Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Reimagining the Cemetery as Museum | Page 18

People and Happenings

Volunteer Profile:
Kathleen Fox
By Jennifer Johnston,
Webmaster, Media & Imaging Coordinator

On October 27, 1988, Kathleen Fox—a local
Cambridge artist and then Associate Registrar at the
Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University—
wrote to then Cemetery President Bill Clendaniel about
her interest in investigating who had done the carving on
all of the small (and large) monuments she had become
so familiar with. She voiced her appreciation for Mount
Auburn, which she had visited at least once a week for the
better part of a decade, and expressed her desire to “pay
homage to this wonderful arboretum, to provide a way of
perceiving it, and in particular to recognize the wonderful
sculpture and sculptors who have contributed to it.” We
take this opportunity to pay homage to Kathleen in return.
The spring 1989 issue of Sweet Auburn magazine told of
her official arrival at Mount Auburn as one of our very first
volunteers: “Kathleen Fox…has spent many years in the
Cemetery drawing and painting the landscape. Last year
she did a series of graphite drawings of several figurative
sculptures in the snow. This work led her to wonder about
the stonecutters who had carved the stones and…she then
approached the Cemetery staff with an offer to research
Mount Auburn’s sculpture.”
This was not a simple task. In the early 1990s, Kathleen
Fox read through 17,000 Cemetery records, took 700
photographs, and created a database of over 5,000 monuments at Mount Auburn. A particular thrill was discovering
all of the correspondence with sculptors Thomas Crawford,
Richard Saltonstall Greenough, William Wetmore Story,
and Randolph Rogers for the statues originally commissioned for the Cemetery offices that now reside in various
locations at Harvard. The “Fox Database,” as we now call
it, can be sorted by monument carver, monument dimensions, monument symbolism, lot number, location, name
of the deceased, or the source of information regarding the
monument. All references in the database are from records
on file at the Cemetery—such as general correspondence
files, work order forms, Cemetery journals, and nineteenthcentury guidebooks—or from external sources such as
monument company files or Boston Public Library records.
For over twenty years, the database has proved invaluable to
staff, volunteers, and researchers at the Cemetery.
Kathleen also began transcribing select letters in the
Cemetery correspondence files. She realized that these
letters revealed details of nineteenth-century cultural
habits and technologies that were of historic significance.
Kathleen began sorting letters into categories such as
horticulture, wildlife, and workers. She knows the names of
the six Cemetery horses and how much they weighed; she
16 | Sweet Auburn

can tell you how the first telephone lines were installed at
the Cemetery and when typewriters were first bought for
the office.
Though she at one time hoped to craft her discoveries
into a book, Fox ultimately realized that the quiet rewards
of pure discovery were enough. Exploration itself—“the
hunt” as she calls it—is what has always driven her, both as
an artist and as a historian. This same sense of curiosity and
discovery is what drew Kathleen back to the Cemetery as a
volunteer, after retiring from a 27-year career as an Assistant
dean at the Kennedy School.
For the past few years, Kathleen has come in two days a
week as a volunteer in the Historical Collections department at Mount Auburn Cemetery. There, her colleagues,
including her supervisor Meg Winslow, Curator of
Historical Collections, continually rely on her expertise
in all manner of research, logic, and organization. Since
returning, Kathleen \