Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Lives of the Past Informing the Future | Page 6

The Shoulders
We Stand On:
A Conversation with
Denise Simmons
By Jennifer J. Johnston
Media & Communications Director
C
4
ity Councilor and former Mayor Denise Simmons,
a lifelong resident of Cambridge, MA, has been
a regular visitor to Mount Auburn Cemetery for
longer than she can remember. In addition to officiating at
weddings as a Justice of the Peace, she recently had her own
wedding photos taken near Halcyon Lake.
“It is just beautiful at the Cemetery,” says Simmons. “The
structure and form of monuments and architecture, the
sculptures, the trees as well as the scent of all the flowers
make it such a wonderful place to walk around. My daughter
loves the tower and viewing the foliage from that vantage
point in the fall. And I love the chapels and especially the
Sphinx....I find Mount Auburn a wonderful place to be quiet.
I find it recuperative and rejuvenating. And of course, it is a
great place to contemplate history.”
Simmons became even more passionate about Mount
Auburn after learning about the marble sculpture of the
Goddess Hygeia on Poplar Avenue, through her involvement
with The History Project. Beyond its beauty as a work of
art, Hygeia is significant because it is associated with two
extraordinary nineteenth-century women: Dr. Harriot Kezia
Hunt (1805–1875), who commissioned the monument for her
grave, and sculptor Edmonia Lewis (1844–1907), who carved
it. Lewis, born to an African American father and a Chippewa
(Ojibwa) mother, was the first woman and the first person of
color from America to receive international recognition as
a sculptor; few examples of her work survive. At the time of
the Hunt commission, Lewis was living and working in Rome.
Harriot Hunt was one of the first female physicians in Boston,
an early feminist reformer and an abolitionist. After learning
about Hygeia (and the stories of Lewis and Hunt), Simmons
began bringing friends and guests with her to “meet the statue.”
On one of her visits, Simmons found herself on Clethra
Path at the grave of author, abolitionist, women’s rights
advocate, and former slave Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897) (photo
top right). Simmons was inspired to read Jacobs’s Incidents
in the Life of a Slave Girl, which is among the few primary
resources on slavery written by a woman.