If you want to be remembered as a man of taste, you should be entombed in the Parthenon, or something very like it. This is very similar, but not identical, to the Eaton mausoleum in the Homewood Cemetery. Both are very correct Doric temples, bearing an even stronger resemblance to the Temple of Hephaestus in Athens than to the Parthenon. Alexander McBurney Byers was a titan of the iron industry, which you would never guess from this pristine white temple.
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.
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.
