Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Expanding our Educational Outreach | Page 3

Panels from the new Visitors Center
exhibit in Story Chapel make use
of text and images from three centu-
ries, including, below right, an early
guide (1844) to Mount Auburn.
New Visitors Center
Increases Educational Outreach
Dramatically Increasing Visitors’
Understanding of Mount Auburn
By Stephen H. Anable ,
Communications Coordinator & Writer
M
ount Auburn Cemetery has been an
outdoor museum—and more—for over
a century and a half. Now, with the
opening of its new Visitors Center this December,
its own history and place in American history will
be put into a new, more comprehensive context for
the public. The Center, located in Story Chapel just
inside the Mount Auburn Street entrance, inaugu-
rates a new chapter in Mount Auburn’s commitment
to education. Its goal is to educate visitors about the
complexity of the landscape and explain why the
grounds—the monuments, plantings and roadways—
look the way they do. It will help visitors “read” that
landscape, learning how and why it has changed
over time, demonstrating how Mount Auburn can
be explored as a series of “period rooms.” And the
Center will track the extraordinary influence Mount
Auburn has had on the design of other cemeter-
ies and as the “ancestor” of all of the nation’s public
parks—including Central Park in New York and the
Mall in Washington, D.C.
(cont’d)
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