Austin Allen Mausoleum at Mount Hope Cemetery

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Mount Hope Cemetery, 3700 N. Rangeline Road

The Austin Allen Mausoleum is one of nine architecturally distinctive family mausoleums at Mount Hope Cemetery. Constructed around 1917, it belongs to the cemetery’s early twentieth-century group of private monuments and reflects the Egyptian Revival style often chosen for buildings associated with permanence, protection, and rebirth.

The façade is crowned by a solar disk between falcon wings, associated with the sun god Re and rebirth. Vulture wings, a circular sun relief, and flanking cobras combine protection, life, and death symbolism. Solid bronze entrance doors and a colorful Egyptian-inspired art-glass window enrich the interior. A memorial resolution from the Kansas City Chapter of the American Institute of Architects honors Allen inside the mausoleum.

Austin S. Allen came to Joplin as a child, graduated from Joplin High School, and earned an architecture degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1902. After work in New York and study in Paris, he opened his Joplin practice in 1905. His designs helped define the city’s built environment, including the Olivia Apartments, Newman Building, Joplin High School, St. Peter’s Catholic Church, and United Hebrew Congregation. Allen died of typhoid fever in 1917 at only thirty-six. Several members of the Allen family are interred here. The cemetery grounds are accessible, but mausoleum interiors are generally available only during authorized tours.

Above Allen’s name, Egyptian Revival elements include vulture wings symbolizing protection and maternal care, a circular relief representing the sun, and twin cobras symbolizing death. The art-glass window is on the back wall. These architectural descriptions draw on excerpts from the Joplin History & Mineral Museum calendar published in 2021.

The Allen Family

Austin married Belle Taylor and the couple had three children. Family members interred in the mausoleum are listed in the earlier research as Austin S. Allen (March 3, 1917), Walter Scott Estes (February 12, 1926), Linda McOwen Allen (June 6, 1926), Whitby J. Allen (May 22, 1930), and Austin Allen Jr. (December 2, 1940).

Austin’s wife, Belle Taylor Allen (1887–1921), died several years after Austin’s untimely death. She and her young children were residing in Los Angeles, California, with her aunt and uncle at the time of her death. It is believed that she died from heart disease. After being cremated in California, her brother Wilkins Taylor picked up her ashes in a container. From that point, the whereabouts of her ashes is unknown. According to Mount Hope Cemetery officials, Mrs. Allen’s ashes are not in the mausoleum.

Mausoleum Photographs

Explore further

• The Austin Allen House & Virtual Tour of His Designs
• Austin Allen, the Architect Remembered