Sprankle

Sprankle Mausoleum is late XIXth century neo-Gothic. They really don't build them like this anymore. It has five crocketted spires, ususally associated with churches. It has a plankway to the door. It has some deterioration. The original roofing is gone, and has been replaced by asphalt (tar) shingles.

Sprankle sounds like a beer baron, but no, close. Rudolph Sprankle *1817, 1898†, and his son James Rudolph Sprankle *1843, 1904† were grain merchants, and later millers and bankers. First using the canals, and then the trains, became the biggest shippers of grain to the Atlantic coast. First the path was Cleveland to Chillicothe to Indianapolis. The son's first wife was a Grasselli, whose father owned Grasselli Chemical which made sulphuric acid for Standard Oil. There was great money in that stink. These were millionaires on Cleveland's Millionaires' Row (Euclid Avenue).

And more Sprankles were added to the building. But the 1970s was a period of decay in Cleveland. Woodland Cemetery's buildings were broken in, items removed, bones tossed out, and bums holing up in the buildings. Later the city cemented and blocked the entrances.