Cemetery Resources Aid Massachusetts Historical Commission’ s Research
By David Russo, Watertown Historical Commission
In 2013, I was contacted by an intern at the Massachusetts Historical Commission( MHC), who was following up on an old inventory done on Mount Auburn in the mid-1970s. It listed the familiar monuments and buildings that we often read about in these pages and elsewhere. MHC was interested in learning the locations of each and whether they still existed.
Fairly quickly, I was able to answer the questions: of the 23 items on the MHC list, 22 were extant( only the Rest House was demolished), and I recorded the location of each resource on a Cemetery map. But the request spurred the idea of a bigger project: we needed complete inventories of these and other resources within the Cemetery that comprehensively and articulately detailed their significance and documented it for perpetuity. With MHC’ s blessing, this project was born.
The task of every town’ s Historical Commission is to determine what historic resources exist in its community, to advocate for those resources, and to make them more available to the community. The MHC provides inventory forms that allow users to document landscapes, objects, and structures in a systematic, organized way. Information starts with the year of construction, the architect or maker, materials used, alterations, a design assessment, and a narrative of its history. But that’ s just the beginning. The forms are very broad and extensive, and require intensive research to get the information and interpretations just right. The bonus, though, is that the forms themselves, once completed, become an important resource that the MHC and the public can access in perpetuity.
At the start of the project, Meg Winslow, Curator of Historical Collections at Mount Auburn, always an insightful and grounding influence, subtly cautioned that I consider starting with a smaller subset of monuments( maybe mausoleums?) and then consider moving on to others. Despite this sound advice, a project that began with 23 resources soon ballooned to 234. These included all manner of monuments, mausoleums, landscapes, and buildings within the Cemetery that collectively capture its significance. I chose the large and the small, the very old and the very new, and the first burial and the more recent.
For landscapes, I chose Harvard Hill for its obvious significance, inventorying every monument on it( 44!) and the lot itself as a landscape. Other significant landscapes that I included were Consecration Dell, Hazel Dell, Asa Gray Garden, Auburn Lake, and Halcyon Garden. Each has a related yet markedly different story to tell. I learned that the lowest point in the Cemetery is not Consecration Dell but Auburn Lake at nine feet above sea level. The highest point is Mount Auburn Hill at 125 feet, the third highest point in Watertown. Adding Washington Tower’ s 62 feet, those that climb the tower stand a full 187 feet in altitude.
I found some surprises in my research on significant monuments. I learned that the Sawyer monument on Larch
8 | Sweet Auburn