoleum received its first burial in 1883—a few years before the Allegheny County Courthouse opened the floodgates of the Romanesque revival in the Pittsburgh area.

  • Guthrie Mausoleum, McKeesport and Versailles Cemetery

    Here is a mausoleum not quite like anything else Father Pitt has seen in this area. For lack of a better term, he will call the style Romanesque, but there are odd bits of whimsy that suggest a local architect who cared little for any main stream of architectural thought.

    Many of the mausoleums in the McKeesport and Versailles Cemetery are half-sunk into the hillside—a style that had gone out of favor in most Pittsburgh cemeteries, but remained popular here well into the twentieth century, probably because the vertical landscape nearly demands it.

  • Soles Mausoleum, McKeesport and Versailles Cemetery

    A good example of the character of the mausoleums in this fascinating cemetery. They seem determined to surprise us with their disregard of standard forms. Here, for example, we have Doric columns; but the rest of the structure is hardly classical, and indeed it is hard to assign it any particular style at all. Yet it is a pleasing design, and its picturesque hillside location is also in its favor.

  • R. T. Carothers Mausoleum, McKeesport and Versailles Cemetery

    Father Pitt would guess that this mausoleum might have originally had a bronze door, which was replaced by the stone in front. If that is so, the replacement is very well and very expensively done, though it does not really match the style of the mausoleum. It is much more delicate than one would expect from a rugged rustic mausoleum like this: the inscription, in particular, clashes with the lettering on the lintel.

  • Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, McKeesport and Versailles Cemetery

    This huge tower of zinc may be the biggest zinc monument in the Pittsburgh area. The zinc monument makers sold statues like these to municipalities all over the country as a relatively inexpensive way to have a very impressive Civil War memorial. Huge though they are, they are built on the same principles as the zinc cemetery monuments offered to ordinary families, with various interchangeable parts that can be mixed and swapped to make any composition you like. This one was donated by the citizens of McKeesport, and it lives up to the monument salesman’s most extravagant claims: here we are, more than a century later, and the thing still looks magnificent.