[If you’re in
New England, there are few more beautiful spots for a spring walk than Cambridge’s Mount Auburn Cemetery. In this
series, I’ll highlight a few American connections for this unique site and all
it includes. Please share your thoughts, on this site and any other beautiful
or evocative spaces you’d highlight, for a crowd-sourced weekend walk!]
Three ways to
contextualize the cemetery’s 1831 dedication.
On September 24th,
1831, more than 2000 spectators came to Cambridge to help dedicate what was
to be the nation’s first landscaped cemetery. Earlier that year the
Massachusetts Horticultural Society had purchased 72 acres of land in the city
and neighboring Watertown in order to construct what they called a “rural
cemetery and experimental garden,” a project that could well be considered a
first step toward the City
Beautiful movement that would come to dominate American urban planning at
the end of the 19th century. One of that movement’s primary
goals, after all, was to create natural, pastoral escapes within the
borders of urban spaces, green retreats like Central Park (designed
in 1858) and Boston’s Emerald
Necklace (begun in 1870) where the nation’s citizens could find those
pleasures and pursuits not quite available to them in city life. Those spaces,
and their designer Frederick Law
Olmsted, are often considered the first prominent steps toward the
movement—but a significant case could be made that it was in the pastoral
beauties of Mount Auburn that the philosophy first took root.
If connecting
Mount Auburn’s origin points to the American future offers one important
contextualization, however, there’s a complementary and equally compelling way
to read them in relationship to the past. As captured with particular force in Alfred
F. Young’s The Shoemaker and the Tea
Party: Memory and the American
Revolution (2000), the 1820s celebrations of the 50th
anniversaries of Revolutionary-era events and moments became a vehicle for some
of the first sustained conversations and debates over how to commemorate and
engage with America’s past. While occasional celebrations and reenactments
offered one set of commemorative options, and permanent memorials such as
Boston’s Bunker
Hill Monument (first raised in 1823) a second, it seems quite possible to
me to read historical cemeteries such as Mount Auburn as a third. It’s no coincidence,
that is, that at the center of Mount Auburn is a tower
dedicated to George Washington (which was not completed until the 1850s but
included in the cemetery’s initial plans): the cemetery is as much about the
people and communities remembered in its gravestones and memorials as about the
pastoral beauties surrounding them; and remembering those people with such
impressive grandeur comprises a particular, venerative attitude toward the
past.
The oration delivered
at the 1831 dedication by Joseph Story, Supreme
Court Justice, Harvard University Law Professor, and the first president of
Mount Auburn Cemetery, could be paralleled to those commemorative endeavors and
attitudes. Indeed, historian Garry
Wills has cited Story’s speech, and particularly lines like “We are met to
consecrate these grounds exclusively to the service and repose of the dead,” as
an important predecessor to Lincoln’s Gettsyburg Address and its images of
hallowed ground and honored dead. Yet to my mind, the most vital element of Story’s speech is an
immediate, personal context for it: the recent death of Story’s 10 year old
daughter to scarlet fever. Although he does not refer to that tragic loss
overtly (he does include “the parent, weeping over his dear dead child” among a
list of prospective mourners whom the cemetery will include), it is impossible
not to read this personal experience into lines like “As we sit down by their
graves, we seem to hear the tones of their affection, whispering in our ears”
and “We return to the world, and we feel ourselves purer, and better, and
wiser, from this communion with the dead.” After all, if Mount Auburn Cemetery
is both a beautiful pastoral escape and a potent historical commemoration, it
is also and most importantly the site of nearly two centuries of such personal
and familial mournings and communions—and Story’s eloquent reflection on those
themes thus represents a vital addition to our understandings of this hallowed
space.
Next connection
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other sites or spaces you’d share?
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