![]() ![]() Mount Auburn is likely the only cemetery in America to have such in-house artists, Harvey says. Views of Harvard and beyond from the top of Washington Tower The Friends of Mount Auburn Cemetery, a nonprofit conservation group, has also begun an artist-in-residence program. Emily Dickinson wrote about her visit in 1846, and local wildlife artist Clare Walker Leslie often sketches there. The landscape has always inspired writers and artists. Her memorial, a white granite neoclassical temple on the edge of Halcyon Lake, was inspired by the Tower of the Winds in Athens, and required 34 marble carvers to complete in 1917. Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy follows close behind. 1859, “still reigns supreme as a well-known and beloved resident” who attracts visitors, according to Bree Harvey, vice president of cemetery and visitor services. ’85, and the essayist, poet, and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes, A.B. The more than 98,000 interees include social reformer Dorothea Dix, artist Winslow Homer, art patron Isabella Stewart Gardner, behaviorist B.F. Many come to pay tribute to their loved ones, or to the luminaries buried there. Today, this National Historic Landmark is the top Cambridge attraction on TripAdvisor, Winslow says, and attracts about 250,000 visitors annually. By the 1840s, other rural garden cemeteries had sprouted up, and Mount Auburn rivaled Mount Vernon and Niagara Falls as a tourist destination. 1790, who would become Harvard’s president) envisioned a tranquil landscape with ornate gardens, sculptures, funerary art, grand monuments, lakes, and exotic trees and plants.Īs Bigelow wrote in A History of Mount Auburn, it was to be a sacred place, where “nature is permitted to take its course, when the dead are committed to the earth under the open sky, to become earthly and peacefully blended with their original dust…where the harmonious and ever-changing face of nature reminds us, by its resuscitating influences, that to die is but to live again.” To receive curated picks of what to eat, experience, and explore in and around Cambridge from the editors of Harvard Magazine follow Harvard Squared. The men and their supporters (including then-Boston mayor Josiah Quincy III, A.B. They seized the chance to develop an expansive “cemetery”-they were also the first to use that word, derived from the Greek “place of sleep,” Winslow adds, instead of “graveyard”-on a hilly rural property that would double as a place where people could escape the rising congestion of urban life. 1806, were leaders of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. Dearborn and physician, botanist, and Harvard professor Jacob Bigelow, A.B. Yet Mount Auburn’s principal founders, Henry A.S. Boston’s population, spurred by increasing industrialization, had grown enormously by 1825, and even its cemeteries were overcrowded, she explains: “They were burying so many bodies that you might come upon bones and coffins sticking out of the ground.” Established in 1831, Mount Auburn Cemetery was at once a practical solution to Boston’s burial-ground crisis, and “the first designed landscape open to the public in North America,” says Mount Auburn’s curator of historical collections Meg Winslow. “Mount Auburn is just a very beautiful place to be in the spring.” “The flowering trees and shrubbery have all the insects, which are what the birds are looking for,” Trimble notes, and lots of crevices for nesting. Each year, the cemetery’s greenhouses also grow upwards of 32,000 annuals for planting in ornamental beds and within family plots. There are approximately 18,000 accessioned plants on the grounds, of which about 5,000 are trees, including 1,500 different conifers. May brings flowering dogwoods, azaleas, and rhododendrons, along with weigela, mountain laurel, and Japanese snowbell. Rarer, he adds, are sightings of petite, jittery palm warblers, bay-breasted warblers, yellow-rumped warblers: “On a good day you can hear over 20 different species.”īird walks, formal and informal, occur almost every morning during migration season, but other visitors are drawn throughout the day to the cemetery’s historic arboretum and stunning array of plant life, especially as it’s emerging from a long, bleak winter. ![]() He’s rambled through the cemetery since he was a boy, and currently leads bird walks on Thursday mornings through May 18. All of them are fairly common, says Jeremiah Trimble, assistant curator in the ornithology department at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Nestled in the arms of a copy of Lorenzo Bartolini's 1833 statue, Trust in God ![]()
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