Alexander Timothy Brown

November 21, 1854 – January 31, 1929

Mary Lillian Seamans Brown

August 3, 1863 – June 22, 1932

The Brown Family Mausoleum in the Oakwood Cemetery in Syracuse, New York, is an Art Deco masterpiece.  Art Deco is a design movement from the 1920s that marked a break from the fluid and flowing Art Nouveau designs of the 1890s.  The term ‘Art Deco’ is derived from the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, an exhibition of artists that showed their work in Paris in 1925.   Arts Décoratifs was eventually truncated to Art Deco.

The Brown Family Mausoleum was constructed with white granite, and exhibits the clean, straight lines characteristic of the Art Deco designs from the 1920s. This mausoleum was modelled to look like a skyscraper, partly achieved with the vertical lines and by its soaring height of 25 feet.  The exterior of the mausoleum is white granite, but the interior is a stark contrast constructed of polished black marble.

The inventor, Alexander Brown and his wife are buried within the mausoleum.  Brown was a serial inventor with over 150 patents to his name in a wide variety of areas which included the L.C. Smith Shotgun, the Smith Premier full-keyboard upstrike typewriter, as well as various patents for the automatic telephone and different automative parts.  In addition to his inventions, Brown was president of the Franklin Automotive Company and Director of the First Trust and Deposit Company. 

With all of his inventions and creations, one of his most lastly designs was the design for his own mausoleum!