If this mausoleum looks a bit like a miniature courthouse, then Mr. Burleigh should feel right at home: he earned his greatest fame, or infamy, as the Allegheny County district attorney who prosecuted the Homestead strikers in 1892. He was later Pittsburgh city solicitor for many years. You may ask how a man who devoted his life to public service gained the kind of wealth evident in this splendid Ionic temple; but if you do ask it, it is because you are not very familiar with Pittsburgh.
A fairly lavish monument for a German hilltop cemetery. The style could be described as Victorian Corinthian. Christian Zies died in 1874, and that may be about the date of this monument; but it could also be a bit later.
Satanists (which is to say drunken giggling teenagers) have vandalized this and a few other monuments in the cemetery, but the stone will long outlast their paint, which is wearing off.
Mr. John Weakly Chalfant died in 1898, but in 1930 his heirs took it into their heads to have the Ecclesiastical Department of Tiffany Studios design this very elegant classical structure, in which he was reinterred. The whole design is clearly meant to show off a Tiffany stained-glass window, but the window was stolen more than thirty years ago.
Either Louis Knoepp made quite a bit of money in a short time (he died at forty), or he had a rich family who remembered him fondly. This monument towers over everything else in this little Lutheran cemetery; in scale it resembles some of the grander monuments in the Allegheny or Union Dale cemeteries. The statue on top, however, is not of the first quality; in fact, its proportions are a bit odd. The head is large and broad, and the neck is unnaturally thick.
The style of the base is a bit hard to describe; it is classical with elements of Gothic.
As if it were not enough to be more magnificent than anything else in the cemetery, the monument is also surrounded by an elegant stone wall to separate Mr. Knoepp from the riffraff around him.
One might expect Henry Clay Frick to rest in a huge mausoleum, but in fact when he went to see Mr. Carnegie in hell he was buried in a modest grave overlooked by a large but very plain classical monument. The rest of his family is also buried here—even Helen and Childs, who refused to speak to each other after the reading of their father’s will, are buried in the same plot, although almost as far apart as possible.
The graves in this plot all match, except for the monument to Childs and his wife, which is entirely different. All the matching graves have places for flower urns, and when Father Pitt visited, someone had left artificial roses for Henry and Adelaide.
