A Walk among the Tombstones at Mount Auburn

The cemetery's sculpture, gardens, trees, and dells transformed landscape architecture in America.

W hen I was in Boston to see the Philip Guston retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, I added an unconventional stop and visited Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. Mount Auburn, established in 1831, is America’s first garden cemetery. Its founders wanted a place designed to commemorate the dead but to do so in a tranquil, spacious setting using advanced horticultural values. Now about 175 acres, Mount Auburn was crafted from fields, hills, and forests in what was then rural but also accessible to Boston.

It was always meant to be a cemetery and a public garden, as well as an outdoor museum of monumental sculpture. That was, in its day, an extraordinary vision, more so since Mount Auburn, as a designed landscape, is, I’d say, America’s first park. I like writing about landscape design, which is art, but the last time I tackled the subject was a story about Olana, Frederic Church’s estate near Hudson in New York.

So I’ll start with Mount Auburn, still a gorgeous park and the place to go to commune with the old and gone Boston Brahmin class as well as the famous and not-so-famous. Mount Auburn has always been open to all. Next stop is Arlington National Cemetery, for war heroes and a political skunk or two. Arlington descends from Mount Auburn, design-wise, but begins through the seizure and appropriation of the home of General Lee in 1861. Next, I’ll write about Forest Lawn in Glendale, opened in 1906 and uniquely California and the closest I’ll ever get to movie stars.

Boston’s establishment in 1630 raised an inevitable problem, and I don’t mean draining its smelly mudflats. What to do with the dead? The town’s cemeteries were carved from land near churches and, with the passage of time, packed to the gunwales. Graves were often unmarked but, when they were, the look, and we can still see it in old New England cemeteries, doesn’t evoke the songs of angels. Grave sculpture is heavy on skulls and bones, on resignation and decay, and a grim lesson on death’s universality and, for many of us, unexpected arrival.

These early stones are the earliest examples of American art, along with other practical works of furniture and silver. The rich got prime space and stones with high production values. Landscape design was rudimentary and based on dense rows often facing east and the rising sun, a symbol of resurrection.

Mount Auburn developed from a confluence of a new, for America, concept of landscape design, health concerns, city cemeteries with no space, and, of course, the vision of movers and shakers. Mount Auburn’s aesthetics come from Arcadian landscapes imagined by Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. Poussin’s Et in Arcadia ego, from 1638, is Mount Auburn’s rough draft. It depicts shepherds in a calm, pastoral setting scrutinizing an ancient tomb. Claude expanded the repertoire by the 1660s to feature groves of mature trees set in meadows, Roman ruins, water features, usually ponds, and views in the distance that start with hills and conclude in misty, distant mountains.

British aristocrats made the look real in picturesque landscapes at country estates such as Stowe, Stourhead, and Castle Howard. Fabricated ruins and grottoes, meadows, ponds, follies, and views created a new Arcadia, and from Arcadia it doesn’t take long to conceive of new Elysian Fields.

On the health front, big-city epidemics made planners wary of active, jammed cemeteries close to where people lived. Church crypts were also seen as unsanitary. In 1831, Henry Dearborn and Jacob Bigelow, both leaders of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, marshaled a group of Boston businessmen to buy 75 acres in rural Cambridge for a purpose-built cemetery that was also a garden and park. They also wanted a presentation of death as uplifting — a release from life’s woes and a trip to heaven — rather than grim. Banish the skull and crossbones, bring in the beautiful. As image-makers, Thomas Cole and other Hudson River School painters presented America as a new Eden, in life and in death. Contemporary painting, then, had lots of influence on the landscape architecture of its day.

More than 100,000 people are buried in Mount Auburn. It’s still an active cemetery. There were about 500 burials in 2021, and there’s room for thousands more. As an art historian, I fastened on style, and 19th-century style in particular. The cemetery is an index of phases of Neoclassicism punctuated by Gothic Revival and, here and there, Victorian whimsy and pathos. It’s an outdoor museum of the very highest quality.

Mount Auburn’s immediate inspiration and model was the world’s first garden cemetery, Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, which opened in 1804. Père Lachaise was developed as a cemetery on land — then well outside Paris — once owned by Father de la Chaise, Louis XIV’s confessor, and used as a Jesuit retreat. With Paris’s cemeteries packed well beyond capacity and the city fearing epidemics from barely buried corpses, Napoleon’s government used the Jesuit land, seized by the state in the 1760s in a violent purge of Jesuits, for a purpose-built cemetery. It was architect-designed, with paths winding through hilly terrain that was — and this was radical — landscaped in a faux-wild English style, with groves of trees evoking forests, meadows, and vistas.

It wasn’t an immediate hit. Parisians thought it was in the boonies, and the cemetery wasn’t attached to a church, so it seemed godless. For cachet, the cemetery’s masters moved Molière’s remains there, and then the purported but surely fake bones of the doomed lovers Abelard and Héloïse. Business picked up, some 30 Americans were buried there by the 1820s, and the nascent American lifestyle-journal sector wrote about it. An idea was hatched.

I’ve been to Père Lachaise to do the predictable — visit Jim Morrison’s grave — but also to see the graves of Caillebotte, Pissarro, and Delacroix. One of the big innovations of Mount Auburn is its incorporation of setbacks between family plots. This contributes to the place’s spacious feel. Père Lachaise is smaller than Mount Auburn, too, and with 300,000 graves seems full as it is. Graves there, technically, are leased, and after a period of years, rent is due. If someone, often a descendent, doesn’t cough up the cash, the plot is emptied and resold. Mount Auburn is prohibited from doing this.

I spent the afternoon at Mount Auburn. My dissertation was on Washington Allston (1779–1843), the painter, poet, art theorist, Coleridge’s best friend, and, at the end of his life, a tombstone designer with one work to his credit. Though revered in his day as America’s premier painter-philosopher, Allston goes unnoticed today. There’s so little room for erudition in this world of dumb, coarse things. I keep the flame, though, and on my visit to Mount Auburn, I looked first for the sarcophagus-style monument he designed for William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), his brother-in-law and Unitarian divine. Mount Auburn had been opened for only ten years, so it’s art from the beginning.

Channing discarded Calvinism, with its dehumanizing rigor and carps about depravity, in favor of a new kind of rigor, a humane rigor called self-culture. His 1838 essay, “Self Culture,” part sermon, part lecture, proposes that self-improvement together with self-control is a uniquely American opportunity. “Sensuality is an abyss,” he said, and that’s a downer. He was no Puritan, though.

Rather, he saw envy among the poor and the pursuit of luxury among the rich as distractions from our freedom to develop our God-given individuality. This takes discipline, self-education, and a habit of disinterest, which means open-mindedness and a resistance to mobs. “Self-Culture” is a good read. Unitarianism can be happy-clappy, but there’s no dogma to it except self-realization. As Protestant denominations go, it’s lean and mean, not austere but streamlined.

Allston’s design meets the man. He’s a Romantic painter and poet whose work swerves between dense and overwrought, and lovely and sappy. His memorial for Channing, though, is an austere, disciplined frame with decorative touches, including an urn topping a canopy that flares on each corner, Art Deco–style. A row of argyles decorates the body of the tombstone, which rests on a double platform — two different geometric shapes that, together, don’t suggest pillow luxe but make the overall look solid and fixed on the one hand and ever so lithe on the other.

The epitaph for Channing is short and sweet. Eloquence, courage, truth, and freedom were his calling cards. Framing the epitaph is a string of abstract garland. It’s simple and direct but also debonair.

The Channing marker works wonders through design. Amos Binney’s monument from 1847 works through allegory. Binney was a rich doctor-turned-naturalist who wrote a book on mollusks. When he died in Italy, his widow hired Thomas Crawford, an American sculptor living in Rome, to create a monument. One side depicts a scene from Agrippina Landing at Brundisium with the Ashes of Germanicus, by Benjamin West and painted in 1768. Agrippina, like Mrs. Binney, carried her late husband’s remains home. But, unlike Germanicus, who was poisoned, Binney died of malaria.

West’s picture was famous in the U.K. and in America through endless reproductions. Agrippina and Germanicus were the Boston Brahmins of antiquity. She was the daughter of Julia, whose father was Emperor Augustus, and Marcus Agrippa. Germanicus was the adopted son of Tiberius and heir to the imperial throne. Agrippina’s comportment — grave and austere — suited the Brahmins of Binney’s time. On the other side of the monument is the figure of a man ascending to Heaven. The heavy, carved drapery adds emotional weight.

A single sculpture, from 1856, of three children, embracing and looking toward heaven, sits above the graves of Willie, Mary, and Charlie Atkins, who ranged from one to three years old when they died. Children younger than five accounted for a third of those buried at Mount Auburn before 1850. That was, like every time before ours, an age of epidemics. The sculptor, Peter Stephenson, studied in Rome before settling in Boston. He specialized in portrait busts.

If Channing’s grave is bracing and abstract, this one’s bittersweet and corporeal. Part of the look comes from the deceased children, obviously, but by the 1850s, the cult of bourgeois family values was well entrenched. Parental love wasn’t new, but cherishing and nurturing children were more salient. The old Calvinists, the ones Channing felt were brutal and anachronistic, might have considered dead children to be lost souls, but by the 1850s heaven was a kinder, gentler, more accessible place. The Atkins children don’t sleep as children often do in Victorian memorial sculpture. The two older children look up with hope and anticipation. They hold their one-year-old sister as if to propose that they’ll all go to Paradise as a team.

Aesthetic eclecticism isn’t really an American style but, rather, a state of mind. Thomas Handasyd Perkins, who died in 1854, made a fortune from opium, slave ships, mills, and mining. His grave marker — a handsome, watchful, and, I presume, loyal Newfoundland dog — was done by Horatio Greenough in 1843. Greenough did it at the very start of the Victorian era, which made sweet sentimentality a way of life. It’s completely unexpected and an icon of Mount Auburn.

Some of the grander monuments are tombs as big as a house. Some, like the small Raymond memorial from 1871, have enough Gothic Revival bells and whistles to evoke a house. Sheaves of harvested wheat suggest a bounty bound for heaven. We’ve come far from scary skulls.

The gateway to the cemetery is a massive Egyptian Revival pile completed in 1842 and the first Egyptian Revival structure in America. Why Egypt, pagan as it was? Pyramids there had always been associated with royal graves. Scholars finally were able to use the Rosetta Stone to decipher hieroglyphics and push the West’s intellectual lineage back centuries. And scholars in the 1840s believed that the oldest Egyptian cemeteries were in oasis gardens.

The gateway separates two worlds, one of the living, the other of the dead. In 1854, Mount Auburn opened Washington Tower, based on the crenelated tower design of the Middle Ages. It’s at the highest point of the cemetery, with views to the Harvard campus and to Boston. If the gateway separates worlds, the tower unites them. An ecumenical, Gothic Revival chapel opened in the 1840s to unite the dead and the living through funerals.

Mount Auburn, like Arlington National Cemetery and Forest Lawn, were tourist attractions very soon after they opened. Each was, for a time, and Arlington still is, one of the most visited places in the country. Mount Auburn inspired dozens of garden cemeteries, among them the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, but it also informed Frederick Law Olmsted in his design of Central Park. It has hundreds of types of trees and plantings and is a sanctuary for birds.

I’ve written about Boston and how much I dislike it. It’s a Connecticut thing, in part, but Boston bounces in my mind from the haughty to the rude to the parsimonious. That said, Mount Auburn is the most beautiful place in that part of the country, except for Massachusetts’s beaches. There are so many American cultural giants at Mount Auburn, from Longfellow to Mrs. Gardner, Francis Parkman, Julia Ward Howe, Charles Bulfinch, Winslow Homer, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., as well as scientists, philosophers, war heroes, and, in Mary Baker Eddy, a founder of a religion. Through impeccable care of its monuments, paths, and gardens, Mount Auburn opens itself to this history. And that history includes this feature. Mount Auburn, and it’s worth repeating, has always been open to the dead of all races, religions, and classes.

I spoke to Matthew Stephens, the new president of Mount Auburn. He’s a horticulturalist who directed the botanical garden in San Francisco and, before that, ran the Million Trees initiative in New York. He has been at Mount Auburn for only a year but has one long-term initiative in his sights — the movement from turf toward plants that are indigenous to the area, which will probably include gardens of rare and unusual but distinctly New England plants. The Victorian and Modernist aesthetic aimed at conquering nature, he said, but Mount Auburn was originally wilder.

With 150 acres, mostly turf, this transition will probably happen a few acres at a time. Maintenance is a formidable task, given the 50,000 monuments made from many materials. Mount Auburn, as a collection of sculpture but also flowers and trees, also hopes to endow its horticulturists.

I’ll write about Arlington National Cemetery and the Lee Mansion around Veterans Day and about Forest Lawn when I think we need some California sun and movie-star magic in our lives, but certainly before Vermont’s mud season.