Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn The Art of Memory: Monuments Through Time | Page 4

the Art of Memory
Neoclassical Inspiration
The first monuments erected at Mount Auburn took the shape of simple, architectural forms. Obelisks, pedestals, columns,
and classical sarcophagi were copied extensively and eclectically from ancient Greece, Italy and Egypt. Mount Auburn founders
Jacob Bigelow and General Henry A.S. Dearborn purchased books illustrated with prints of monuments from Père La Chaise
Cemetery in Paris, whose classic funerary designs could then be copied by local monument dealers and stone cutters back
home. White marble became a favorite alternative to the blue and gray slate traditionally used for markers in Boston’s burying
grounds.
Hannah Adams, (1755 – 1831),
Lot 180 Central Avenue
In 1832, the Boston Courier reported, “A white marble
[monument] of singular beauty and simplicity was erected last
week in this new cemetery.” 3 Women friends of Hannah Adams,
author and historian of comparative religion, raised funds for
a memorial in her honor. Local stone carvers Alpheus Carey
and David Dickinson carved the monument, the first to be
erected at Mount Auburn. The neoclassical pedestal form
became a model for other memorials in cemeteries throughout
the United States.
Joseph Story, (1779 – 1845),
Lot 313 Narcissus Path
Wood engraving, Bricher & Russell, Guide
Through Mount Auburn, 1860
In his consecration address for the Cemetery in 1831, Mount Auburn’s first president,
Justice Joseph Story, stated that “it is confidently expected that many of the proprietors
will… proceed to erect upon their lots such monuments and appropriate structures, as
will give to the place a part of the solemnity and beauty which it’s destined ultimately
to acquire.” 4 Story’s own neoclassical monument on Narcissus Path took the form of
a beautifully proportioned obelisk with a winged sun disk underneath the pedestal’s
cove molding. The obelisk, used by the Egyptians to symbolize a ray of sunlight, became
a popular funerary symbol in American cemeteries.
Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, (1776 – 1832),
Lot 181 Central Avenue
Photo, Arthur C. Haskell,
1937
2 | Sweet Auburn
A marble sarcophagus was erected in honor of the German
phrenologist Johann Gaspar Spurzheim in 1832. Spurzheim
died only a few months after coming to the United
States on a lecture tour, and friends contributed funds for
his memorial. The classical altar tomb with a Doric frieze
is an exact copy of the stone sarcophagus of Cornelius
Scipio Barbatus discovered on the Appian Way in
Rome in the 1700s, and now in the Vatican Museum.
Prominently placed near the entrance to Mount Auburn,
the Spurzheim monument is the first use of this primary
funerary form in a Western cemetery, a design now
found in cemeteries worldwide.
Photo, Jennifer Johnston, 2013