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.
What shall we call this style? Father Pitt has heard it called “Byzantine,” but that does not seem right to him; it seems more Romanesque, but with an unusual domed cupola. The cupola adds impressive height, and in spite of the difficulty he had assigning the structure to a particular style, old Pa Pitt thinks it is a pleasing and harmonious design.
The best way to describe this style is probably “Baroque”: it’s a splendid half-underground mausoleum, of the type usually called a “burial vault” in the days when such things were built. It’s the only one in the Chartiers Cemetery, which was founded in 1861.
The front bears the date 1874, which suggests that the vault was built originally for David C. Steen, who died at the age of 20 or 21 in that year. An Emma M. Lappe Steen died the next year, also at the age of 20 or 21; did a young widow never recover from her loss? In fact, the mere dates tell us a good deal about the appalling mortality even among the well-to-do in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In a list of eleven names, four lived past the age of thirty.
In a later article we have more pictures of the Steen mausoleum.
A particularly splendid Egyptian temple; it would be rather ordinary but for the broad porch that wraps around three sides, making it magnificent.
A small rustic Romanesque mausoleum made almost top-heavy by the large statue of Hope holding her anchor. Father Pitt knows nothing about Martin Lappe except that he died in 1896 and his name is on this mausoleum.
