Alexander McDonald Company

For much of the first half of the last century, the monumental works of Alexander McDonald Company were located just outside the gate of Riverview Cemetery, next door to the old superintendent’s house and office, and it was here that its many artisans and carvers turned out all manner of memorialization in stone from simple headstones to elaborate monuments for the city’s burgeoning population.

The office and display of Alexander McDonald Company
on Centre Street and stone-yard on Second Street as they appeared in 1921

Alexander McDonald was born April 28, 1829, in Aberdeen, Scotland, and emigrated to the United States in 1852. Arriving in New York City, he made his way to Albany, N.Y., and finally to Cambridge, Mass., where in 1856 he established a monumental firm bearing his name opposite the entrance to Mount Auburn Cemetery. After retiring in 1887, his son Frank R. McDonald took over the day-to-day operations and the firm continued as Alexander McDonald and Son.

The Cambridge of Eighteen Hundred and Ninety-Six: The City and Its Industries Fifty Years After Its Incorporation (Gilman 1896) notes “the business has been confined principally to fine monumental work from all kinds of marble and granite” and as a consequence “some of the finest monuments, headstones, tablets, and carved work have been made here, and erected in Mount Auburn and other prominent cemeteries in the United States.”

Frank passed away on November 15, 1905, following surgery, and nearly two months later on January 11, 1906, Alexander passed away after a long illness of bronchial pneumonia. They were interred in the family plot at Mount Auburn Cemetery while the firm continued for a number of years under the proprietorship of Patrick Brooks, a longtime worker, and still later his son William F. Brooks.

So how did this firm come to have a presence in the Garden State?

There were actually two branch offices incorporated in New Jersey: Alexander McDonald Company adjoining Riverview Cemetery in Trenton on December 8, 1898, and Alexander McDonald Granite Company adjoining Cedar Lawn Cemetery in Paterson on February 2, 1903.

Under the management of Alfred R. Baxter, the Trenton office garnered much acclaim for its execution of the Mercer County Soldiers and Sailors Monument. Proposed for the grounds of the Mercer County Courthouse and then the grounds of Trenton’s City Hall, it was eventually agreed to site the Civil War monument in the city’s Cadwalader Park where it stands today on the hill just inside the entrance. Baxter was the architect and builder, and Charles R. Owen was the designer.

The 50-foot-high monument was dedicated on June 19, 1909, before several thousand citizens gathered for the unveiling.

Postcard view of the model for the
Mercer County Soldiers and Sailors Monument
Author’s collection

Born in Quincy, Mass., on January 6, 1870, Baxter died on January 4, 1949, at his home in Trenton following years of declining health, and was laid to rest in Quincy’s Mount Wollaston Cemetery. During his time at the helm of Alexander McDonald Company, he boasted an ever-growing list of prominent families for whom the firm had done work, and many of those families chose rather impressive monuments for their plots here in Riverview Cemetery.