A New American Landscape
Mount Auburn Cemetery was the expression of a new idea.
Before 1831, most Americans were buried in isolated plots or in crowded town graveyards. Mount Auburn’s founders had a new vision. They designed a tranquil, natural setting, well outside the city, to bury and commemorate the dead and to inspire and comfort the living. This principle continues to guide the Cemetery’s management and use today.
Over time, Mount Auburn responded to changing ideas about burial, mourning, and even death itself. The Cemetery’s different landscape sections illustrate customs in American society over nearly two centuries.
Mount Auburn’s story is broadly categorized into five distinct eras. Learning more about the development of land and the public use during these different periods will help you “read” our landscape today:
The Founding (1831)
A Bold New Vision (1830s – 1850s)
Managing the Vision (1870s – 1920s)
Meeting 20th-Century Needs (1930s – 1990s)
Mount Auburn Today (2000s – Present)
Continue reading to learn more about the evolution of this National Historic Landmark and discover some of the personal, family, and national history you can find here.
Above: Forest Pond, engraving by James Smillie for Mount Auburn Illustrated, 1847. The pond was filled in 1918; 20th-century memorials are now found there.
1831
THE FOUNDING
Members of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society founded Mount Auburn in 1831. The Cemetery was the first in North America to combine these features:
★ Large scale
★ Designed landscape
★ Open to the public
★ Outside the city center
★ Permanent family lots
★ Established as a nonprofit corporation
First plan of the Cemetery, 1831. Drawn by civil engineer Alexander Wadsworth. General Henry A. S. Dearborn, president of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, laid out the avenues and paths. Dr. Jacob Bigelow, the Society’s corresponding secretary, named them for trees and other plants.
The Rural Cemetery Movement
Mount Auburn offered a place of permanent rest for the deceased. Before Mount Auburn, urban graveyards were utilitarian, crowded, unhealthy, and impermanent. Cities struggled to find room for the dead. Graves and graveyards were often moved and occasionally lost or destroyed. Mount Auburn’s concept of permanent family lots in a setting of natural beauty was immediately popular. Cities across the country began using it as a model to create their own rural cemeteries. Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn (1838) and Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati (1845) are two of many examples.
This rural cemetery movement helped persuade cities and towns to create public gardens and parks, such as Central Park in New York City.
Charms of Early Mount Auburn: Nature and Art in Harmony
Early visitors to Mount Auburn described the Cemetery as having an Arcadian loveliness that no other spot in America could match.
View of Consecration Dell. Engraving by James Smillie, 1847. A solitary mourner sits by the grave of Martha Coffin Derby. This monument no longer exists.
View of Binney Monument. Engraving by James Smillie, 1847. Visitors were drawn to the grave of young Emily Binney. Her monument, the image of a sleeping child by Henry Dexter, was the first life-size marble sculpture ever carved by an American in this country. In the 1930s, when the marble had deteriorated, the family removed the monument.
Pilgrim Path. Engraving by James Smillie for Mount Auburn Illustrated, 1847.
1830s – 1850s
A BOLD NEW VISION
The design of Mount Auburn Cemetery in this period reflected a romanticized view of death. The Cemetery’s founders wanted to create a balance between nature and art. They saw it as a place to console and inspire the public and encourage a healing connection to nature.
The early landscape of Mount Auburn retained the original natural contours of hills, valleys, and ponds. Trees covered much of the site. In this era, when few cities had public parks or museums, Mount Auburn served as a park and a “museum without walls.”
Map of Mount Auburn, 1847. Roads and paths followed the natural contours of the land.
Above, clockwise from top left: Gossler Lot on Yarrow Path; Oxnard Lot on Narcissus Path; Loring Lot on Oxalis Path; Appleton Lot on Woodbine Path. All engravings by James Smillie for Mount Auburn Illustrated, 1847. Although the fences are gone, the monuments remain in place today.
“[Mount Auburn is] a pleasure garden instead of a place of graves.”
Fanny Kemble, actress, 1833
Monuments Tell Stories
The monuments in Mount Auburn Cemetery tell stories by their location, size, materials, design, images, and inscriptions. Mount Auburn was founded in an era of monument building when the new nation wanted to celebrate the past and instruct the living. The Cemetery’s monuments honored the dead through narrative and allegory, often using figures and symbols from ancient times.
Caterpillar Transforming into a Butterfly. The popular image, used on a number of monuments, symbolized death as the transition between one form of life and another.
Weeping Female Figures. Detail from the Magoun Monument, Fir Avenue, erected in 1851. Mourners consoled each other with the hope that one day they would be reunited with the deceased, “all in love…one household still.”
Hooped Snake and Winged Hourglass. Detail from the Appleton Monument, Woodbine Path, 1834. The snake swallowing its tail symbolizes eternity, time without beginning or end. The winged hourglass reminded viewers of fleeting time.
“Here let us erect the memorials of our love and gratitude, and our glory.”
Joseph Story, Consecration Address, 1831
Choosing Monuments
In this period, families controlled the design, installation, and maintenance of their own monuments. Families looked to the past for architectural styles. Popular choices included Egyptian, Neoclassical, and Gothic models, balanced by natural surroundings and landscaping.
Gothic. The popular architectural style, also used for homes and churches, can be seen on many imposing monuments and small gravestones throughout the Cemetery. This example is the Winchester Tomb on Narcissus Path.
Neoclassical. European physician Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, who died in Boston in 1832, was honored by a Neoclassical monument in the form of a sarcophagus. In the late 1700s, explorers unearthed such forms from ancient Roman burials. This marble can be seen today on Central Avenue. Many similar monuments are found throughout the Cemetery.
Egyptian. The Story monument on Narcissus Path is one of the Cemetery’s many obelisks, a popular form derived from ancient Egypt and used by the Greeks and Romans.
Engravings from Dearborn’s Guide Through Mount Auburn by Nathaniel S. Dearborn.
“If you follow the windings of the paths you come unexpectedly upon these simple & beautiful obelisks.”
Mary Peabody, visitor, 1834
Monument Materials
Many kinds of building material were used. In the early decades, white marble was the most popular. The Cemetery’s monuments, gravestones, statues, tombs, crypts, and borders were constructed from marble, limestone, brownstone, granite, cast iron, bronze, and some slate.
Monument materials weather over time. Mold, lichens, and algae change the appearance of the stones. Marble and limestone dissolve in acid rain and snow. Brownstone and slate may peel apart in layers. Granite is the most durable.
When you visit, look, but please do not touch the monuments. Many are very fragile!
MARBLE:
BROWNSTONE (SANDSTONE):
GRANITE:
Enclosing the Family Lot
In the early 19th century, owners embellished family lots with fences, curbs, and plantings. Mount Auburn’s original bylaws gave families ownership of individual lots with responsibility to care for them and define their boundaries. First with cast iron fences, then granite curbs, lot owners installed thousands of borders that turned the Cemetery into a kind of patchwork quilt. The result was unsightly clutter.
By the mid-1870s, new aesthetic ideas called for maintenance by a professional staff. Mount Auburn prohibited lot enclosures in new areas and removed them from older ones.
Lots near the Entrance, looking toward Central Avenue, 1870s. By the 1870s, the older parts of the Cemetery were filled with fences, curbing, and monuments, losing the picturesque qualities of the early Cemetery and creating huge maintenance problems.
George Jones lot on Central Avenue, 1870s. Many owners embellished family lots with furniture, vases, and art.
Howland Lot on Elm Avenue, 1870s. In the brief period of 1860-1875, more than 1,000 granite borders or curbings were added to enclose family lots.
View from the Tower, looking north, 1870s
A Place of Inspiration: A Place of repose, a place for heroes, a place for the living
The founders of Mount Auburn Cemetery believed the dead could inspire the living through their character, past achievements, or public service. For mourners and other visitors, Mount Auburn was intended to be peaceful and uplifting. Nineteenth-century guidebooks promoted the quiet beauty of the Cemetery.
View of Bowditch Monument. Engraving by James Smillie, 1847. The life-size bronze statue of Nathaniel Bowditch (1773-1838) was erected by public subscription. Bowditch prepared The New American Practical Navigator, a manual used by every New England ship master of his time. It is still in use today.
The Monument to Channing. Engraving by James Smillie for Mount Auburn Illustrated, 1847. The monument to the great Unitarian leader William Ellery Channing (1780 – 1842) honored him for his eloquence and courage and for advancing the cause of truth, religion, and human freedom.
Guidebooks. Several publishers produced guidebooks about Mount Auburn Cemetery from the 1830s through the 1880s. This is one of many editions of a popular guide that included a map of the Cemetery and descriptions of individual monuments.
“And here the admiring youth shall come to seek some relic of the great and good-whose fame shall gather greenness from the hand of Time.”
Lydia Sigourney, 1840s
1870s-1920s
MANAGING THE VISION
In the decades after the Civil War, ideas about death and burial grew less sentimental. Mount Auburn reflected this trend. The earlier emphasis on balancing art and nature shifted to greater simplicity, economy, and uniformity in the Cemetery’s appearance.
Starting in the 1870s, a professional staff began developing the former Stone Farm to the south of Washington Tower as a “landscape lawn.” Family lots shared grassy lawns accented by a few prominent points of interest. The Cemetery also began regulating memorials. The result was an open, park-like landscape.
Plan of Mount Auburn Cemetery, 1854. The Cemetery purchased the Stone Farm area of about 20 acres in 1854 and began developing it for use in the 1870s. Other areas were also developed in the “landscape lawn” style.
View to Washington Tower from the Stone Farm Area, 1893 from Mount Auburn Cemetery, Boston, a promotional souvenir album. In the new plan, no fences, curbs, or hedges enclosing lots were permitted.
South Gate on Coolidge Avenue, ca.1900. The South Gate, built in 1875, provided an entrance to the new Stone Farm area. The gate was removed in the 1920s.
View from Washington Tower to the Stone farm Area, 1957. Photograph by Arthur C. Haskell. Carefully located ornamental trees and flowering shrubs added color contrasts to the lawn.
Stone Farm Area, 1957. Photograph by Arthur C. Haskell. Lot owners could erect one central monument, but all individual headstones had to be lower than 2.5 feet.
“The general effect of grassy lawns … is gratifying to the eye … it is the aim of the Trustees to introduce the features of the landscape lawn as far as possible.”
Israel M Spelman, President, Mount Auburn Cemetery, Annual Report, 1892
Unifying the Landscape
The Stone Farm area was planned for carriage drives rather than strolling visitors. As part of the design for this area, gently curving roads and paths emphasized focal points in the landscape. Mount Auburn leveled the ground and filled in wetlands in Stone Farm before laying out family lots.
Plan of Mount Auburn, 1874. Superintendents Charles Folsom (1870-1873) and James W. Lovering (1873-1895) recommended a plan that avoided straight lines, emphasized curving avenues, and eliminated hills and hollows.
” … follow as easily as practicable, the natural ‘lay of the land’ so that a carriage will meet no abrupt hills or hollows but have a smooth and easy grade.”
Col. Charles W Folsom, Superintendent,
on the design for Stone Farm, May 9, 1871
Professional Management
This period marked the start of the high-level, professional management and maintenance still offered by Mount Auburn Cemetery today. By the 1870s, many families no longer cared for their own lots or designed monuments and landscaping. The Cemetery’s expanding size, the expense of maintaining it, and the disrepair of neglected family plots required Mount Auburn to introduce professional management.
Mount Auburn pioneered perpetual care contracts for burial lots in the 1870s. After 1876, all sales of interment space included guaranteed care of the turf by the Cemetery. Endowment payments were also sought to provide for perpetual maintenance of the lots in older sections and the care for monuments and tombs.
Tending Flower Beds, ca. 1870s. Crews of gardeners maintained the ornamental plantings created by the Cemetery. Mount Auburn first encouraged, then required, lot owners to have all work on their family lots done by the Cemetery’s own staff.
Asa Gray Garden, 1883. Illustration from a souvenir album. Initiated in the 1860s, this ornamental garden near the Mount Auburn Street entrance grew more elaborate with labor-intensive plantings, demonstrating the horticultural skills of the Cemetery’s staff.
Alice’s Fountain, 1883. Illustration from a souvenir album. This popular ornamental area, a gift from a private donor in memory of her daughter, also reflected the high standards of care offered at the Cemetery.
Modifying the Landscape
As Mount Auburn took control of landscaping and maintenance, it changed the landscape throughout the Cemetery to reflect new ideas and needs. The new professional staff under the direction of the Trustees of the Cemetery initiated complex projects: hilltops were leveled, wetlands filled, and ornamental display gardens created and improved. Memorials were regulated and made more uniform. The Cemetery required that all monuments be placed on foundations constructed by its own staff.
The Cemetery made improvements such as grading and paving avenues and paths. The ornamental garden areas created in the 1860s in the older sections now received expert care from Mount Auburn’s expanding staff.
Paving Poplar Avenue, ca. 1910. Miles of pavement were laid in the early 20th century by the Cemetery’s own staff working under new generations of professional management.
Cremation
Growing acceptance of cremation reflects changing American ideas about death. Cremation, the burning of the dead body, is an age-old and widespread practice, but it was rare in the United States until the late 1800s. Religious opposition to cremation waned and scientific interest grew. Cemeteries such as Mount Auburn began to encourage cremation. In 1900, Mount Auburn renovated its historic Bigelow Chapel to accommodate the first crematory located in a Massachusetts cemetery.
The Crematory Chapel, 1900. The first Cremation took place on April 1, 1900.
Bigelow Chapel Columbarium, 1920s. Beginning in 1908, Mount Auburn built niches for the permanent placement of cremated remains.
Bigelow Chapel Interior, 1920s. Increasing use of the Chapel for services inspired the complete reconstruction of the interior and entrance in 1924.
Below: Bigelow Chapel, then and now. A basement built under the Chapel housed the first crematory. This basement crematory was replaced in 1969 with a crematory on the western side of the Chapel. A new glass and steel addition, housing a modern crematory and additional public gathering spaces, was completed in 2019.
“In this country, the movement for cremation is very largely among the comfortable classes, who chose this method for themselves.”
-The Boston Daily Globe on the opening of the crematory, 1900
1930s – 1990s
MEETING 2Oth-CENTURY NEEDS
The modern concept of a memorial park reflects 20th-century changes in attitudes about death and in our society itself. American society became more secular and families smaller. Members were less likely to live, die, and be buried together. The public wanted interment spaces for one or two graves, not complete family lots.
Mount Auburn responded by developing Willow Pond, an area that resembles a public park. No above-ground memorials are allowed. Instead of grand monuments to families or individuals, the area features wide expanses of lawn and gardens, grave markers flush with the ground, and works of art commissioned by the Cemetery.
Plan of Mount Auburn Cemetery, 1915. The Willow Pond area, shown as undeveloped space on this map, was purchased in 1912 and developed for use beginning in the 1930s. This remains an “active burial” area today.
View of Willow Pond, 1950s. A few wide avenues provide access for visitors arriving by car, but the emphasis on its views of lawns, plantings, and reflections on water. Willows, trees that had been growing in the area for decades, were cultivated around the pond, creating the central feature.
“The design…of the modern cemetery [is] to develop a cemetery that one would wish to visit as a beautiful park…”
Laurence Caldwell, landscape architect, 1935
20th-Century Memorials
Markers flush with the ground are personal expressions, seen and read only by standing next to them. They are often reflections of beliefs held by the deceased and their families. After the introduction of markers flush with the ground in the Willow Pond area, the use of these lawn markers spread to other parts of the Cemetery.
In the 20th century, the Cemetery, not individual owners, created focal points with commemorative art. At Willow Pond Knoll, the sculpture garden and the view itself create a shared memorial.
Lawn Markers at Willow Pond, 1969. On the sloping lawn, markers flush with the ground are visible but the area has a park-like appearance.
Meadow Sections, 1969. In the areas west of Willow Pond developed in the 1950s, uniform upright memorials, lawn markers, and plantings create the look of small, private gardens.
Willow Pond Knoll, 1981. In the early 1980s, Mount Auburn selected Massachusetts sculptor Richard Duca to design a sculpture for the Willow Pond Knoll. The Cemetery added an inscription wall and garden designed by Julie Moir Messervy in 1995.
The Cemetery as Arboretum
Since its founding in 1831, Mount Auburn has preserved the mature trees on its grounds. In the 1930s, Mount Auburn President Oakes Ames brought a renewed focus to preserving and improving Mount Auburn’s collection of trees. Today the Cemetery has more than 5,000 trees representing 630 taxa in its collection. Many specimens are native to the area while others are fine examples of species from around the world.
Above: Trees of Mount Auburn, 1940s. Photographs by Arthur C. Haskell.
Above: Trees of Mount Auburn, 1970s. Photographs by Alan Chesney.
“It is hoped that eventually all of the more desirable species of trees that thrive in this climate will be represented at Mount Auburn, thereby carrying out the original plans of the founders.”
Oakes Ames, President, Mount Auburn, Annual Report, 1939
2000s – Present
MOUNT AUBURN TODAY
Mount Auburn’s mission today remains the same as on the day of its founding: to offer a dignified, beautiful, and tranquil setting for the burial and commemoration of the dead and give comfort and inspiration to the living.
In 1993, Mount Auburn developed a master plan to guide its work. It calls for the preservation and enhancement of the Cemetery’s natural and cultural resources while continuing to provide cemetery services to clients and interpretation to visitors. Mount Auburn continues to carry out its diverse responsibilities as a nonprofit cemetery, museum and sculpture garden, arboretum, wildlife sanctuary, and historic site.
Consecration Dell. In 1997 the Cemetery began an ambitious project to return Consecration Dell to a naturalistic woodland. Today the landscape, with new native plantings, is maintained as the last vestige of the early rural cemetery and an important habitat for urban wildlife.
Spruce Knoll. With the rising acceptance of cremation, Mount Auburn has created new burial gardens like this woodland setting designed by Julie Moir Messervy where cremated remains are buried to become part of the ecology.
Memorial to Amos Binney. Mount Auburn’s holistic approach to preservation considers the landscape’s built and natural elements. Careful conservation of the marble Binney memorial by sculptor Thomas Crawford was followed with the installation of low maintenance and historically appropriate groundcovers.
Asa Gray Garden. The revitalization of the Cemetery’s Entrance area is currently underway. Recent updates to Bigelow Chapel (seen in the background) and Asa Gray Garden carefully consider the past while preparing Mount Auburn for a third century of active use.
Visitors. Mount Auburn welcomes 200,000 visitors each year who come to visit graves, connect with nature, and seek comfort and inspiration.
“Preservation and enhancement of the landscape will take precedence in cemetery development. Natural beauty, diversity, spaciousness, and the integration of natural features and monuments are key design elements.”
Mount Auburn Cemetery Master Plan Principles, 1993
Acknowledgements
This online exhibit is an adaptation of the permanent exhibit “Mount Auburn: A New American Landscape” created for our Visitors Center. Funding for the exhibit was provided by:
Anthony J. and Mildred D. Ruggiero Memorial Trust
and Generous donations to the Friends of Mount Auburn Cemetery from members, donors, and Corporate sponsors.
To ensure that the Cemetery endures for future generations, we invite everyone to support the Friends of Mount Auburn.
Member Spotlight: Harold I. Pratt’s Family Research Guide
Curiosity about past generations of our families is a common interest for many of us, especially at a site like Mount Auburn where our landscape and historical collections are filled with tangible records of so many individuals from nearly two centuries. Longtime 1831 Society member Harold I. (Harry) Pratt has been finding out compelling, noteworthy stories of some of his nineteenth-century ancestors for many years, including two Mount Auburn notables: famed mathematician and navigator Nathaniel Bowditch and Civil War colonel Norwood Penrose Hallowell (Harry’s great-great-great and great-great grandfathers on different sides, respectively). He and his wife, Frances, were eventually inspired to create a short reference book on four of their ancestors, including Bowditch and Hallowell, as a family resource for future generations. The final product was Four Worthy Ancestors, printed by The Ascencius Press in Bar Mills, ME in 2022.
Learning about everyone was a gradual process, Harry recalls, thanks to a combination of saving family documents and participating in programs, trips, and exhibit events with ties to these individuals. “I’d accumulated quite a bit of information about them, which at first ended up on an apocryphal lower shelf in my home. It got bigger and bigger with stuff from the family that I didn’t know much about. And then more time passed, and the lower shelf was getting pretty full. So I began to separate the material and put together a three ring notebook for each of the four ancestors. That got me to thinking that it might be good if I could put together a little book about all this, for the benefit of our children, grandchildren, etc.” That inspired him to read everything more carefully and do additional research, deepening his knowledge of each individual. Now, he and Frances have distributed the final version among their extended families – as well as sending a copy to Mount Auburn’s Historical Collections & Archives as an informal, non-academic resource on both Bowditch and Hallowell.
Harry’s advice to anyone interested in researching family history is that there are more resources than you might think, if you start asking around. “I was so blessed by having access to a significant amount of written material about the old boys. But my advice is that if someone is interested in their family’s lineage, start talking to other relatives. Very often cousins have quiet interest in these things that you wouldn’t have known about. Find out if there are any family diaries. If you want to find out deeds or that kind of stuff, try the local probate court. There’s more out there than anyone might suspect. And as I said, I’ve been so fortunate in having – either by accident, or by pure luck – ended up with a lot of material. My job was to try to sort it out and make some sense of it.”
Mount Auburn resources on Nathaniel Bowditch:
https://mountauburn.org/nathaniel-bowditch-1773-1838/
https://mountauburn.org/nathaniel-bowditch-statue/
Mount Auburn resources on Norwood Penrose Hallowell:
https://mountauburn.org/paul-laurence-dunbar-voice-of-fate/
https://mountauburn.org/sesquicentennial-second-battle-of-fort-wagner/
https://mountauburn.org/civil-war-union-colonels/
Commemorating Simon Antranighian
Memorializing local heritage: creating a monument for Mount Auburn’s first Armenian resident
Mount Auburn is working with a group of Armenian history and culture advocates to erect a monument to daguerreotypist Simon Antranighian (1827 – 1855), the first known Armenian buried at Mount Auburn. He was interred in a public lot in an unmarked grave – the first of more than 3,000 Armenians to be buried here up through today. While this group includes Armenian national heroes, there are also thousands of everyday individuals like Antranighian who helped establish their heritage in the Boston area, which now has the third-largest Armenian population in the United States.
A pioneer who deserves to be remembered
In 1853, the 26-year-old Simon Antranighian arrived in Boston on the clipper ship Sultana from Smyrna (Izmir), Turkey. When he applied for U.S. citizenship the following spring, he stated that he was an “Artist,” born in Constantinople (Istanbul), Turkey, in 1827. Probate records suggest that Antranighian worked as a daguerreotypist (an early type of photographer) and a waiter in what is now Boston’s South Bay.
According to his death record, Antranighian died on March 15, 1855, just 470 days after his arrival. His cause of death was listed as “Infl. of lungs,” which could have been one of several respiratory diseases – including tuberculosis and pneumonia – that were common killers in 19th-century cities.
Antranighian was interred in the public St. John Lot on Vesper Avenue in an unmarked grave. He was the first known Armenian to be buried at Mount Auburn – but not the last.
A community effort
In 2014, volunteer docent Stephen Pinkerton collaborated with Ruth Thomasian of Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives and Marc Mamigonian of the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research to present a program celebrating the lives of Armenians buried here, as a centennial commemoration of the Armenian Genocide. It was during this collaboration that Stephen identified Antranighian’s story. After that, they formed an informal “Armenian Friends of Mount Auburn Cemetery” group with fellow advocates to pursue installation of a grave marker for Antranighian, designed by sculptor Robert Shure of Skylight Studios in Woburn, as well as James Holman of Mount Auburn.
Support this project
You can help us make this monument a reality! We are raising funds for the costs of creating the monument and landscaping around it. Your donation will join others from the Watertown community to create this important memorial to our local history.
A Good Neighbor: John Chipman Gray the Elder
By Karen Falb
Mount Auburn Cemetery and the nearby Larchwood Neighborhood (Fig. 1) have a history going back to the Cemetery’s founding in 1831. At that time, the neighborhood was an estate owned by John Chipman Gray (1793-1881), a state politician and horticulturist who resided on Boston’s Summer Street. He used his Cambridge property as a family farmstead and summer residence convenient to Boston, where he served as both a state representative and senator from 1829 to 1852. Researchers today can find him listed as John Gray, John C. Gray, and John Chipman Gray the Elder. His estate was inherited by his nephew John Chipman Gray (1839-1915), son of Horace Gray, Harvard Law Professor and partner in the law firm Ropes and Gray. After the death of the younger Gray, the estate was developed into the Larchwood Neighborhood in 1915.
John Gray was one of the many gentleman farmers of the Boston area involved with prominent voluntary associations such as the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Society for the Promotion of Massachusetts Agriculture. He was also a founding member and first vice president (1829-1833) of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society during its early years, when it championed the project of developing a rural cemetery. Although the Society’s president Henry Dearborn and corresponding secretary Jacob Bigelow were the masterminds of what became Mount Auburn, the support of people like John Gray made their efforts successful.
One of the most important of these supporters was the merchant and art collector George W. Brimmer, whose land bordering Mount Auburn Street in Cambridge became the core of the Cemetery (Fig. 2). Beginning in 1825, Brimmer had purchased acreage in Watertown and Cambridge with the idea of making an estate. But by 1831 he had given up the idea because of ill health, and was eager to sell the land to the Massachusetts Horticultural Society for its new cemetery. One of Brimmer’s original Cambridge parcels was purchased from John Gray’s father, the Boston merchant and Massachusetts politician William “Billy” Gray. However, Gray had retained 1.3 acres directly in front of his mansion and the triangle of land between Brattle and Mount Auburn Streets.
When his father died later in 1825, John Gray inherited the 1.3-acre parcel with the estate and mansion. He then sold that land to George Brimmer in September 1831, adding to the total area purchased by the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. And later that fall, he helped support the Society’s financing of the cemetery land by buying three contiguous lots for the Gray family’s future needs. Since he and his wife, Elizabeth, had no children, those future needs included those of his older single brother, Frances Calley Gray, and his younger brother Horace Gray and his family. His parents were already interred in St. Paul’s Cathedral on Tremont Street in Boston.
Located on a foothill by the intersection of Hemlock and Lily Paths, the Gray family lots are on a line from the original mansion house site to the Mount Auburn mount. Perhaps the lots were chosen by John and Elizabeth for existing views both from and to the mansion. 25 years after their purchase, the first burial was of Frances Calley Gray in 1856. His poignant marble memorial of an old loyal dog catches one’s attention to this day. The next burial was of Horace Gray in 1873, marked by a simple marble stone. John’s wife, Elizabeth Pickering Gardner Gray (aunt to Isabella Stewart Gardner’s husband), followed in 1879, and John joined her in 1881 (Fig. 4).
What should John Gray be remembered for today? Certainly his support of the Cemetery during its first year is important. This included his leadership in the Massachusetts Horticultural Society as well as personal decisions to sell land to complete the cemetery and provide financial support by buying lots. Later he was a Trustee from 1845-1849 and a neighbor for fifty years. It is easy to imagine, though, that as a horticulturist he must have been at least initially disappointed when the Massachusetts Horticultural Society’s goal of developing experimental gardens in or near his former 1.3 acres was dropped by 1835 when Mount Auburn became a separate corporation.
Meanwhile, the Larchwood Neighborhood still memorializes him as well, especially his interest in trees. Its name was inspired by the trees he and other family descendants planted at the edge of the estate for privacy. Many of these interesting estate trees were saved by the architectural landscape firm Pray Hubbard and White when they planned the neighborhood in 1915. A few from the Gray estate survive to this day. (Fig. 6 – top photo. A memorial commemorating the 100th birthday of the neighborhood placed in the Larchwood cul de sac on Fresh Pond Lane. Photo by Karen Falb.)
Karen Falb is a retired biology teacher and landscape historian. She and her husband, Peter Falb, have enjoyed the Cemetery’s beauty and history for almost 50 years as neighbors living in the Larchwood Neighborhood, almost on the original site of the Gray’s family mansion now located on Larch Road.