Massachusetts Book of the Dead by Roxie J. Zwicker

Author:Roxie J. Zwicker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2012-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Mount Auburn Cemetery remains one of the most visited cemeteries in the world.

Before the establishment of Mount Auburn Cemetery, people’s beliefs about death were dark and gloomy; the grim reaper was everywhere. People were also aware that the cemeteries of Boston were becoming dangerously overfilled, and as aforementioned, bones and coffins regularly became exposed, increasing the risk of widespread disease. General Henry Dearborn, president of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, felt that the dead should be buried and honored in a place of natural beauty that would lend dignity to death. He felt that the living who were visiting their deceased loved ones needed a welcoming place of beauty that had fountains, ponds, beautiful monuments and ornamental plantings. Using the famous Pere LaChaise Cemetery as a model, Dearborn created the first public landscape in the United States. The grounds at Mount Auburn were consecrated on September 24, 1831, and the garden-style cemetery was born. Later public parks were modeled after this burial ground.

There were more than two thousand people in attendance at the consecration ceremony. Joseph Story, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, spoke at the ceremony. Following is an excerpt:

A rural Cemetery seems to combine in itself all the advantages, which can be proposed to gratify human feelings, or tranquilize human fears. And what spot can be more appropriate than this, for such a purpose? Nature seems to point it out…as the favorite retirement for the dead. There are around us all the varied features of her beauty and grandeur—the forest-crowned height, the grassy glade; and the silent grove. Here are the lofty oak, the beech…the rustling pine, and the drooping willow—the tree, that sheds its pale leaves with every autumn, a fit emblem of our own transitory bloom; and the evergreen, with its perennial shoots, instructing us, that “the wintry blast of death kills not the buds of virtue.”

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