Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Reimagining the Cemetery as Museum | Page 10

The Surprising
Range of Resources
in Mount Auburn’s
Historical
Collections
By Meg L. Winslow, Curator of Historical Collections

We deal, not with tracts of land, nor even with lots large enough
to provide a house with a garden, but with areas often measured in
feet or inches…There is probably no business in existence in which
the importance and value of mere records is so high.
— Cemetery Accounts, Walter Mucklow (1935)
Every year, the Historical Collections Department at
Mount Auburn fields inquiries from some four hundred
researchers: architects, landscape designers, historians,
biographers, genealogists, preservationists, curators, writers,
publishers, teachers, filmmakers, artists, poets, and individuals
with family members at the Cemetery. Institutions such as
the Boston Athenaeum, Gettysburg Cemetery, Harvard
University, Massachusetts Horticultural Society, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, and New York State Historical
Association have consulted our records, which are
unique among American rural cemeteries in their extent,
completeness, and organization. Mary Roach, author of the
bestselling book Stiff:The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers,
describes Mount Auburn’s holdings as “a rich and endlessly
surprising trove of death-related goodness, the likes of
which I have never come across elsewhere.”
The Department holds a wealth of materials that tell
the story of the Cemetery and those interred here: burial
records, guidebooks, maps, plans, blueprints, photographs,
lithographs, engravings, drawings, paintings, sculpture,
decorative arts, and ephemera. Though the Department
was only officially established in 1993, its holdings go
back to the Cemetery’s founding in 1831 and continue to
grow through purchases, gifts, and acquisitions. In addition
to aiding researchers, the Historical Collections serve as a
valuable resource for Cemetery staff seeking to improve the
landscape, implement preservation plans for monuments
and buildings, or create interpretive programs and materials.
Researchers come to us with questions relating to family
genealogy, historical figures, landscape and architectural
history, horticulture, American studies, anthropology, sociology, natural sciences, and medicine. The rural cemetery
movement is a subject of increasing interest to scholars and
educators, and Mount Auburn’s records reflect society’s
changing ideas about death, commemoration, religion,
ethics, and nature over the past century and a half.
8 | Sweet Auburn

Contact with researchers enriches the Cemetery as well.
The late Caroline Loughlin, a Trustee of the Cemetery who
for many years handled research questions at the Historical
Collection Department, remarked that “The exchange we
have with researchers—between what we know and what
they know—is enormously useful.” Curator of Historical
Collections Meg L. Winslow concurs: “The people laid to
rest here and the ways in which they are commemorated
are remarkably varied and rich. Each day we continue to
discover new things about the Cemetery through our
growing collections and through our interactions with the
families and scholars we serve.”
The Cemetery’s holdings are organized into Archives,
Library, Photographs, and Fine and Decorative Arts collections. In addition, the Department manages the Cemetery’s
collection of significant fine art monuments, stained glass,
monuments, and landscape furnishings.

Archives
The Archives holds more than 2,000 linear feet of
materials gener ]Y[