Mount Auburn Cemetery

Mount Auburn opened in 1831 on a hilltop between Cambridge and Watertown, and it changed the American relationship with the dead. Before it, most Americans buried their dead in crowded town graveyards or isolated family plots; Mount Auburn's founders, led by the Massachusetts Horticultural Society and Dr. Jacob Bigelow, built something new: a large designed landscape outside the city, open to the public, with permanent family lots set among hills, ponds, and trees. The public flocked to it, and it became the model for the rural cemetery movement that produced Greenwood in Brooklyn, Laurel Hill in Philadelphia, and scores of others. In a country with almost no public parks, it was a park, an arboretum, and a place of mourning at once, a museum without walls.

Its relevance to the esoteric history of the United States is the era it anchors rather than any occult event on its grounds, and the honest framing keeps that distinction. The Spiritualist movement began in 1848, seventeen years after Mount Auburn's gates opened, and the two institutions grew up in the same nineteenth-century American conversation about death: whether the dead were gone, near, or reachable. Mount Auburn reshaped mourning into something pastoral, visitable, and garden-like, and that memorial culture is the ground the Spiritualist generation stood on. Among those interred here is Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science, whose mind-healing religion belongs to the same broad nineteenth-century ferment, and her memorial remains a site of pilgrimage for Christian Scientists. Visitors today come for the landscape, the birds, the history, and the dead.

Visiting

Mount Auburn Cemetery is free and open daily; hours change with the seasons to match sunset, so check the current hours before visiting.

Photo: Gareth Wyn Jones, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons ([source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2010-08-21_Mount_Auburn_Cemetery_03.JPG))