Our mausoleums are housed in two buildings on our grounds, the Alder building and the Cedar building.  Not only are we the oldest mausoleum in our area, we were the first mausoleum ever built west of the Mississippi River.

Four thousand years before Christ, the Egyptians were building increasingly elaborate funeral monuments, ranging from simple burial mounds to pyramids. Reserved for royalty, noblemen and wealthy citizens, the complexity of some of these monuments continue to fascinate us today.

In the fourth century B.C. in Persia, Queen Artemisia II had 100,000 slaves erect a magnificent tomb 140 feet high and 111 feet in circumference to honor her dead husband, King Maussollos. This splendid monument, now called a mausoleum, was named one of the Seven Wonders of the World by the Ancients.

However, the taste for such imposing monuments slowly disappeared, to be replaced by more modest tombs.  In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a new trend took hold in the United States: the development of cemeteries in the form of vast green parks accentuated with imposing funeral monuments created by renowned sculptors.