The only private mausoleum in the cemetery, this is not quite as grand a construction as some of the ones in the great city cemeteries. But it must have impressed the neighbors in this little country town.
The epitaph is a version of a poem commonly associated with valentines:
Each little flower shall sweetly say,
In absence oft I do regret thee;
And though a wanderer far away,
Yet never do I once forget thee.
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.
There is one splendid mausoleum in St. Adalbert’s, a Polish Catholic cemetery, and it stands out not only for being the only one in the cemetery, but also for not closely resembling any other mausoleum in Pittsburgh. It looks as though it was built by Polish craftsmen who decided they could build a mausoleum as well as anybody, and went ahead to prove that they could. The result is a style that is hard to describe, so Father Pitt will go ahead and name it “Polish Ionic.”
The wooden doors are not original; as usual, the bronze doors were stolen (a fine picture of the original doors is here). One wonders how it is possible that metal recyclers ask no questions when scruffy-looking men bring in huge bronze doors on the back of a broken-down pickup. At any rate, someone deserves great credit for replacing the doors rather than simply bricking up the entrance with concrete blocks, as has been done to nearly all the mausoleums in the South Side Cemetery next door. Old Pa Pitt would not have chosen the diagonal boards, and he would have painted the doors verdigris color.
The Polish language is mysterious to Father Pitt, so he does not know what the initials Ks. Wł. stand for. There are no records for St. Adalbert’s Cemetery. According to the Carrick and Overbrook Wiki, “The caretaker, who was fired, took all the records with her and either destroyed them or kept them. She has since died and the records are gone.” That Wiki page also has pictures of the beautiful gate that was removed only a few years ago.
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:
