Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Reimagining the Cemetery as Museum | Page 16

History Students Visit
Mount Auburn
On October 16, 2015, Mr. Andrew Milne, a
teacher at Medford High School, brought forty-three
students from his AP U.S. History classes to Mount
Auburn as part of a workshop on early American burial
practices. The students had already studied the Puritans
and the Enlightenment. At the time of their visit they
were exploring how the Transcendentalists had altered the
dominant New England religious ideology.
Students first examined the gravestones at the Cambridge
Burial Ground, noting the relative uniformity of funerary
icons—winged skulls and cherub heads, willow trees, and
urns—and charting their frequency over time. The class
then took a 90-minute tour with Jenny Gilbert, Mount
Auburn’s Director of Institutional Advancement, learning
about the founding history of the Cemetery. Students
were given a list of twenty objectives to photograph, such
as most beautiful or saddest monument. In small groups,
they created short biographical sketches of important
nineteenth-century figures buried at the Cemetery.
The students were greatly impressed by the natural
beauty of Mount Auburn and the diversity of its memorials
relative to those in the Cambridge Burial Ground. They
had gathered empirical evidence that the Transcendentalists
and their followers valued individuality and the cycle of
nature, rather than conformity to theological beliefs or the
role of an afterlife.
The students were divided into ten groups for a
Cemetery and Architecture Photo Treasure Hunt. Images
of Mount Auburn by Photo contest winners Georgia
Bowder-Newton, Abby McCarthy, Olivia Marks, Tyler
Nguyen, and Andre Melo, with Chaperone Joe Ferrari are
presented here.
14 | Sweet Auburn