I can’t count the number of times I’ve driven past the Grove Street Cemetery Gates (its actual name is The New Haven Burial Ground) in New Haven.
The gates, done in Egyptian revival style, were designed by New Haven’s own Henry Austin, “The father of American Architecture”
Austin probably designed the gates after the temple Esna North (Five miles south of Luxor on the east bank of the Nile River) and it’s well worth pulling roadside for a moment to take in the entire structure with its a winged sun-disk and two pendant cobras and its Biblical quote “The dead shall be raised”
Henry Austin (December 4, 1804 – December 17, 1891)
He was born in Hamden and learned the carpenter's trade as an apprentice and became a prolific architect based in New Haven.
In his fifty-year career designed an astounding number of building in both New Haven and Connecticut. Locally, he designed the Trinity Episcopal church in Seymour in 1858.
While I was researching Henry Austin the architect, I came across Henry Austin (1782–1852) promoter, lawyer, and land broker also from New Haven. (Below)
At the age of twelve, he sailed to China as a cabin boy and, on returning, found that his father's death had left him partly responsible for the family.
He had quit the sea and in 1805 worked in a number of businesses in Elm City but wrote: "Scarce a dollar that has gone out of my hands has returned to me."
In 1824 his cousin Stephen F. Austin, later known as the Father of Texas, urged him to come to Texas.
Stephan Austin.
Henry Austin tried and failed at a series of business in northern Mexico. He eventually traveled up the Brazos to Brazoria in 1830 and got a massive land grant to build a colony. The colony never really panned out, but Henry Austin is noted in Texas history as a promoter, lawyer, land broker and a politician.