Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Mount Auburn and The Civil War | Page 13

“The Egyptian sphinx, large and small, was
also part of the landscape, the grandest such
sculpture being the great creature carved by
Martin and Joseph Milmore to commemorate
the abolition of slavery, the preservation of
the Union, and the Union dead in the Civil
War. This impressive granite memorial was
set at the top of the hill in front of the larger,
Gothic chapel in Mount Auburn Cemetery
in the early 1870s, not far from the cenotaph
of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw who fell
leading his regiment of black troops against
Fort Wagner, in Charleston Harbor, SC.”
— Cornelius C. Vermuele III,
Curator of Classical Antiquities,
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1988.
1872 newspaper article, Boston Evening Transcript
Mount Auburn’s Monument
to Commemorate the Civil War
1883 Souvenir Guidebook
Circa 1880s Stereo View
“She is, however, a wholly new birth, we take it, and her past will date from to-day, —
the to-day which has brought the two races, depicted in the African mythic figure and
the American face, into such strange and close association. “
—The Atlantic Monthly, page 116, 1873
Winter 2015 | 11