Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Connecting the Present with the Past | Page 6

Significant
Monument
Preservation
By Jenny Gilbert
Director of Institutional Advancement
With content from
The Art of Commemoration and America’s First Rural Cemetery
by Melissa Banta
Mount Auburn Cemetery Curatorial Consultant
and Meg Winslow
Curator of Historical Collections
Detail of putto, Whitney Monument. ©Greg Heins, 2014.
4
O
ne of the key visual characteristics of Mount
Auburn Cemetery is the intentional integration
of commemorative art within the landscape.
Consistent with their civic and aesthetic goals, the Bostonians
who founded the Cemetery worked to make it “as remarkable
for the treasures of art collected there as for its scenery.”
Before there were public art museums, visitors came to
Mount Auburn to look at the art of the funerary sculptor and
monument carver. Today, the Cemetery continues to serve as
an outdoor museum in which landscapes of different styles
include memorials representing diverse aspects of American
cemetery design and cultural traditions. Among the more
than 45,000 monuments at Mount Auburn are a number of
highly significant, character-defining works of nineteenth-
century funerary art that are at risk of permanent loss due to
exposure to our fluctuating climate. Cyclical maintenance and
conservation of these monuments not only preserves their
individual designs and meaning within the landscape but also
reflects the national taste and aspirations of Bostonians in that
age.
Mount Auburn’s project to preserve our thirty most
significant outdoor funerary monuments began in 2013 with
funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services
(MA-30-13-0533-13), and included research and digitization of
historical records, cataloguing, and documentary photography.
The project also included conditions assessments and
treatment recommendations for each of the thirty monuments
by conservators at Daedalus Fine Art, Inc. These assessments
provided a baseline for future preservation work and laid
the groundwork for fundraising for eventual conservation
treatment.
In 2014, the Friends of Mount Auburn Cemetery
successfully raised funds for the highest priority project,
conservation and stabilization of American sculptor Thomas
Crawford’s 1847 monument created in memory of naturalist
and philanthropist Amos Binney. The grand marble sculpture
is one of the most sophisticated and complex funerary
monuments in the country and has been designated a
National Treasure. The grant-funded conditions assessments
contributed to the Cemetery’s decision to conserve two
additional monuments in 2015—the Magoun and Harnden
Monuments—and to raise funds for conservation of the
Coppenhagen Monument in 2016. With the support of an
energetic Unitarian Universalist fundraising campaign, we
completed conservation of the Channing Monument in 2017.
Conservation of the Appleton and Wigglesworth Monuments
was successfully completed in 2018.
Funerary monuments communicate personal memories
and civic narratives that become more evident after care
and conservation. Crawford’s Binney Monument features
carvings of a male figure ascending on the south-facing side
and a female mourner holding an urn on the north-facing