3 minute read
WHAT A SITE
Tillinghast, who worked with stained glass artists Louis Comfort Ti any and John La Farge, also designed several windows at St. Stephen’s Parish and two windows at First Church of Christ, Congregational, both in Pittsfield.
Even without entering the space, I can feel the presence and energy it exudes; if the exterior of the tomb is monumental and commanding, its interior is an inviting sanctuary, more like a place of worship than of somber reflection.
Completed in 1893, this amazing structure was built for Berkshire local and Gilded Age industrialist Gordon McKay (1821-1903). McKay, who spent much of his life in Pittsfield, is a character whose story captures the zeitgeist of the Industrial Revolution and its resonance in Berkshire County. Trained as an engineer, he left the Berkshires at 22 to work as a corpsman for the Boston & Albany Railroad, and subsequently an engineer on the Erie Canal. Years later, he returned to Pittsfield and established a repair shop for paper and cotton milling machines.
In 1859, McKay took a job in Lawrence, managing the Lawrence Machine Shop. This is where he crossed paths with fellow industrialist and inventor Lyman R. Blake, who had recently invented a shoesole sewing machine. McKay, ever-interested in new technologies, bought the patent for the machine and worked to improve its functionality and accuracy. Nearly three years later, in May 1862, McKay’s patent for the updated sewing machine was accepted.
Soon, McKay was manufacturing tens of thousands of boots a month, and on his way to building a fortune.
With the Civil War came a greater-than-ever need for boots among the Union Army. McKay saw a huge opportunity for profit and pounced on it. Just a few months later, with his operation in full swing, McKay was manufacturing tens of thousands of boots for government contracts. After the war, McKay kept his business in the black by leasing his machines to shoe manufacturers across New England, earning royalties for each pair made.
More than a decade before his death, McKay retained artist and designer Mary Elizabeth Tillinghast of New York to develop a design for what would eventually become the family tomb. Choosing Tillinghast as the designer for this particular project was not an obvious choice. Although regionally established as an accomplished glasswork artist, having worked for (and eventually, with) some of the century’s most recognizable names in stained glass, Louis Tiffany and John LaFarge, she had never designed a building or a tomb.
It is not clear whether McKay approached Tillinghast with a particular architectural style in mind for the mausoleum. Perhaps McKay had seen — or read about — Tillinghast’s glasswork exhibit at the 1893 Chicago World Fair for the glasswork in the exhibit would be installed in McKay’s tomb after the exhibition closed.
Nevertheless, whether it was at
The mausoleum’s mosaic scenes depict the six figures – invention, industry, patience, justice, charity and e cacy.
McKay’s request or Tillinghast’s invention, the (mostly) Byzantine-style mausoleum was completed in October 1893, in honor of McKay’s father, Samuel M. McKay. In addition to Gordon and his father, the tomb contains the remains of McKay’s mother, Katherine, and his two older brothers, Samuel and Eustace.
At once beautiful and brutal, serene and severe, the McKay Mausoleum is a perfect metaphor for the life it is meant to memorialize — sophisticated, but not opulent; decorated, but not overly adorned. It embodies the special duality of a gravesite, vibrating between the frequencies of past and present, of somber remembrance and elegant preservation.
And, however out of place the tomb may at first seem among its more modest neighbors in the Pittsfield Cemetery, the monument tells a very local story of industry and ingenuity, reflecting the unique worldliness that was the object of many in the Gilded Age and reminding us of connections between Berkshire County history and world history. ■
Tristan Whalen, a student at Williams College and a Western Massachusetts native, writes about architecture, design and the built world.
