Register for Public Events

Register for Public Events
February 26, 2024

Upcoming Public Events

ONGOING

First Saturday of Every Month, 1 PM
Discover Mount Auburn Introductory Walking Tour
These docent-led 1.5-mile walking tour will focus on stories of history, monuments, and the lives of those buried here.
Saturday, April 6
Saturday, May 4
Saturday, June 1
Saturday, July 6

Forest Bathing: A Mindful Nature Experience
Stefanie Haug (LICSW) will guide our Forest Bathing experience including simple warm-up movements, a natural history of the area, guided breathing and centering awareness, mindful walking with sensory activities, and finding a nature meditation/sit spot. 
Saturday, April 20, 1 PM
Sunday, August 11, 10 AM
Saturday, September 14, 1 PM
Saturday, October 19, 10 AM

Community Connections Walks
Join guest guide, Stefanie Haug LICSW, for a series of theme-based Community Connection Walks. Each walk includes nature-based mindfulness practices and space to listen and share what may arise around the theme of our walk.
Sunday, April 21 at 10:00-11:30am: Elderhood
Sunday, Aug 11 at 1:00pm-2:30pm: Elderhood
Saturday, Sep 14 at 10:00-11:30am: Navigating Loss
Saturday Oct 19 at 1:00-2:30pm: Navigating Loss

Morning Writes
Lead by Mount Auburn Cemetery Public Events Producer, Julie-Anne Whitney, Morning Writes is an informal writing time and a chance to meet up with other creative thinkers. Each session will begin with a few writing prompts to get you started, followed by 30-40 minutes of writing time. 
Saturday, June 15, 10 AM
Saturday, August 17, 10 AM
Saturday, September 21, 10 AM


(more…)

Floral Tribute Regulations

Floral Tribute Regulations
December 1, 2023

Tribute Guidelines

To remember and honor a loved one when you visit, tributes made of natural plant material may be left graveside. Tributes will be removed for you when they become unsightly or during area maintenance. These regulations support our Vision of environmental stewardship by helping to preserve the landscape and ensure the safety of staff, wildlife, and visitors.

(more…)

Current Hours

Current Hours
November 3, 2023

The Cemetery grounds are open to all visitors 8 AM – 6 PM every day.  Please see below for information regarding specific buildings and amenities.

(more…)

Citizen Science Naturalist Program 2024

Citizen Science Naturalist Program 2024
March 18, 2024

Classroom Trainings 2024

Nature Curious?

If you are interested in nature and would like to learn more about our local flora and fauna, please continue reading this message!

If you like to be outdoors and are interested in meeting people that care about the earth as much as you do, please continue reading this message!

If you are concerned about the potential impacts facing wildlife and wildlife habitat due to our warming climate, please read below!

(more…)

Reborn: A Conversation with Artist-in-Residence Eden Rayz

Reborn: A Conversation with Artist-in-Residence Eden Rayz
March 16, 2024

In 2023, we welcomed seven Artists-in-Residence to create original works inspired by their experiences at Mount Auburn. Meet composer and musician Eden Rayz. [above photo by Artist-in-Residence Billy Hickey]

You are a composer, cellist, and freelance private music teacher with a Master’s degree in music composition and theory from the Boston Conservatory at Berklee. You are also an extreme vocalist, cellist, and lyricist for a death metal band. How would you describe your work as a musician?

Right now, my work is centered around expanding the functionality of listening experiences as individual and community rituals. With the musical death awareness meditation “Nothingness is Impossible,” listeners are invited to meditate on their own relationships with death and dying. With “Aboriginal Sensible Muchness,” there’s another invitation to walk, notice, and question why our judgments exist. I judge this oak tree as beautiful, but this dead bird as ugly. Why is that? With “Lux Aeterna (which translates to eternal light),” the work I’m currently writing, the construct of time and our relationships with it will be examined.

(more…)

Washington Tower: Landmark, Observatory, and Cenotaph

Washington Tower: Landmark, Observatory, and Cenotaph
March 4, 2024

Above image: Washington Tower, Arthur Cushman Haskell, 1937.

In 1831, the year Mount Auburn was established, its founders “proposed to erect on the summit of Mount Auburn, a Tower, after some classic model, of sufficient height to rise above the tops of the surrounding trees. This will serve the double purpose of a landmark to identify the spot from a distance, and of an observatory, commanding an uninterrupted view of the country around it.”[1] The Garden and Cemetery Committee, responsible for the design and layout of the new cemetery, described the summit as “the most lofty eminence . . . 125 feet above the Charles River, which gracefully sweeps round its gently sloping base.”[2]

Henry A. S. Dearborn, a founder of the Cemetery, envisioned the tower as a cenotaph (monument in honor of a person buried elsewhere) to the country’s first president George Washington. “At some future period, when the munificence of the citizens shall be commensurate with their debt of patriotic gratitude this structure may perhaps give place for a stupendous monument . . . there will be reared the cenotaph of Washington, in massive blocks of granite.”[3]

Hand-written invoice for $75 in brown ink on pale blue paper
Invoice for a set of plans and working drawings, Gridley J. F. Bryant to the Proprietors of Mount Auburn Cemetery, 1852.

Another two decades would pass before the trustees voted to proceed with building the Tower in 1852.[4] Bigelow, a founder of Mount Auburn and its second president, collaborated on the design and construction of the structure with Gridley J. F. Bryant, an architect and industrial engineer, who also worked with Bigelow on the Cemetery’s first chapel. M. S. Dodd, a carpenter, built a wooden model, and Bryant created a set of plans and drawings. At a reported expense of approximately $22,000, Whitcher & Sheldon, contractors from Quincy, Massachusetts, erected the 62-foot granite tower with a granite platform at its base and stairs leading to the entrance.[5] The Tower measured 25 feet in diameter at the bottom and 15 feet in diameter at the top.

Black-and-white print of landscape with tower on hill and long stairs with carriages on road below. People are climbing stairs to the entrance and on the tower ramparts. Trees are to either side and clouds are in the sky
The Tower, Guide Through Mount Auburn, Bricher and Russell, woodcut, 1864.

For the design of Mount Auburn, Bigelow and Dearborn found inspiration in the English picturesque landscape, where summits and towers were commonly featured.[6] Historian Blanche M. G. Linden notes that the Cemetery’s topography “was ideal for creating a landscape in the English fashion, a standard feature of which was a ‘mount’ or high point . . . . Often a temple, pavilion, or tower was built atop it, providing a place for contemplation of the sublime, deemed inherent in distant horizons.”[7]

Bigelow described the historical associations of the Tower as an English Norman Revival structure that was “built on the general plan of some of the round towers of the feudal ages, and contains a gallery, battlements, Gothic windows, and a spiral staircase of stone.” [8] He praised the construction of the Tower in which “the stones are smooth hammered on both sides, so that each stone makes a part of both the inside and outside surface of the wall. The horizontal surfaces of all the stones being level and true, it is impossible that any structure, of the same materials, should be more substantial.”[9]

Black-and-white photograph of interior stone spiral stairwell with iron handrail
Interior Stairwell of Washington Tower, Paul Wainwright, 2004.

As originally intended, the Tower was placed on the highest summit, which the founders named Mount Auburn, and above the deep hollow of Consecration Dell, thereby amplifying its presence within the Cemetery. The 62-foot structure situated on the 125-foot summit reached a height of 187 feet. No competing structures were situated near it. As Bigelow advised, “It is justly considered important to the good appearance of these principal edifices, such as the Tower, the Chapel, and the Gate, that no inferior structures should be placed so near them, as to interfere with, or impair their isolated effect.”[10]

Print of a cemetery landscape with monuments, trees, plants, and a tower on high summit. A small deep dell and pond are below.
View from Consecration Dell, Prang & Meyer, lithograph, 1859.

Inside, the spiral staircase leading to two outside galleries with battlements, one at forty feet and the other at the top, offered breathtaking panoramic views of the surrounding area. As the founders envisioned:

From the foot of this monument will be seen in detail the features of the landscape, as they are successively presented through the different vistas which have been opened among the trees, while from its summit, a magnificent and unbroken panorama, embracing one of the most delightful tracts in New England, will be spread out beneath the eye. Not only the contiguous country, but the harbor and bay of Boston, with their ships and islands, and, in a clear atmosphere, the distant mountains of Wachusett, and probably even of Monadnock, will be comprehended within the range of vision.[11]

Photograph of cemetery landscape with monuments, paths, trees, curbing, and a chapel. In the background is a pond with hills in the distance
View from Washington Tower, stereograph detail, 1898.

The summit held a symbolic meaning, as Joseph Story, the first president of Mount Auburn wrote: “In the distance, the City―at once the object of our admiration and our love, ―rears its proud eminences. . . . We stand, as it were, upon the border of two worlds; and as the mood of our minds may be, we may gather lessons of profound wisdom by contrasting the one with the other.”[12]

Upon its completion in 1854, the Tower took its place, along with the Bunker Hill Monument, as one of the two tallest structures in the Boston area. It continues to serve, as Bigelow eloquently expressed:

as a landmark, by which the place of the Cemetery is designated in the distance. It identifies the spot which is already the resting place of thousands. It is a centre to which mourning hearts and eyes are daily turned, of those who would fain seek in its shadow for what remains on earth of their children and kindred.[13]

Photograph of stone tower on a hill with stairway leading to the entrance door and two women with parasols in front of the entry door. Trees to either side
Washington Tower, stereograph detail, circa 1870s.

[1] In Jacob Bigelow, A History of the Cemetery of Mount Auburn (Boston and Cambridge: James Munroe and Company, 1859), 16.

[2] Report of the Garden and Cemetery Committee, September 30, 1831, Transactions of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, 77.

[3] Henry A. S. Dearborn, Massachusetts Horticultural Society Report, October 1, 1831, published in New England Farmer, Oct 5, 1831.

[4] In the intervening years, funds were devoted to the construction of the Egyptian Revival Gateway in 1832 and the first chapel in 1844, both designed by Jacob Bigelow.

[5] Whitcher & Sheldon also worked on the renovation of Bigelow Chapel. Bigelow, 60.

[6] See Blanche M. G. Linden, Silent City on A Hill: Picturesque Landscapes of Memory and Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 229.

[7] Linden, 144.

[8] Bigelow, 60-61.

[9] Bigelow, 60-61.

[10] Bigelow, 99.

[11] Bigelow, 17.

[12] Joseph Story, “An Address Delivered on the Dedication of the Ceremony at Mount Auburn, September 24, 1831” in Bigelow, A History of the Cemetery of Mount Auburn, 162.

[13] Bigelow, 60. Repairs to the Tower over the years have included repointing of the granite and repair of the wooden windows. In 2007, Mount Auburn created the Wildflower Meadow, a one-acre garden surrounding the Tower that includes native shrubs, wildflowers, and grasses.