Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Reimagining the Cemetery as Museum | Page 8

Eglantine Path

Reimagining the
Cemetery as Museum
By Meg L. Winslow, Curator of Historical Collections
Photos by Greg Heins

Most of us venture into a cemetery without
expecting to encounter great art.Yet that is precisely what we
experience at Mount Auburn. Coming upon the memorial
to Amos Binney on Heath Path, you see the monument’s
heavy marble shroud from a distance, seemingly thrown
over the top of the monument. On closer approach, you
notice that the drapery is carefully pulled back to reveal
carved niches below. This magnificent shroud has softness,
movement, and an immediacy that the sculptor has managed
to capture in the inert, hard medium of stone. So too with
the Harriet Hunt statue on Lily Path: from a distance, it
appears to be a stiff Victorian figure, but closer examination
reveals a graceful naturalism in its stance. Looking closer
still, you find the chisel marks of the sculptor and the name
of a goddess, Hygeia, carved into the pedestal.
The act of looking, and slowing down, allows us to
discover the layers of meaning within each monument.
Even the simplest architectural memorial can have an
unexpected impact. The pedestal monument to Hannah
Adams, like the monuments noted above, is carved in such
a way that your eye is immediately drawn to it. If the carvers had truncated the stone to make it lower, or if they had
tapered the sides more dramatically, it would not have the
proportions that generate in the viewer a sense of harmony.
Walking through Mount Auburn’s landscape, we can seek
out these monuments and appreciate them from multiple
points of view. We can get up close to them, linger for as
long as we like, and return to them again and again. We
can observe how they reflect light and color through the
changing seasons: or how they develop the dark patina of
age over time.
6 | Sweet Auburn

The Cemetery’s natural space can be experienced as
an outdoor museum with different rooms or galleries of
monuments that span three centuries. In keeping with
the original vision of the Cemetery’s founders, an integral
part of Mount Auburn’s mission is to steward this diverse
collection of commemorative art. Starting in 1993, Mount
Auburn formally articulated a philosophy of preservation
values and commitments. Through a steady trajectory of
initiatives, the Cemetery has taken steps to protect and
stabilize significant monuments and also to preserve related
archival records that illuminate their unique historical
significance.
Of the more than sixty thousand memorials on the
grounds, a smaller number have been selected for their
artistic and historical significance. The Binney monument
by Thomas Crawford, for example, has been designated
a National Treasure for its artistic contribution to our
country’s history; the statue of Hygeia was commissioned
by a female physician and carved by Edmonia Lewis, one
of the first female African-American sculptors to achieve
international recognition; and the monument to author
Hannah Adams, by local carvers Alpheus Cary and David

Rich Monument