Graves Mausoleum

Robert Graves
1866-November 27, 1931

Robert Graves came from a prominent New York family. He inherited a large fortune from his father’s wallpaper business and lived an affluent lifestyle. However he led a trouble life and was married three times. His second wife,  Margaret J. Loughman Plant, was formerly the wife of Henry B. Plant, president of the H. B. Plant Company, which had a number of railroad holdings. Graves inherited her fortune when she died. In 1931, his mounting financial problems (perhaps as a result of the general financial collapse of the stock market in 1929) stun him into despondency. On November 28th 1931 he was found slumped in his chair after apparently firing two bullets into his head. However he must not have died completely in financial ruin: his will left $50,000 to a charitable fund called the “Hundred Neediest Cases Fund” administered by the New York Times in the name of his wife’s charity, the “Margaret Plant-Graves Fund”.

His octagonal mausoleum is set on a three-tiered podium, It features fluted pilasters marking each of the corners and an antefix at the peak of the stepped stone roof. Inside the mausoleum are seven nature-themed stained-glass windows crafted by Tiffany.
Text and photo © Douglas Keister Visit Doug’s Author Page

[address cemetery=”Woodlawn Cemetery” street=”East 233rd Street” city=”Bronx” state=”New York” zip=”10470″]

Gates Mausoleum

John W. Gates
May 18, 1855 – August 9, 1911

John Warne “Bet a Million” Gates was a financier, owner of the American Wire Company, which was an early manufacturer of barbed wire. He made millions when sold the company to J. P. Morgan’s United States Steel Corporation. Gates was also the founded of the Texas Company, which became the Texaco Oil Company. Gates was known for his fondness for gambling. In 1900 he bet $70,000 on a horse race in England and reaped a $600,000 return. Rumors escalated his winnings to one million dollars and he acquired the nickname “Bet-a-Million” Gates.

The massive Gates mausoleum is executed in a Classical Revival style with two fluted Ionic columns on the front and sides with a plain entablature and slightly gabled pediment. The mausoleum features a door crafted by Robert Aitken in 1914 depicting a mourning woman draped in cloth.

Inside, the mausoleum features two male portrait busts in marble, a combination altar and sarcophagus, a stone table and two stone chairs. The mausoleum’s interior is crafted largely in pink granite. Centermost is a dark-hued stained glass window. In a 1932 article in American Landscape Architect, the mausoleum is illustrated as the “most impressive in Woodlawn.
Text and photo © Douglas Keister Visit Doug’s Author Page

[address cemetery=”Woodlawn Cemetery” street=”East 233rd Street” city=”Bronx” state=”New York” zip=”10470″]

Gurnee Mausoleum

This marble mausoleum is the permanent home of a number of members of the Gurnee family. The most noted resident is Walter S. Gurnee. Gurnee was born in Haverstraw, New York, then the family moved to Detroit. In 1835 he started a business in Detroit then moved to the booming city of Chicago where he got into the leather business, becoming one of the first tanners in Chicago. In 1843 he founded and installed himself as president of the Chicago Hide and Leather Company and later as a partner of the Gurnee and Matteson (a saddlery and leather firm) where he amassed his fortune. He became active in a number of trade organizations and soon thereafter became president of the Chicago and Milwaukee Railroad. Gurnee served as mayor of Chicago from 1851-1853.

He moved to New York in 1863 and soon became one of the city’s movers and shakers, in the banking a business world. When he died at age 91 he was serving as the treasurer and a director of the Shelby Iron Company, and served on the board of directors of the American Smelting and Refining Company, American Surety Company, Carbon Steel Company, Chrysolite Silver Mining Company, Clifton Iron Company, Pittsburg, Lisbon and Western Railroad and Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company. He was also a member of a number of community organizations including the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Gurnee’s home of 5th Avenue in Manhattan was a site of frequent entertainments and gala events. It’s only fitting that the family mausoleum is full of activity and life. There are allegorical statues as well as statues of Mr. and Mrs. Gurnee and their daughters. A number of intricately carved marble busts of Gurnee family members grace the mausoleum’s interior. At the rear of the mausoleum are two allegorical statues. The statues and the mausoleum’s interior all crafted of marble.
Text and photo © Douglas Keister Visit Doug’s Author Page

[address cemetery=”Sleepy Hollow Cemetery” street=”540 N. Broadway” city=”Sleepy Hollow” state=”New York” zip=”10591″]

Chrysler Mausoleum

Walter Percy Chrysler
April 2, 1875 – August 18, 1940

Members of the Walter Chrysler family repose in this garden-variety classical revival mausoleum. One would expect something a bit jauntier. Why? Well, for one, one of the most recognizable buildings on the planet bears his name: the Art Deco masterpiece, The Chrysler Building.

Walter Chrysler grew up in Ellis, Kansas. At an early age he displayed a talent for mechanical things and he took a number of jobs as a mechanic for railway companies. He advanced through the ranks as a foreman, superintendent and master mechanic, eventually becoming the works manager at the American Locomotive Company in Pittsburgh. A short time after assuming the position and director at the company asked him if he might be interested in automobile manufacturing. In short order Chrysler became the production manager for Buick in Flint, Michigan. Just as he had done in railroading, he rose rapidly and in 1925 formed his own firm, the Chrysler Corporation. Then came the crowning event of his career; he financed the construction of the Chrysler Building. Before being surpassed by the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building was the tallest building in the world. It still remains the tallest steel-supported brick building in the world. The Chrysler Building and the accumulation of other successes in his life led to being Time magazine’s Man of the Year in 1929.
Text and photo © Douglas Keister Visit Doug’s Author Page

[address cemetery=”Sleepy Hollow Cemetery” street=”540 N. Broadway” city=”Sleepy Hollow” state=”New York” zip=”10591″]

Harder Mausoleum

Most mausoleum interiors tend to be rather pedestrian storehouses for the departed. The Harder mausoleum, which was built by W. W. Leland Studios, might fit that description save for interesting juxtaposition of the crypts. Rather than being flat to the wall they protrude out at a 45-degree angle. The cross-hatched window echoes the angular pattern. The mausoleum’s first permanent guest was Victor Achilles Harder (August 15, 1847-August 9, 1914). Victor Harder was born in Manhattan but lived almost all his life in Brooklyn. While still a youth he was employed by Mayor, Lane and Company and later bought the company. He seemed to have a talent for buying and developing companies. He was the president of the Powhatan Brass and Iron Works in West Virginia and the Essex Foundry in Newark and was a director of the Connecticut Tobacco Corporation. He was best known as the founder of the Victor A. Harder Real Estate and Construction Company in Brooklyn. Subsequent generations of Harders continue to use the mausoleum.

Victor Harder’s business ventures received the usual amount of attention in the local papers, but one of his daughter’s exploits cause a bit more attention than the wealthy family wanted. On November 10, 1910 the New York Times reported that Harder’s seventeen-year old daughter Hortense had been caught smuggling. Smuggling? It seems that young Hortense was returning from her studies in Europe and accidentally forgot to declare that in her trunks she had seven new designer gowns. An innocent enough mistake, one might suppose, but an inspection of Hortense’s handbag revealed labels that had been removed from the dresses, no doubt to elude customs inspectors about the garments’ provenance. Not so, claimed Hortense. She said she had removed the labels, not to evade paying customs duties but so her friends couldn’t find out where the gowns were made and order the same one. After all, Hortense’s coming out party was being scheduled and it would be absolutely devastating for another girl to have the same gown. Somehow it was all worked out. An $800 customs fine was paid and young Hortense didn’t wind up with a criminal record. On January 20, 1911, Hortense made her debut in a spectacular Paris gown. Whether the label had been sewn back on is not known.
Text and photo © Douglas Keister Visit Doug’s Author Page

[address cemetery=”Green-Wood Cemetery” street=”Willow Avenue” city=”Brooklyn” state=”New York” zip=”11218″]

Daly Mausoleum

Marcus Daly
December 5, 1843-November 12, 1900
Margaret Price Daly
September 7, 1853-July 14, 1941

Marcus Daly worked for John Mackay in Virginia City, Nevada then ventured to Butte, Montana where, in 1881, with the backing of George Hearst (father of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst) he developed what was soon to be discovered to be one of the world’s greatest concentrations of copper. Daly purchased the Anaconda Copper Mine from one Michael Hickey. Hickey said he named the mine after reading an account by another Green-Wood resident Horace Greeley. Greeley had written that at the end of the Civil War Ulysses S. Grant’s forces had surrounded Robert E. Lee’s forces chocking them “like an anaconda.”

Marcus Daly’s life was the personification of the American Dream. He had arrived virtually penniless in a wave of Irish immigration at age 15 and within 20 years had become a multimillionaire lording over mines, banks, power plants and vast tracts of timberland. He was also a great lover of thoroughbred racing and often gave his employees days off to watch horseracing at a track near the Anaconda mine. Many of his employees were Irish. His mines worked 24 hours a day in three shifts, but in a show of respect to the miners and the Irish heritage of many of them he closed the mines on Miners’ Union Day and St. Patrick’s Day.

Reposing in the mausoleum are Marcus and Margaret Price Daly. Accounts of the day said that his body was originally going to be sent to Montana for burial, but those plans were obviously changed. Gracing the polished marble interior of the Daly mausoleum is a religious-themed Tiffany-style stained glass window crafted in opalescent glass.
Text and photo © Douglas Keister Visit Doug’s Author Page

[address cemetery=”Green-Wood Cemetery” street=”Willow Avenue” city=”Brooklyn” state=”New York” zip=”11218″]

Manville Mausoleum

Tommy Manville
April 9, 1894 – October 9, 1967

Tommy Manville (Thomas Franklyn Manville, Jr.) was the Paris Hilton of the mid 20th century: he was famous for being famous. Like Hilton, he inherited a lot of money. In his case he was an heir to the Johns-Manville asbestos fortune. Unlike Hilton, he had a predilection to marriage. From his first marriage to chorus girl Florence Huber in 1911 to his last, to 20 year old Christina Erdlen in 1960, he was married a total of 13 times to 11 different women. Marriage became a sort of a sport to him and he won whatever he was trying to win by securing a spot in the Guinness Book of Records. By all accounts the playboy reveled in his ability to lure young blond women into his lair, marry them then rapidly divorce them. He married Macie Marie Ainsworth in August 1943. They were together for 8 hours of connubial bliss before separating. They got a divorce two months later in October 1943.

Manville’s fortune was not guaranteed from birth. In fact his early marriage antics caused his father to cut him off and Tommy had to take a job at the Pittsburgh facility for $15.00 a week. But his father relented and when the elder Mansville died he left Tommy approximately 10 million dollars (about $125 million today) certainly enough for him to maintain an extravagant lifestyle. Too bad reality TV hadn’t been invented yet. Tommy Manville would certainly have been a star.
Text and photo © Douglas Keister Visit Doug’s Author Page

[address cemetery=”Kensico Cemetery” street=”Mount Pleasant” city=”Valhalla” state=”New York” zip=”10595″]

Cornelius Smith Mausoleum

The Lyman Cornelius Smith (1850-1910) mausoleum is one of the grandest mausoleums in a cemetery full of grand mausoleums. It is designed in a classically elegant Beaux-Arts style complete with four delicately carved Corinthian columns projecting out from the facade and a number of squared off, engaged Corinthian columns, which ring the building. Inside the mausoleum is a well-secured Tiffany stained glass window sandwiched between two pieces of one-inch thick plate glass.

Lyman Cornelius Smith was an industrialist and capitalist who had a vast empire of business holdings including banks, steamship companies, ship building companies, steel mills and railroads. His later years were devoted to developing his most well known product, the typewriter. Along with his brothers, he manufactured the Smith-Premier Typewriter and the L.C. Smith and Brothers Typewriter.
Text and photo © Douglas Keister Visit Doug’s Author Page

[address cemetery=”Oakwood Cemetery” street=”940 Comstock Avenue” city=”Syracuse” state=”New York” zip=”13210″]

Crocker Monument

Sharing the top of Mountain View Cemetery’s Millionaires Row are the Merritt Mausoleum and the Crocker Monument. The circular Crocker monument, constructed in 1888, was built in the Pavilion style. These round “tholos” forms were inspired by temples and tombs of Greco-Roman antiquity. The smooth sides of the mausoleum are contrasted by the rusticated stone blocks forming the base of the structure.

The Crocker mausoleum was designed by New York born architect Arthur Page Brown. Brown studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris before working for the prestigious New York architecture firm of McKim, Mead and White. He moved to California in 1889. In 1893, he won the design competition for the California Building at the Chicago Columbian Exposition then designed the famous Ferry Building in San Francisco in 1896. Brown’s life was cut tragically short by a carriage accident later in 1896.

Following Charles Crocker’s death in 1888, his wife Mary commissioned Brown, then living in New York, to build this tomb for her husband. Charles Crocker was one of the “big four” who built the western portion of the transcontinental railroad. Ironically, like Brown, Crocker was also killed in a carriage accident.  Curiously, since the monument is solid granite, none of the Crockers are entombed inside. Nevertheless, cemetery records indicate that somewhere around the monument lie the mortal remains of Charles Crocker, his wife Mary, their son George and George’s wife, Emma.
Text and photo © Douglas Keister Visit Doug’s Author Page

[address cemetery=”Mountain View Cemetery” street=”” city=”Oakland” state=”California” zip=”94611″]