Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn A Dynamic and Evolving Landscape | Page 24

Stories Behind the Stones:
The Rocks from which Stones are Made
By Robin Ray

In English, “rock” is geochemical material that lies in its natural state; it becomes “stone” when a human chooses, moves,
or changes it. Cemeteries are full of stones that have been shaped to commemorate the dead. But there are some at Mount
Auburn whose significance lies in the rock from which the stone was made.

Fanny Parnell Monument,
Lot 167 Violet Path.

Gustavus A. Jasper Monument,
Lot 3913 Fern Path.

The Parnell family were landowners in Avondale, County
Wicklow, Ireland. Despite membership in the Anglo-Irish
Protestant ruling class, Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–1891)
and his sister Fanny Parnell (1848–1882) became fervent
Irish nationalists, campaigning for economic justice and
Home Rule. Fanny’s poem “Hold the Harvest” (1880)
became the unofficial anthem of the Irish cause.
Fanny died suddenly at age 33 while in the United
States, and it was decided to bury her at Mount Auburn
with her mother’s kin, the
Tudor family. The burial took
place on 19 October 1882,
but, perhaps fearing political
vandalism, her grave bore no
marker.
Nine years later, Charles
Parnell died in Ireland.
He was buried in Dublin’s
Glasnevin Cemetery atop
a mass grave of cholera
victims, in order to discourage desecration. Marking his
grave is an immense boulder
of Wicklow Granite, the rock
that underlies the Parnell
home in Avondale, marked
simply “PARNELL”. The
granite is distinctive in having
tiny red garnets in its matrix.
In the late 20th century, the
Parnell Society of Ireland
became aware that there was
no memorial at Fanny’s grave.
They commissioned a marker
of Wicklow Granite, echoing Charles’s monument in
Dublin. This stone, complete
with tiny garnets, was installed at Mount Auburn in 2000, bringing a bit of Fanny’s
beloved Ireland to her resting place.

Born in Bremen, Germany, Gustavus A. Jasper (1834–1884)
immigrated to the United States as a youth and eventually
flourished in the sugar business. Jasper and his family settled
on Bowdoin Street in Dorchester, and they were living
there, amid outcrops and informal quarries of Roxbury
Puddingstone, when Gustavus died at age 50.
The Puddingstone is an ancient conglomerate (over
600 million years old) consisting of rounded cobbles and
pebbles of various rock types cemented together with
gray-green mud. It crops out
naturally in southern parts of
the Boston Basin: Roxbury,
Dorchester, Brookline, and as
far south as Milton. It was extensively quarried for use in
foundations and facing stones
and became a recognizable
symbol of Boston itself. In
1886, a 20-ton monument of
Puddingstone was erected at
Gettysburg to honor the 20th
Massachusetts Infantry—the
“Harvard Regiment.”
Perhaps with this symbolism in mind, the family of
Gustavus’s daughter Fannie
Jasper Dodd (1870–1915)
commissioned a boulder
of Puddingstone to mark
the family grave at Mount
Auburn. The Jasper family may have had roots in
Germany, but it was now
anchored in the Boston Basin.

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