Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Mount Auburn as a Muse | Page 3

Photo by Richard Cheek
A Treasured Source of Inspiration…
& a Modern Day Muse
By Bree D. Harvey, Vice President of External Affairs
Edited by Lauren Marsh, Communications, Grants & Events Coordinator
W
hen the members of the Massachusetts
Horticultural Society consecrated
Mount Auburn in 1831, they did so
with a vision for a place that would commemorate
the dead, console the bereaved, and inspire the living.
And though it was their intention to attract the
living and inspire these visitors with the landscape’s
natural beauties and its many features—the works
of art, the horticultural specimens, and the stories
of those buried at the Cemetery—the founders
could never have envisioned the extent to which
this sacred ground would, indeed, come to serve as
a creative muse.
Throughout the eighteen decades that have since
passed, Mount Auburn has inspired generations
of creative individuals. In the nineteenth century,
writers like Caroline Frances Orne (see inset on page
4) celebrated their experiences at the Cemetery in
prose and verse. Daguerreotypists Southworth and
Hawes, some of the earliest practitioners of the new
art form, chose Mount Auburn’s dramatic landscape
as the subject for some of their early experiments
with photography (see inset on page 6).
Today, designers, writers, painters, and photographers
continue to find inspiration within our 175 acres.
Julie Moir Messervy, Amy Clarkson, Jessie Brown,
and Richard Cheek are among those for whom
Mount Auburn now serves as muse. Like the
generations of those who have done so before, they
have drawn upon personal experience to celebrate
the Cemetery’s many virtues, each telling a unique
story of Mount Auburn in their chosen medium.
Fall/Winter 2011 | 1