MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Trenton was the fiftieth largest city in the nation at the turn of the last century. In 1911, reflecting its immense industrial base, a wooden sign on a bridge over the Delaware River between Pennsylvania and New Jersey proclaimed “The World Takes, Trenton Makes.” Six years later, in 1917, the phrases were reversed when it was replaced with an electric sign that read “Trenton Makes, The World Takes.”

Riverview Cemetery, founded in 1858 and significantly expanded in 1887, became the favored resting place for many of the city’s industrialists, many of whom chose elaborate monuments for their plots.

This illustrated paper will examine, among others, the Egyptian Revival architecture of the Bowman mausoleum just inside the cemetery gate; the Lee mausoleum, whose bronze door features a mourning figure by American sculptor Maxfield Keck; the Sickel monument, a replica of the sarcophogus of Roman consul Scipio Barbatus; the Tattersall monument, an adaptation of the Iona Cross in Iona, Scotland; and even a small white bronze monument with a motif adapted from the “The Last Voyage,” a work of British sculptor F.M. Miller.