Architecture, Culture, & Religion: 19th—20th Centuries

Mount Auburn Cemetery, Bigelow Chapel.

Old Burying Ground, c. 1889.

Located across the Johnston Gate entrance to Harvard Yard and adjacent to the Cambridge Common, the Old Burying Ground was established in about 1635 as a necessary component of a vibrant town center. The 2-acre lot is peppered with angled headstones dating back to as early as 1653— almost twenty years after the cemetery was established. This is a reflection of the cemetery’s inconsistency in gravestone placement (which is believed to have begun at the start of the 18th century); by 1653, it is very likely that hundreds of Cambridge residents had been buried across the lot, despite the absence of dedicated markers. About 2 miles west down Brattle Street from the Old Burying Ground is Mount Auburn Cemetery, founded in 1831 as an ample burial space characteristically encapsulated by tranquil scenes of natural Massachusetts foliage and terrain. Ideas for Mount Auburn were developed in the early-mid 19th century in response to increasing complaints from locals and growing dissatisfaction with Boston’s crowded (and offensively maintained) burial grounds. Mount Auburn was intended to be a memorial site for deceased individuals just as much as it was intended to be a space of relaxation, contemplation, and inspiration for visitors from across the region— and it is still a vibrant and popular tourist attraction within the city of Boston. Despite their inherent compositional and stylistic differences, the Old Burying Ground and Mount Auburn Cemetery are both known for their historic significance within the history of Cambridge and Harvard itself. While 3 of Harvard’s first 4 Presidents find their final resting place at the Old Burying Ground, Mount Auburn is also home to Harvard Presidents like James B. Conant, Charles William Eliot, Edward Everett, and Abbott Lawrence Lowell. 

 

A reflection of the inherent differences in attitudes towards ideas of memorialization between the Old Burying Ground and Mount Auburn Cemetery can be visualized through a comparison of sample gravestones. The two memorials pictured above directly reflect their respective cemetery’s approach towards remembrance and honoring the lives and individual personalities of their dead. On the left, a baby’s tombstone at Mount Auburn Cemetery demonstrates a uniquely ornate and sentimental approach at honoring the unfortunate short life of a lost child— the fame or importance of the child was not seen as a necessary segment of justification for an expensive or individually personalized tombstone. As a stark contrast to this, on the right is a photograph of Henry Dunster’s tombstone at the Old Burying Ground. Despite having served as the first president of Harvard University— the cultural center of Cambridge at the time and a renowned educational facility— the current plaque that sits on President Dunster’s tomb is characteristically simple, in keeping with the rest of the Old Burying Ground’s theme of default austerity. 

 

Thomas Chambers, Mount Auburn Cemetery, mid-19th century. Oil on canvas.

Mount Auburn Cemetery, its memorials, and the entirety of its landscaping composition reflects a late 19th and early 20th century cultural shift of the way in which society approached topics like death, mourning, remembrance, and public memorialization. The decline of Puritanism, a religious and cultural atmosphere that had founded and developed most of New England, led to an increase in the public’s acceptance of more melancholic and romantic dispositions. The Calvinist teachings that had dominated New England’s sociocultural and religious landscape for so long had strictly enforced expectations of visual simplicity, austerity, and severity— Mount Auburn is a reflection of society’s departure from these anti-sentimentalist perceptions. Boston’s burial grounds were becoming increasingly crowded and poorly maintained sources of dread for community members; the development of Mount Auburn Cemetery as an amply-spaced burying ground and the country’s first large-scale designed landscape altered societal understandings of the potential that cemeteries and graveyards had to enliven their communities.    

 

Photograph of Memorial Hall, c. 1904.

Mt. Auburn embraces remembrance, encouraging the sentimental memorialization of those we have lost, and contextualizing the practice of public mourning within fanciful and thoroughly planned out spaces. These values are closely related to the rise of Romanticism in the cultural, artistic, and literary atmosphere of America, and the British-born Gothic Revival movement of the time can be perceived as the architectural manifestation of Romanticism and its values. Gothic Revival architecture reflects a sense of romanticized and nostalgic affinity for the medieval and the whimsical attitude of traditional Gothic styles— a direct contrast from the stylistic restraint of Puritanical building styles that characterized the structures of colonial New England. Memorial Hall is a relevant example of a Cambridge building that reflects the aforementioned late 19th and early 20th century values of fanciful memorialization, remembrance, and dedicated mourning. As a High Victorian Gothic structure completed between 1870 and 1877, Memorial Hall was conceived amidst a cultural embrace of Romanticism. Similar to the inspiration behind the planning for Mount Auburn Cemetery, Memorial Hall was intended to serve both the living and the dead. The memory of those lost to the Civil War is ingrained into each and every brick that makes up the structure, while the varied use of its spaces encourages students to engage with the building consistently throughout their time at Harvard.

Annenberg, Interior of Memorial Hall.