Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn A Dynamic and Evolving Landscape | Page 4

Henry A. S. Dearborn:
Visionary Designer of Mount Auburn Cemetery
By Melissa Banta, Historical Collections Consultant

Oxnard monument, Lot 364. Engraving by James Smillie.

“There has Horticulture established her temple…There will repose the ashes
of the humble, and exalted, in the silent and sacred Garden of the Dead,
until summoned to those of eternal life, in realms beyond the skies.”1
—Henry A. S. Dearborn, 1831
In 1831, the Massachusetts
time envisioning a picturesque landscape
Horticultural Society (MHS) purchased
in which to bury and commemorate the
72 acres of wooded terrain bordering
dead. A botanist, physician, and Harvard
on Cambridge and Watertown for
professor with an ardent interest in
the development of what would be
design and architecture, Bigelow helped
America’s first rural cemetery. The
organize the committee that would lay
newly formed MHS bought the land
out the grounds and formalize a plan
from one of its members, George
for Mount Auburn.3 Acting as chairman
Watson Brimmer, who planted what
of the committee was General Henry
he had originally envisioned as his own
A. S. Dearborn, a military commander,
estate with evergreens and ornamental
politician, author, horticulturalist, and
trees. Brimmer offered to sell his
President of the MHS.
property to the MHS at cost so that the
Dearborn brought in a young civil enextraordinarily beautiful site and its trees
gineer, Alexander Wadsworth, to survey
could be preserved.2
the site and to produce a topographical
At the time, Jacob Bigelow, Secretary
plan for Mount Auburn in 1831. His
of the MHS and one of the founders of
beautifully detailed plan illustrates the
Henry A. S. Dearborn, J A.J.Wilcox,
lithograph.
Mount Auburn Cemetery, was actively
natural features left behind by successive
engaged in addressing the problem of
epochs of glaciation—seven prominent
overcrowded burial grounds in Boston and at the same
hills made of moraine and outwash deposits, deep dales
Dearborn in New England Farmer and Horticultural Journal, vol. X, no. 12 (5
October 1831): 91.

1

Horticulturalists appreciated George Brimmer’s beneficence at a time when land along the
Charles River and the nearby towns of Waltham and Watertown was increasingly developed
for factory space.

2

3

2 | Sweet Auburn

Proceedings of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, 1 October 1831.