Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Connecting the Present with the Past | Page 4

Connecting the Present
With The Past
By Gus Fraser
Vice President of Preservation & Facilities
I
n September 1830, Zebedee Cook,
Jr., lauded the benefits of creating
a cemetery near Boston, on the
model of Père Lachaise in Paris, “where the
hand of the designer and horticulturalist
would adorn the solemn paths and avenues
displaying monuments to the dead.” Such a
cemetery of substantial monuments,
observed landscape designer Henry
A. S. Dearborn, would assure that
“the great deeds” of civic leaders
“might be perpetuated and their
memories cherished by succeeding
generations.” The sentiments
of these two early supporters of
Mount Auburn capture at once
the enthusiasm for a designed
landscape that can move and
inspire, and the desire to record the
history of the young nation and its
2
citizens in commemorative art and sculpture.
Nature and art, reflecting the present through
the work of the horticulturalist and the
sculptor, combined to create a picturesque
landscape of beauty that would endure for
generations to come.
Mount Auburn has remained true to the
vision of its founders as each successive
generation has shaped the landscape and
placed monuments that reveal changing
tastes in cemetery, garden, and memorial
design. The result is a layered history that
can be read in the layout of the roads and
paths, in the plants and trees, and in the
ornamentation of the monuments. The
changing monuments, and the stories they
tell, trace the history of the country through
war, industrialization, urbanization, and
immigration. Preserving that history is
critical to maintaining our Cemetery as