Mount Auburn near the Charles
Our earliest visit to Mount Auburn Cemetery was on a beautiful spring day when the trees had burst into bloom – pink, yellow, crimson, and white, with the sun illuminating the new green of the trees. We walked with our four-month-old son in his stroller along winding lanes past intricately carved monuments, bordered by ponds and pathways with botanical names like Larch Avenue and Violet Path.
Years later, on an autumn day, my husband and I climbed the stairs to the top of the granite Washington Tower with its view of Boston and beyond and then paid our respects at the base of Mary Baker Eddy’s white columned Neoclassical memorial by Halcyon Lake.
Sadly, on a cold grey November day some years later, I attended the memorial service for a dear friend in the Story Chapel near the entrance of the cemetery where it opens onto Mount Auburn Street.
Then one day in spring, I was at Mount Auburn with another friend to sit by one of the ponds and paint with watercolors while bullfrogs bellowed back and forth. This beautifully landscaped cemetery welcomes the living to enjoy nature in a reflective setting and is a favorite of bird watchers. Plant-lovers will find labels on many of the trees and flowers.
The Mount Auburn Cemetery, a place of reflection and enjoyment in any season, is a short distance from the Charles River and the site of Sir Richard’s Landing described in a previous blog entry, on hilly land that was once part of the Stone family’s farmland at the Cambridge-Watertown border, the wooded areas frequented by young men seeking respite from their studies at Harvard College and looking for love and companionship among the young women who also ventured there. The name “Mount Auburn” derived from the phrase “Sweet Auburn” that had first appeared in Oliver Goldsmith’s 1770 poem “The Deserted Village,” a paen to nature and its palliative effects while deploring the onslaught of factories and their effects on people’s lives, and a century later, in a romantic poem by a Miss Orne called “Sweet Auburn” about this sylvan meeting place. Today, the publication “Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn” is available online at the Mount Auburn Cemetery website.*
After many years of burying deceased family members in church graveyards, separate denominational cemeteries would become the new norm. The crowded remains of the deceased were a source of concern for health reasons, one belief being that the decaying bodies emitted unhealthy vapors, all this before the discovery of germs, the invention of the microscope to study bacteria, and the use of antiseptic practices for surgery later in the nineteenth century. Medical doctor Jacob Bigelow was one of the earliest to promote the establishment of rural cemeteries safely away from population centers and organized a group of civic leaders in the Boston area to bring about his vision (“cemetery” derives from a Greek word meaning “resting place”).
As Puritan ideas and attitudes had receded and the Romanticism of the late eighteenth century praised a return to a more natural existence against the backdrop of the industrial revolution, this movement would be reflected in the engravings of plants and similar natural designs on the headstones that would be selected for the burial sites at the Mount Auburn and the other cemeteries that followed it, replacing the images of grim skeletons and death heads on the gray slate headstones in graveyards.
With the leadership of Dr. Bigelow, the garden cemetery, modeled after the Pere LaChais Cemetery in Paris, was established in 1831. The newly formed Massachusetts Horticultural Society designed Mount Auburn Cemetery with its rolling hills and winding pathways, the first of its kind in the country and a model for cemeteries throughout the country and for urban parks, at the same time inspiring the development of landscape architecture. Highlights include the Gothic revival style Washington Tower and the Bigelow Chapel both constructed from Quincy granite and the Egyptian revival gate to the cemetery created to inspire reflection on the past.
After its completion, Supreme Court Justice and Harvard professor Joseph Story became the first president of this nondenominational cemetery, officiating at its consecration ceremony on September 24, 1831. Over the years, the Mount Auburn has become a resting place for several notables, from poets and scholars Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Ralph Waldo Emerson to architect Buckminster Fuller, as well as a number of civic leaders. It is now a National Historical Landmark.
Currently, a multi-year project is in progress to restore the impressive Egyptian gateway and adjoining iron fencing at the entrance to Mount Auburn Cemetery. Also, when the Greenough Greenway along the Charles River is completed, a path will wind through Mount Auburn in the direction of Fresh Pond in Cambridge
Sarah Taylor’s article in the publication describes the history of Mount Auburn in greater detail: http://www.neh.gov/humanities/2010/marchapril/feature/sweet-auburn.”Sweet Auburn.”Humanities. March/April 2010, Vol. 31, No. 2.
Another source:
Gozzoldi, Mary Isabella. “Gerry’s Landing and Its Neighborhood.” 1925. Submitted to the Cambridge Historical Society in 20123. cambridgehistoricalsociety.org.
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