Founded in 1831 as "America's first garden cemetery", Mount Auburn Cemetery is an Elysium where, traditionally, chaste classical monuments were set in rolling landscaped terrain. This 174 acre (70 ha) cemetery is important both for its historical aspects and for its role as a fine arboretum. It is located at the corner of Mount Auburn and Brattle Streets near Fresh Pond at the western end of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is adjacent to the Cambridge City Cemetery and Sand Banks Cemetery.
Mount Auburn Cemetery was inspired by Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, and is credited as the beginning of the American public parks and gardens movement. It forms the link between Capability Brown's English landscape gardens , and Frederick Law Olmsted's Central Park in New York (1850s) and Forest Lawn in Glendale, California (1917).
Mount Auburn is also credited with the first use of the word cemetery in English. The word stems from the Greek for "sleeping place" and had long been used in Romance languages. Mount Auburn is well known for its tranquil atmosphere and accepting attitude towards death. Many of the more traditional monuments feature poppy flowers, symbols of blissful sleep.
More than 80,000 persons are buried in the cemetery, and number of historically significant people have been interred here over the last 175 years, particularly members of the Boston elite associated with Harvard University as well as a number of prominent Unitarians. However, the cemetery is nondenominational and continues to make space available for new plots. The area is well known for its beautiful environs and is a favorite location for Cambridge bird-watchers. Guided tours of the cemetery's historic, artistic, and horticultural points of interest are also available.
Mount Auburn's superb collection of over 5,500 trees includes nearly 700 species and varieties. Thousands of very well-kept shrubs and herbaceous plants weave through the cemetery's hills, ponds, woodlands, and clearings. The cemetery contains more than 10 miles (17 km) of roads and many paths. Landscaping styles range from Victorian-era plantings to contemporary gardens, from natural woodlands to formal ornamental gardens, and from sweeping vistas through majestic trees to small enclosed spaces. Many trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plans are tagged with botanic labels containing their scientific and common names.
Notable persons interred at Mount Auburn
- Louis Agassiz
- Elizabeth Cary Agassiz (1822-1907), scientist, author
- Nathaniel Bowditch (1773-1838), mathematician, seaman
- Phillips Brooks (1835-1893), American Episcopal bishop
- William Brewster
- George Cabot
- Charlotte Cushman (1816-1876), actress
- Dorothea Dix
- Mary Baker Eddy
- Harold "Doc" Edgerton
- Charles Eliot (1834-1926), landscape architect
- Fannie Farmer (1857-1915), cookbook author
- Buckminster Fuller
- Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924), art collector, museum founder
- Charles Dana Gibson, (1867-1944), illustrator
- Horatio Greenough
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-1894), physician/author
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Supreme Court Justice
- Winslow Homer
- Julia Ward Howe, activist, poet
- Edwin Land
- Henry Cabot Lodge
- Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- Amy Lowell
- James Russell Lowell
- Bernard Malamud
- Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908), scholar and author
- Owen figure-skating family:
- Maribel Vinson-Owen (1911-1961), 9 time U.S. skating champion and coach
- Maribel Y. Owen (1940-1961), U.S. pairs figure skating champion
- Laurence Owen (1944-1961), U.S. ladies skating champion
- Josiah Quincy
- Anne Revere (1903-1990), actress
- B. F. Skinner
- Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, grandfather of a more famous Colonel Robert Gould Shaw
- Charles Sumner
- Frank William Taussig (1859-1940), economist
- Robert Charles Winthrop
See also
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