Mount Auburn Cemetery

Mount Auburn invented the American cemetery. Before 1831, the dead went into crowded town graveyards or isolated plots; Jacob Bigelow — Harvard botanist, physician — convinced the Massachusetts Horticultural Society to buy the seventy-two wooded acres across the Charles that Harvard students called Sweet Auburn, and to lay out something new: a designed landscape for the dead, outside the city, open to the public, organized on permanent family lots. It was the country's first large-scale designed landscape of any kind — before there were public parks, there was the garden of graves.

The public came immediately — in an era without parks or museums, Mount Auburn was both: the glacial-moraine hills and ponds, the monuments rising among the trees, the view from the 125-foot hill over Boston. Every 'rural cemetery' that followed — Laurel Hill, Green-Wood, Spring Grove — was its descendant, and the public parks movement grew directly out of it: the city that had banned burials in its old graveyards ended up designing its parks on the cemetery's model.

The dead match the design — Emerson, Longfellow, Mary Baker Eddy, Winslow Homer, Buckminster Fuller, Isabella Stewart Gardner among 97,000 — in a landscape the Landmark nomination calls a chronicle of two centuries of American attitudes toward death. It is still an active cemetery and an accredited arboretum — the nation's first garden cemetery still doing both of its jobs.

Mount Auburn is the archive's first-garden file — the 1831 cemetery that invented the rural burial ground, became the model for America's public parks, and holds the city's greats in the landscape that taught the country how to commemorate.