Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn In Celebration of 175 Years | Page 6

Auburn also cares for the remaining 62 cast and wrought iron fences surrounding family and institutional lots. Dating mostly from the mid-nineteenth century these Victorian survivors need to be painted and repaired on an ongoing basis, so the Cemetery has made a commitment to restore two each year as long as funds are available.

When the staff needs the specialized skills of outside experts, they call on people such as conservator Barbara Mangum, who worked this past fall on the Richard Duca sculpture on Willow Pond Knoll, a work of art less than thirty years old and a project that was completed with the input of the artist.( See article on page 17.) A significant project completed last year by outside experts was the restoration of the

“ You need no special occasion to appreciate its beauty and tranquility … It may even allow you to reflect on the pace of your life and wonder what the rush is all about.”

— Richard P. Carpenter,

BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE, July 16, 2006

21.5-foot-tall north chancel window in Bigelow Chapel, a rare example of mid-19th-century Scottish stained glass. The restorers at Serpentino Stained & Leaded Glass of Needham, MA, were so enthusiastic about the results of their work that they used a detail from the window on the firm’ s Christmas card.( See pictures on page 14 and article on page 17.) The Cemetery has also established partnerships with other organizations, such as the informal“ exchange” it has with Historic Scotland. After Dave Gallagher spent several weeks working throughout Britain, Historic Scotland sent stone expert Alan McKenzie to Mount Auburn for two weeks last summer. Alan worked on the Barnard monument, a brownstone cross on Pyrola Path, and on the Fagnani monument’ s marble flowers on Greenbriar Path. Alan treated these eroded 19th-century monuments with an acrylic mortar seldom used in this country. Mount Auburn has also shared its growing knowledge with other cemeteries, organizing two monument workshops at the Cemetery in 1998 and again in 2002.

Photo by janet heywood

The Larger Challenge of Preserving the Whole

But preservation at Mount Auburn is not done with a narrow focus, monument-by-monument. Here preservation encompasses considering the entire landscape, which is a work of art in itself. It has undergone many changes during its 175-year history. Buildings and mausolea have been torn down; significant details of other structures have been removed. As an active cemetery where we have created new burial areas and rejuvenated old ones, our challenge is balancing inevitable and desirable change with preservation. Since 1993 we have been guided by the Cemetery’ s awardwinning Master Plan, a document developed in a team effort by the Cemetery and what is now the Halvorson Design Partnership, Inc., a Boston landscape design firm. The Master Plan states:“ It is not singular objects— vegetation, structures, topography, water— but their relationships within a series of interconnected spaces that creates and strengthens the design of a landscape.” Therefore, any changes proposed for a portion of the Cemetery must be evaluated as to their impact on the whole.

Meg Winslow smiles when she hears people thank the staff for keeping the Cemetery“ exactly as it has always been.” She stresses that the decision process has been much more complex:“ When we have a site that we want to develop for burials, for instance, the staff goes to the archives and looks through historic images and records to learn what the site used to be like and refers to the Master Plan. The staff then incorporates that information into its decisions about the new. So we’ re not copying what used to be— we’ re using it as a reference to create new landscapes that reflect our contemporary feelings about memorialization and commemoration.”

As Bill Clendaniel emphasizes, Mount Auburn is“ a dynamic landscape that has grown and changed from the day it started. The people who

“ Mount Auburn is a wonderful place to visit. The collection of trees is one of the most spectacular in the Northeast, and the plantings provide a far richer habitat for birds and other wildlife than you would expect in an urban zip code.”

– PEOPLE, PLACES, PLANTS, Summer 2006

worked here over all those generations and the people who came here as clients brought their contemporary values with them. The same is true today.” In short, Mount Auburn is preserving its historic landscape not by keeping