Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn President Bill Clendaniel Retires | Page 4

Many Accomplishments
Bill’s achievements are varied and impressive. During his
tenure and under his leadership, Mount Auburn
• Completed a comprehensive Master Plan for the grounds
and historic monuments in 1993 that was given an Honor
Award by the American Society of Landscape Architects;
• Established the Friends of Mount Auburn Cemetery
as a charitable trust in 1990 and initiated fundraising
programs for historic preservation, landscape renovation,
and public outreach;
• Completed major renovations of the Administration
Building, Story Chapel, Bigelow Chapel and the Service
Yard, now called the Operations Center, and in 2003
constructed a new Preservation Services Building;
• Refurbished large portions of the landscape and suc-
ceeded in having the Department of the Interior designate
the Cemetery as a National Historic Landmark in 2003;
• Created a preservation program for all of Mount Au-
burn’s built structures and archives; and
• Expanded and professionalized the staff, hiring the first
Directors of Horticulture, Preservation, and Planning &
Cemetery Development, as well as the Curators of Plant
Collections and Historical Collections and Vice Presidents
of Development and Cemetery Services.
—In short, Bill dramatically changed Mount Auburn for the
better and made the world take notice of those changes.
He took the job of President, convinced that the Board
of Trustees was “eager for strong leadership and willing to
think about new things.” Bill was “very interested in open-
ing us up to the community, making the Cemetery more
accessible and sharing what we did here with a wider audi-
ence. And I certainly was pretty quickly aware of preservation
issues.” Bill’s first challenge was completing a badly needed
renovation of the Administration Building, including convert-
ing a dank basement into a series of comfortable air-condi-
tioned offices, including one for the archives, complete with
climate-controlled storage to prevent fragile books, papers,
maps and photographs from literally becoming a thing of
the past.
“Bill is extraordinarily innovative. His vision of what
Mount Auburn could be was way beyond what the
Trustees at the time he arrived had imagined… And it
will be tough to replicate Bill’s public persona. He is a
very strong advocate for historic landscape preservation
on the regional and national level.
Prior to Bill, people thought of
Mount Auburn as a local institu-
tion, not as a national historic
landscape.”
— Jim Storey, of Boston
Chair of the Mount Auburn
Cemetery Trustees
2 | Sweet Auburn
Bill leads a tour through the Cemetery, Spring 2007. Photo by Jennifer Johnston
While the pre-Clendaniel staff was aware of Mount Au-
burn’s uniqueness as a historical and horticultural treasure,
they were making decisions on a utilitarian basis, replacing
architectural elements such as downspouts and floor tiles
with modern versions not in keeping with their Victorian
surroundings, filling in the spaces between curb lots, or
planting a new tree whenever an old one died—all without
any overall plan. The staff paid little attention to historical
details in either structures or horticulture.
The whole idea of protecting historic landscapes was
in its infancy in 1988. “You had the sense that this was all
pioneering work,” Bill says. He remembers his first meet-
ing with the Alliance for Historic Landscape Preservation
at Olympic National Park in Washington State, sitting
outdoors on the ground with colleagues now considered
founders of the field such as Charles Birnbaum, Tim
Keller and Patricia O’Donnell, discussing proposed federal
standards for landscape preservation. “We were trying to
articulate what you do to preserve historic landscapes. This
was a wonderful experience for me, being new at Mount
Auburn, to begin to understand what the issues were. Alli-
ance meetings have been very helpful throughout the years,
putting me in touch with a lot of people and ideas that
proved to be valuable to Mount Auburn.”
Rather than make changes to this “iconic landscape”
that were incremental, isolated, or out of context, Bill
recognized the need to think big, far into the future—and
to invest the time and money to draw up a comprehensive
master plan. “At a site like Mount Auburn, you’re never
going to go back and recreate the landscape that was here
at any particular time. We’re not a landscape that lends itself
to a single period of significance, so you keep adapting it for
current uses, while trying to still retain a sense of its past.”
Was he scared at first, afraid of making mistakes? Of course,
he admits, which is why he chose to proceed with caution
and only after a good deal of deliberation. To create the
1993 Master Plan, he hired the Halvorson Design Partner-