Cemetery History

Mount Auburn - Founded in 1831 as "America's first garden cemetery", or the first "rural cemetery", Mount Auburn Cemetery is an Elysium where, traditionally, chaste classical monuments were set in rolling landscaped terrain. The appearance of this type of landscape coincides with the rising popularity of the term cemetery, which etymologically traces its roots back to the Greek for "a sleeping place." This language and outlook eclipsed the previous harsh view of death and the afterlife, pictorialized in old graveyards and church burial plots. This 174 acre cemetery is important both for its historical aspects and for its role as a fine arboretum. It is located at the corner of Mount Auburn and Brattle Streets near Fresh Pond at the western end of Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA and the eastern end of Watertown, Massachusetts, USA, and is adjacent to the Cambridge City Cemetery and Sand Banks Cemetery. Mount Auburn Cemetery is credited as the beginning of the American public parks and gardens movement. More than 80,000 persons are buried in the cemetery, and number of historically significant people have been interred here over the last 175 years, particularly members of the Boston Brahmins and the Boston elite associated with Harvard University as well as a number of prominent Unitarians. However, the cemetery is nondenominational and continues to make space available for new plots. [Source: wikipedia.org] Sleepy Hollow Cemetery is a cemetery located on Bedford Road in the center of Concord, Massachusetts. The cemetery is the burial site of a number of famous Concordians, including some of the United States' greatest authors and thinkers. Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Ralph Waldo Emerson are buried on a hill known as Author's Ridge. Other notables buried there include Richard Marius, a Reformation historian and Southern novelist, George Frisbie Hoar, a 19th-century politician, Ralph Munroe, a yacht designer and pioneer of South Florida, and Daniel Chester French, a sculptor whose works include the Lincoln Memorial statue in Washington, DC. Sleepy Hollow has been in use since 1855, and people are still being buried there. The back of the newer portion of the cemetery leads to a path system which connects to the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge. [Source: wikipedia.org] The Prince Hall Mystic Cemetery, also known as the Prince Hall Cemetery, is a historic cemetery located on Gardner Street, Arlington, Massachusetts. It is said to be the only remaining African American Masonic cemetery in the United States. The cemetery is a burial place for members of the Prince Hall Grand Lodge F & AM, founded by Prince Hall in Boston in 1776. Prince Hall Freemasonry was the first African American Masonic group in the United States. In 1864, Grand Master William B. Kendall deeded this site to his lodge. The cemetery was dedicated in 1868, and put in trust to be used exclusively as a Prince Hall Freemasonry burial ground. Records indicate it was in use until about 1897 when it fell into disuse. As time passed it was forgotten until its rediscovery in 1987. It was rededicated in 1990, and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1998. Today the cemetery is the last extant cemetery associated with Prince Hall Masons. It contains a small park with a monument. A 1988 survey found remains of the original gate and an obelisk [Source: wikipedia.org]

 

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