Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn In Celebration of 175 Years | Page 8

Auburn doing more to assist families with planning funer-
als and memorial services in our two beautiful, historic
chapels, and strengthening ties between families and the
Cemetery. “Once someone is buried here, that person’s
family becomes part of the Mount Auburn family,” he says.
Richard wants to intensify Mount Auburn’s efforts to cre-
ate “a community of mourners,” such as the people who
come every year to the Cemetery’s Service of Commemo-
ration held each May and the December holiday candle-
lighting service.
From its earliest days, Mount Auburn has been open to
people from all races, creeds and income levels. When
African-Americans were still kept in slavery and buried in
segregated cemeteries, Mount Auburn was the resting-place
of former slaves as well as African-American and other
abolitionists. When Mount Auburn was founded in 1831,
Boston and the Cemetery were almost entirely Christian,
while today, the Cemetery increasingly reflects the diverse
faiths of 21st-century Boston, cremating and interring, for
example, Buddhists and Hindus.
Each year, an
average of 1,000
cremations and
over 500 burials
take place at Mount
Auburn. While the
Cemetery has addi-
tional space for the
interment of both
cremated remains
and casket buri-
The cast iron finials for Birch Gardens, a new
als, we do not have
burial space in the Cemetery, were inspired
infinite room for
by the original triple lotus finials on the fence
traditional monu-
designed by Mount Auburn founder and first
president Jacob Bigelow in 1844—an example ments. So we began
designing some of
of integrating the traditional and the new. This
photograph illustrates the stages of fashioning
New England’s first
the finial’s prototypes, created by artist David
shared memorials,
Phillips. (Photo by David Phillips)
such as Azalea Path
Wall in 1993. Since
then we have designed a number of new shared memo-
rials—Aronia Gardens, Willow Pond Knoll Garden, the
obelisk at Begonia Garden, and Spruce Knoll and Halcyon
Gardens. We have also begun to offer commemorative
plaques on existing trees, benches and walls. These shared
memorials have a twofold benefit: they give the Cemetery
a greater aesthetic voice in designing memorialization in
new burial areas, so that the new coexists in harmony with
the old; and they reduce the number of monuments, thus
conserving space. Now ground is about to be broken for
the most significant and innovative new interment land-
scape of the last thirty years—Birch Gardens. (See sidebar
on page 5.) This new set of gardens will use shared memo-
rials but in new ways.
6 | Sweet Auburn
Mount Auburn is making “virtual” improvements in
service, too, via cyberspace. We have installed a powerful
software program for cemeteries called PlotFinder, which
records all of our lots and graves as well as their occupants
and owners, complementing our earlier investment in
BG-BASE, the software used by most botanical gardens
to record their collections. These programs and their as-
“It is as if the finger of a greater being touched the
175 acres of Mount Auburn Cemetery, creating
something to celebrate the lives of those passed and
inspire the ones still living.”
–Christopher Loh, W ATERTOWN T AB , July 14, 2006
sociated databases will help our staff give both clients and
visitors greater and easier access to the wealth of informa-
tion stored here. Using information from hard copy records
from three centuries, PlotFinder allows our staff to pinpoint
the exact location of individual burials, instead of just indi-
cating a general area within a plot. “We can print a diagram
and hand it to the client,” says Director of Sales Bob Keller.
Director of Information Technology Rich Snow mentions
that PlotFinder also creates “a digital archive of lot cards,
which is a valuable backup of information and an impor-
tant part of preservation by sparing fragile paper records
from having to endure possibly damaging handling.”
Toward Tomorrow
Throughout this 175th Anniversary year, the media—in the
form of newspapers, websites, magazines, television stations,
newsletters and radio stations—have helped us celebrate the
success of 175 years of stewardship (See article on page 16.)
Many of these stories share a common theme: how much
Mount Auburn offers a diverse range of audiences, its quiet
amid the clangor and congestion of the city, and what a
wondrous and publicly accessible treasure the Cemetery is.
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the
Cemetery’s income increas