History

…And all rare blossoms from every clime

Grew in that garden in perfect prime.

            -Percy Bysshe Shelley

We encourage all to visit our newly renovated Asa Gray Garden. In collaboration with the award-winning Halvorson Design Partnership and R. P. Marzilli Landscape Contractor, this garden includes a diverse mix of 130 taxa of trees, shrubs, perennials, grasses, annuals and bulbs which will provide four-seasons of color, texture and interest. An enlarged central water feature and reflecting pool help create a sense of calm within this newly re-designed meditative landscape.

…made him feel as if the fountain were an immortal spirit

that sung its song unceasingly

and without heeding the vicissitudes around it…

-Nathaniel Hawthorne

In lieu of specific plant discussion, we recall this garden’s namesake, the preeminent nineteenth century botanist, Asa Gray (1810-1888). The eldest of eight siblings of a farmer/tanner in Sauquoit, New York, he graduated from Fairfield Medical College in 1831. Lynn Barber in The Heyday of Natural History 1820-1870 states, “At the beginning of the nineteenth century, all laymen and most scientists believed that the earth and all the species on it had been created by God in six days towards the end of October in the year 4004 B.C.” Gray eschewed an incipient medical practice for a botanical life that led to decades of research and publishing. Later botanical renown positioned him to become the foremost American advocate of Charles Darwin (1809-1882), when in 1859, Origin of Species revealed the then heretical theory of evolution and the process of natural selection. (more…)

Mount Auburn Cemetery is pleased to announce that we are starting a new program to help us tell the stories of the more than 100,000 remarkable individuals buried and commemorated at the Cemetery. These stories will be shared on our new online Memorial Pages http://mountauburn.org/onlinememorialpages/ 

In conjunction with the launch of our online Memorial Pages, we are pleased to offer an exciting new program to digitize memorabilia relating to individuals buried and commemorated at Mount Auburn.

This free service will be offered to the public on the first Friday of each month, beginning Friday May 4th between the hours of 10:00 AM -12:00 PM.

By appointment only. To sign up for First Fridays: Digitization Days, please visit: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/first-fridays-mount-auburn-digitization-days-tickets-45600936629

Mount Auburn’s staff will meet you in the Visitor Center in Story Chapel at 580 Mount Auburn Street Cambridge, MA.

We recommend that you bring in 3-5 documents, photos, or small objects (smaller than 11 x 17 inches) that we will scan or photograph as time allows. You are welcome to make additional appointments.

Memorabilia can include anything you would like to digitize to illustrate the life of the person, including portraits, photographs, letters, scrapbooks, diplomas, awards, and talks.

We will return your original materials to you and give you a flash drive of your digitized files and instructions on how to add these images to Mount Auburn’s new online Memorial Pages.

Please note that we are also looking for materials that document Mount Auburn through the years such as photographs or accounts of visitors and staff at the Cemetery, funerals in the Cemetery, views of the Cemetery and its landscape, monuments, and structures. If you have any collections that you would like to share with our curator, please make an appointment.

According to Mount Auburn Cemetery’s Glossary of Terms prepared by the Curator of Historical Collections, Meg L. Winslow, a Columbarium is “a structure, room or space in a mausoleum or other building designed to hold multiple cremated remains in niches.”  At Mount Auburn we have two public Columbaria, one in each Chapel, as well as private family Columbaria. (more…)

Mount Auburn’s diverse collection of monuments and funerary art from the early nineteenth century through today, interwoven into the landscape, is the reason for so much of our aesthetic richness, educational value, and historical significance. By nature of being an outdoor collection, many of our monuments now require an extra level of care and maintenance to protect them after years of exposure to the elements. The Friends of Mount Auburn Cemetery has been working on a multi-year initiative to prioritize conservation of the most significant monuments on our grounds ever since 2014, and plans are now underway for the latest in this series for 2018. (more…)