Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn The Art of Memory: Monuments Through Time | Page 9

the Art of Memory
significant monument
collection
Within its large collection of memorials, Mount Auburn has identified a
group of monuments, known as the “Significant Monument Collection,”
that reflects an essential part of the Cemetery’s cultural landscape. Mount
Auburn is committed to their care and preservation. The memorials may
represent an example of a particular style or period, a unique work of
art, an association with a particular individual buried at Mount Auburn,
or a special placement in the landscape setting. A primary example is
the memorial commemorating Mary Baker Eddy (1821 – 1910, Lot
6234 Halcyon Avenue), founder of the First Church of Christ, Scientist.
The magnificent Bethel white granite monument is a circular colonnade
composed of eight columns, fifteen feet in height. Located on the
banks of Halcyon Pond, the memorial is one of the most photographed
monuments at the Cemetery.
Hand-colored Lantern slide, John F. Peterson, c. 1920s
the art of memory
“In addition to communicating our traditions, beliefs, and values from generation to generation,” art historian Donald
Martin Reynolds writes, “monuments also help us to come to terms with the unknown, the unexplained, and the mysteries
of life.” 12 Mount Auburn’s commemorative memorials were placed in the landscape to remember, to honor, and to endure.
Tangible symbols of memory, they represent the endeavor of artists, carvers, and family members to capture the ineffable
distance between the worlds of life and death.
The Prisoner’s Friend, Volume 1, April, 1849, p. 365.
Frederic A. Sharf, “The Garden Cemetery and American Sculpture: Mount Auburn,” The Art Quarterly,
Vol. XXIV, No. 1, Spring, 1961, p. 82-83.
3
Boston Courier, July 3, 1832, vol. 7, no. 680.
4
Joseph Story, “An Address Delivered on the Dedication of the Cemetery at Mount Auburn,
September 24, 1831.” Boston: Joseph T. & Edwin Buckingham, 1831, p. 29.
5
John Albee, “Henry Dexter, Sculptor, A Memorial.” Privately Printed, 1868, p. 61.
6
Marjorie B. Cohn, Francis Calley Gray and Art Collection for America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986, p. 120.
7
Hannah Farnham Lee, Familiar Sketches of Sculpture and Sculptors. Boston: Crosby, Nichols, and Company, 1854, vol. 2, p. 177.
8
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008, p. 169.
9
Lawrence Caldwell, 1935 in Shary Page Berg, Mount Auburn Cemetery, Master Plan, 1993, Volume II, Boston, 1993, p. 42.
10
Interview, May 2013.
11
Interview, May 2013.
12
Donald Martin Reynolds, “A New Perspective on the Nature of Public Monuments,” American Renaissance for the American Twenty-First Century Art.
See: http://www.art-21.org/docs/Articles/Monuments.htm.
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