Boston’s Tombstones: Mount Auburn Cemetery

When 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.

About the Author

Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

When 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.