Public parks are a large part of American culture, offering familiar spaces. Parks may be a commonplace landscape, but they have an unusual origin – cemeteries.
A Response to Urbanization and Industrial America
During the United States’s urban expansion of the 1800s, cemeteries were located within towns and cities; many of these cemeteries were graveyards attached to churches. Urban expansion and industrialization resulted in overpopulation, this was true for the dead as well as the living.
Many cemeteries quickly became “overcrowded, unkempt, unhealthy, and unsightly.” This unkempt nature of urban cemeteries was often directly due to the little care that was being put into them.
This was also a time when the Miasma Theory was prevalent.
The Miasma Theory
The Miasma theory posited that diseases, such as cholera and tuberculosis, were caused by noxious or poisonous vapors that were emitted from decomposing organic material. This included human corpses.
https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-101393375-img
This fear of miasmic vapors led to a movement to push burials out of the cities and into more rural locals.
Mount Auburn Cemetery
In a time when Americans of the mid-19th century grappled with industrialization and the societal shift away from nature, America’s first garden cemetery was established.
One Boston doctor in particular had become concerned over miasma and the spread of disease, Dr. Jacob Bigelow. Bigelow was a Harvard professor in addition to being a physician. Through his connections, in 1825, he brought his plan forth for a rural cemetery before a group of local civic leaders.
His plan was for a large cemetery of family plots which included a landscape of shrubs, trees, and flowers. In 1831, a 72-acre farm located in Watertown and Cambridge had just been put up for sale, at its center a 125-foot hill boasting scenic views of Cambridge and Boston. And the Mount Auburn Cemetery was born.
Due to the natural aspect of Bigelow’s vision, it only made sense that the newly formed Massachusetts Horticultural Society take the lead.
Henry A. S. Dearborn, the president of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, was heavily influenced by European styles. In particular, he was influenced by the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris and English-landscaped parks.
To enhance the scenery as John Bigelow envisioned, Dearborn created an experimental garden that included both domestic and exotic fruits, flowers, and vegetables. As the popularity of the cemetery grew over time, seeds were sent from other horticulturalists to add to the experimental garden, including the London Horticultural Society. Dearborn also worked in conjunction with civic engineer Alexander Wardworth to construct winding roads that followed the natural contours of the hill.
By 1835, the cemetery had become a private nonprofit corporation, ending its relationship with both Dearborn and the experimental garden. However, horticulture has remained an integral part of the cemetery’s ideology and practice.
By 1870, Mount Auburn Cemetery became a popular birdwatching destination, leading the Trustees to establish a Committee on Birds and the planting of fruit trees and cherubs to attract more birds. Today, the cemetery has over 5,500 trees, shrubs, and other plants from around the world.
But what of the residents of the Mount Auburn Cemetery?
https://www.mountauburn.org/hazel-dell/
When the cemetery was first established, family lots of 200sqft could be purchased for $30 or 300sqft for $100. The 300sqft lots “were usually circumscribed by stone coping of wrought iron fences, with a gate at the entrance to the lot. A monument (usually an obelisk) rose from the center of the average lot and towered over the headstones and footstones” (Farrell, 1980). Today, Mount Auburn Cemetery is home to over 100,000 burials.
Cemeteries as the First American Parks
From its inception, Mount Auburn cemetery was not meant to be like any other cemetery that had come before it. Mount Auburn was designed to be a haven for both the living and the dead. In his speech at the 1831 Harvard Exhibition stated that rural cemeteries “are not for the dead. They are for the living.”
And as noted by Thomas Bender, “America’s rural cemeteries were explicitly designed both for the living and for the dead, and the assumption underlying their widespread popularity were central to mid-nineteenth-century American ideas about the relation of cityscape and landscape in an urbanizing society.”
In addition to Dearborn’s experimental garden and landscaping elements of the cemetery, “it presents every fine variety of surface, with trees and shrubs in proliferation upon slopes of soft hills. Several ponds reflect the sylvan scenery and funerary architecture that surrounded them. Within the cemetery avenues (for carriages) and paths (for pedestrians) curled through the grounds” (Farell, 1980).
Mount Auburn transformed the cemetery from a place of solemn mourning to one of relaxed reflection.
In his address during the consecration of Mount Auburn, Joseph Story expressed that “the rural cemetery would be more comforting to the mouner than the ‘noisy press of business’ surrounding a city churchyard. He stated, “There is, therefore within our reach, every variety of natural and artificial scenery…We stand, as it were, upon the borders of two worlds…we may gather lessons of profound wisdom by contrasting the one with the other.”
Story was implying “that the influence of the rural cemetery could purify the city without compromising its urbanity.”
Mount Auburn was a place to take a stroll or carriage ride and experience rolling hills and exotic plants. Due to its landscaping and serenity, Mount Auburn Cemetery and “the success of rural cemeteries stimulated the movement for public parks and the profession of landscape architecture” (Farrell, 1980).
This isn’t hard to believe when you consider that Mount Auburn was essentially America’s first public park.
The 1800s were, for the United States, a time of urban expansion and industrialization. Many Americans during thiy time were pulled by the duality of technological advancement and distancing from nature. Fear of disease and overcrowding made it necessary for burial grounds to be pushed out of the city.
Mount Auburn was the first of its kind in America, the first rural/garden cemetery. Mount Auburn was both a burial ground and nature reprieve, giving mourners a serene place to tend to their loved ones’ graves.
Not only was Mount Auburn the first rural/garden cemetery, but it was also America’s first public park and inspired the park movement that followed.
References
About. Mount Auburn Cemetery. (n.d.). https://www.mountauburn.org/about/
Farrell, J. (1980). The Development of the Modern Cemetery. In Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830-1920 (pp. 99–146). essay, Temple University Press. Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/inventingamerica0000farr/page/99/mode/2up.
Taylor & Frances (Accessed 2024) Miasma Theory. https://taylorandfrancis.com/knowledge/medicine-and-healthcare/miscellaneous/miasma-theory/ U.S. Department of the Interior. (n.d.). Mount Auburn Cemetery (U.S. National Park Service). National Parks Service. https://www.nps.gov/places/mount-auburn-cemetery.htm
