Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Reimagining the Cemetery as Museum | Page 3

In this issue of Sweet Auburn, we focus on Mount Auburn Cemetery as a museum. In
what sense is it a museum? According to the American Alliance of Museums (AAM),
“Museums preserve and protect objects and help communities better understand and
appreciate cultural diversity…and museums tell important stories by collecting, preserving,
researching and interpreting objects, living specimens and historical records.”
Mount Auburn does all of that and more. In 2013, we were excited to be recognized
as a museum by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) with a $92,000
grant for a two-year project to research and document thirty of our most significant
monuments, many of them important expressions of Victorian funerary art. It was a
great honor to be the first cemetery in the United States to receive a grant from IMLS.
Meg Winslow, Curator of Historical Collections, elaborates (page 6) on Mount Auburn’s
diverse collection of commemorative art, and confirms our commitment to steward the collection while also preserving related archival records that “tell the stories” and illuminate
their historic significance.
While this project focused on thirty significant monuments, we also continue to inventory, assess, and care for tens of thousands of other memorials throughout the grounds,
under the direction of Vice President of Preservation & Facilities Gus Fraser and Chief
of Conservation David Gallagher. As a cemetery, we are committed to preserving these
memorials and the stories of the people commemorated (see article on page 12).
We are committed as well to preserving other aspects of the historic landscape, including
the trees. When my predecessor Bill Clendaniel hired me as Director of Horticulture in
1993, he made it clear that one of my charges was to bring curatorial best practices and
collections standards typical of arboreta and botanical gardens to Mount Auburn. There
was already a fabulous collection of trees (that’s why I came!), but the records of the trees
and other plantings were far from complete. Under the direction of Horticultural Curator
Dennis Collins, a dedicated crew of volunteers spent over ten years inventorying first
our 5,000 trees and then all the shrubs and groundcover plantings throughout our 175
acres.The collections are now entirely mapped and logged in a database. It was gratifying
to be the first cemetery in the country to achiev H]