Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Environmental Leader and Innovator | Page 5

Many 19th Century
illustrations show visitors
engaging with Mount
Auburn’s lush landscape.
Opposite page: View
from the Top of Mount
Auburn, 1846. This page
clockwise from left: Forest
Pond, 1846; View from
Consecration Dell, 1861;
Bigelow Chapel, 1846.
constant change, in the realities of life and death. When
Mount Auburn was established in 1831 by the brand new
Massachusetts Horticultural Society, it served as an invitation
to Bostonians to ponder their connectedness to each other
and to the soil, to slow down and pause, to remember the
significance of cycles in an age of linear Progress and what
was often referred to at the time as “go-aheadism.”
The cemetery’s opening ceremony took place in late
September, at Consecration Dell. A crowd of 2,000 people
met the speaker, Justice Joseph Story of the U.S. Supreme
Court, with perfect silence. Story explained that the new
cemetery was intended as a “place of repose” as much for the
living as for the people being buried, a space removed from
the pressures of a burgeoning industrial city but accessible
enough that ordinary citizens could incorporate it into their
routines. And the leaders of the Massachusetts Horticultural
Society also made it known that Mount Auburn was to be
a working landscape, a purposeful blending of the natural
and artificial, designed to have experimental vegetable
gardens adjacent to the gravesites. This was a place where
human beings had created a landscape meant to inscribe
and enshrine the mutual dependence of nature and culture.
Mount Auburn came of age at a time when many Americans
could embrace the complexity of betweenness and balance,
of the picturesque. Today, we are so conditioned to respond
to wild sublimity that the very word “picturesque” seems
sentimental. But in the antebellum period it came to rep-
resent the complex flowering of Romanticism, capturing
nature’s rough borders and irregularities, where earth, air,
rock, and water came together; where humanity struggled
to erect solid structures that inevitably became weathered,
blending back into the environment; where viewers were
shocked into a sudden apprehension of the sunlight and
shadows, the exhilaration and dejection, that mark every life.
And just as important was Mount Auburn’s spirit of limi-
tation. Justice Story could appreciate American expansiveness,
but he wanted the cemetery to spur some counterbalancing
“thoughts of admonition”: “the selfishness of avarice will be
checked,” he hoped, by the great leveling force of mortal ity;
“the restlessness of ambition will be rebuked.”
As it turned out, American culture was ready for this
kind of message, and Mount Auburn started a movement.
“We are a hard, practical people,” asserted the editor of
the Picturesque Pocket Companion, Mount Auburn’s first
guidebook, “intensely absorbed in business…, educated
and impelled in every way to undervalue and lose sight of
what we might call the graces of civilization.” America was
industrializing, following the example of Manchester and
Liverpool; the country could be saved only if it recaptured
certain environmental values: “Give me the grave-yards
of the common people, and the poor; the expressions of
a nature which deems itself unobserved; the… stones and
sods, and trees, and chequered turf.” This embrace of social
unity, of a public spirit manifested in environmental terms,
of the cemetery landscape as a countervailing force against
a hubristic Progress, was expressed again and again by civic
leaders in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Brooklyn, Rochester,
Albany, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Providence, Louisville,
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