Mount Auburn Cemetery
2013 Fi el db o ok Cov er St or y
Cover Photograph courtesy of
Mount Auburn Cemetery.
Mount Auburn Cemetery occupies a
175-acre site near the Charles River on
the Cambridge-Watertown border in
Massachusetts. Founded in 1831 as the
nation’s first garden or “rural” cemetery,
Mount Auburn combines the beauty of
nature with the arts of sculpture and
architecture to create a place of comfort
and inspiration. As the first large-scale
designed landscape open to the public
in North America, Mount Auburn began
the rural cemetery movement out of
which grew America’s public parks. The
Cemetery’s 175 acres are recognized
as a world-renowned arboretum and
botanical garden, urban oasis, wildlife
sanctuary, and important birding site.
Designated a National Historic Landmark, Mount Auburn remains an active,
non-sectarian cemetery, open to all.
Founded by members of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, the Cemetery’s
original 72 acres were laid out according
to 18th-century English ideals of a
domesticated landscape, showing only
subtle manipulation by the hand of
man. While it has seen great changes,
Henry A. S. Dearborn’s original landscape design is largely intact, and its historical integrity and origins are evident
to today’s visitors. Successive generations
of landscape architects, including Ernest
W. Bowditch, Lawrence Caldwell, Arthur
Shurcliff, Sidney Shurcliff, the Olmsted
Brothers, Fletcher Steele, Julie Moir
Messervy, Halvorson Design Partnership,
and Reed Hilderbrand, have added discernible layers to the original landscape,
resulting in a complex tapestry that
reveals the ideals and values of nearly
two centuries.
Mount Auburn Cemetery preserves a remarkably illustrative
chronicle of American landscape design, attitudes toward death
and commemoration, aesthetic and spiritual values, material
culture and changing technology. Today Mount Auburn
continues its original purpose of being a natural setting for the
commemoration of the dead and inspiration for the living, and
welcomes more than 200,000 visitors a year.
Learn more about Mount Auburn Cemetery at
www.mountauburn.org.
Asa Gray Garden, by Arthur C. Haskell, 1938. First landscaped in the 1850s, the
design of Asa Gray Garden, just inside Mount Auburn’s entrance, has evolved
through the years to reflect changing tastes in landscape design. This design
from the 1930s reflects the vision of landscape architects Lawrence Caldwell
and Sidney Shurcliff. Today, the design of this garden has been simplified, in
keeping with the Cemetery’s current focus on sustainable and low-maintenance landscapes.
2013 Boston Society of Landscape Architects Fieldbook
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