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Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn | Winter 2015

Sweet Auburn

Mount Auburn and the Civil War

2 | Sweet Auburn

In this IssueThe Union of Abolitionists and Emancipationists in Civil War-Era Massachusetts / 2

Preserving their Memory: Mount Auburn’s Civil War Heroes / 4

Remembering Dear Ones: Lowell’s Commemoration Ode / 6

Poetic Responses to the Civil War / 8

Highlights from the Historical Collections: The Sphinx / 10

Reviving the Victorian Landscape / 12

Stories Behind the Stones: Zabdiel Boylston Adams, MD / 13

People & Happenings / 15

Remembering Blanche Linden / 19

Did You Know? / 20

Preservation of the Egyptian Revival Gateway / 21

Upcoming Events / Back Cover

President’s CornerSweet AuburnA publication of the Friends of Mount Auburn Cemetery580 Mount Auburn StreetCambridge, MA 02138617-547-7105www.mountauburn.org

Editorial Committee

Bree D. Harvey, EditorVice President of Cemetery & Visitor Services

Jennifer J. Johnston, Managing EditorWebmaster, Media & Imaging Coordinator

David P. Barnett, Contributing EditorPresident & CEO, Mount Auburn Cemetery

Jane M. Carroll / Vice President of Development

Dennis Collins / Horticultural Curator

Candace Currie / Director of Planning & Sustainability

Gus Fraser / Director of Preservation & Facilities

Jenny Gilbert / Senior Gifts Officer

Regina Harrison / Executive Assistant

James Holman / Director of Cemetery Sales

Tom Johnson / Family Services Coordinator

Meg L. Winslow / Curator of Historical Collections

ConsultantRobin Hazard Ray

DesignerElizabeth Bonadies

PrinterP+R Publications

Cover Photo: 19th-century stereo view of the Mount Auburn Sphinx. Situated across from Bigelow Chapel, this great Civil War memorial was designed by Mount Auburn’s founder and president Jacob Bigelow and carved in granite by Martin Milmore. A gift to the Cemetery from Bigelow in 1872, it is the only war memorial in the United States in the form of a sphinx.

Trustees of the Friends of Mount Auburn Mary Lee Aldrich, Chair, Cambridge, MADavid P. Barnett, President & CEO, Boxborough, MA Sean McDonnell, Secretary & Treasurer, CambridgeCaroline Mortimer, Vice-Chair, Cambridge

Honorary Trustee of the Friends Susan W. Paine, Cambridge

The Friends of Mount Auburn Cemetery was established in 1986 to assist in the conservation of the Cemetery’s natural beauty and to promote the appreciation of its cultural, historic, and natural resources. Organized in 1990 as a 501(c)(3) non-profit charitable trust, the Friends seeks financial support from its members, other individuals, foundations, corporations, and public agencies. It receives gifts for educational and inter-pretive programs and materials for the public, specific cultural projects, and operating support for horticultural rejuvenation and the preservation of the historic monuments, structures, and archival artifacts and records. The Friends has over 1,300 active members.

See more online at www.mountauburn.org

Circa 1885 photograph

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Mount Auburn Cemetery was just 30 years old when the Civil War began in 1861. With the sesquicentennial anniversary of the Civil War unfolding since April 2011, we dedicate this issue of Sweet Auburn to highlighting some of the important connections between the Cemetery and the War.

In our lead article, Harvard Professor John Stauffer (pp. 2–3) illuminates the critical role played by Massachusetts and its abolitionist senator Charles Sumner (interred in Lot 2447 Arethusa Path at Mount Auburn) in ending slavery and winning the Civil War. One of the highlights of our Civil War sesquicentennial celebration was the restoration in 2011–12 of the memorial for Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who led the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment and died in battle with his men. The restoration was made possible by a gift from a Shaw family member, and the dedication of the monument in 2012 was attended by Governor Deval Patrick and members of today’s 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment, a National Honor Guard unit re-designated by order of the Governor in 2008. Members of the 54th Regiment, Company A, founded in 1992 to bring the original regiment’s history to life via presentations and participation in public events, were also in attendance, making it a memorable occasion (see photos below).

Monument preservation has been one of our top priorities in these years of remembrance and reflection. With funding from the Massachusetts Sesquicentennial Commission of the American Civil War and matching funds from private donors, in 2013–14 we completed conservation work on 17 additional monuments commemorating the lives of individuals who served in the Civil War (see pp. 4–5).

One of Mount Auburn’s most significant monuments is the Sphinx (pp. 10–11), commissioned by Cemetery founder Jacob Bigelow and sculpted by Martin Milmore in 1872 to commemorate the abolition of slavery and preservation of the Union. Mount Auburn’s horticulture staff recently installed a Victorian-style landscape around the Sphinx to provide a more inspirational and historically appropriate setting for this important work of art (p. 12).

Individual stories help humanize the war and deepen our understanding of the Cemetery’s rich connection with local history and families. Thanks in part to research by our dedicated volunteers, including this issue’s highlighted volunteer Steve Pinkerton (p.18), we now know that over 900 men and women who served and sacrificed during the Civil War are buried or commemorated at Mount Auburn Cemetery.

Civil War historian Carol Bundy has written the moving story (pp. 6–7,) of poet James Russell Lowell, whose life was deeply affected by the deaths of his three nephews in the war. Rob Velella (pp. 8–9) examines the war’s impact on American culture and literature through the words of poets interred at Mount Auburn. And Mitchell Adams describes the remarkable career of his great-grandfather Zabdiel Boylston Adams (Lot 2700 Elder Path), a surgeon-soldier in the war (p. 13).

The Civil War helped bring us together with our community as well. Mount Auburn was one of 19 sites that benefited from Watertown Helps Out, a town-wide volunteer day. Volunteers placed flags on the graves of Civil War Veterans at Mount Auburn, drawing local attention to our nation’s past.

Spring 2015 will bring to a close our Civil War commemorations but not our larger mission. We look forward to continuing to comfort the bereaved, commemorate the dead in a landscape of exceptional beauty, and inspire all who visit.

David P. Barnett

President & CEO

President’s Corner

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See more online at www.mountauburn.org

The 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment was formed in February 1863 by abolitionist Governor John Andrew. The enlistment of African- Americans into this unit was so robust that by May 1863 a second regiment, the 55th, was formed. Both regiments mustered out at the end of the Civil War. In 2008, by order of Governor Deval Patrick, the Massachusetts National Guard’s Honor Guard was re-designated as the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment (Selected Honor Guard). In addition, a local group of re-enactors—the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment, Company A, founded in 1992—helps bring the regiment’s history to life via presentations and participation in public events.

Circa 1885 photograph

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On April 14, 1865, editor William Lloyd Garrison, Massachusetts senator Henry Wilson, and other abolitionist leaders visited Charleston, South Carolina, to commemorate the end of the Civil War and of slavery.1 Richmond had fallen and Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox. But for most Northerners, the symbolic end of the war had occurred in February, when the Massachusetts 55th Colored Regiment marched triumphantly into Charleston, the seat of secession, singing “John Brown’s Body” as thousands of freedmen and-women cheered them on.

In a speech at the Charleston Hotel later that day, Garrison noted with irony how thirty years earlier, he had been dragged through the streets of Boston and almost lynched by a Democratic mob for declaring himself an abolitionist. Now, in the marrow of the South, he was being treated as a hero and prophet. He then referred to a recent meeting with President Lincoln and said, “of one thing I feel sure, either [Lincoln] has become a Garrisonian Abolitionist or I have become a Lincoln Emancipationist, for I know that we blend together, like kindred drops, into one.”2

Garrison’s statement wonderfully encapsulates the social revolution that accompanied the war, and the role that abolitionists—especially those from Boston—played in it. Everyone understood Garrison’s terms: “abolitionists” were black and white radicals who had sought an immediate end to slavery and advocated racial equality, at least in theory. “Emancipationists,” or “antislavery advocates,” were liberals who had sought to preserve the Union. For emancipationists, the evil of slavery inhered less in what the institution did to slaves than in what it did to the Union. They advocated practical, legal, and, preferably, gradual solutions to slavery. And, unlike the abolitionists, they opposed racial equality and supported the idea of blacks’ colonizing another country.3

But the exigencies of war had transformed Lincoln and other emancipationists into abolitionists, while Garrison and other abolitionists had become emancipationists. Pre-serving the Union required abolishing slavery, and vice-versa. The categories of radical versus liberal, immediatist versus gradualist, idealist versus realist, had broken down.4

With the war, black and white abolitionists were transformed from a tiny group of despised fanatics into respected prophets. They were considered indispensable to the war effort and the successes of Reconstruction, notably the constitutional amendments that ended chattel slavery and guaranteed citizenship, equal protection under the law, and unrestricted male suffrage to blacks; the desegregation of federal post offices, courts, public transportation, and visitors’ galleries in Congress; and the extraordinary rise of black literacy and black office-holders at local, state, and national levels.5

Members of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment, Company A, at Mount Auburn Cemetery for the dedication of the Colonel Robert Gould Shaw monument on September 27, 2012. The 55th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry mentioned in the article below was formed by Governor John Andrew in May of 1863 when there was an overflow of black recruits for the Mass 54th.

The Union of Abolitionists and Emancipationists in Civil War-Era Massachusetts By John Stauffer

Excerpted from Dr. Stauffer’s essay in the forthcoming Massachusetts and the Civil War: The Commonwealth and National Disunion, eds. Matthew Mason, Kathryn P. Viens, and Conrad Edick Wright (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015).

Lincoln himself more than once credited the Massachusetts contingent for their crucial role in ending slavery and winning the war.

He not only joined the ranks of the abolitionists in his outlook; he worked with them to end slavery and to champion some form of legal equality. Shortly before he died, he endorsed limited black suffrage and began to envision racial equality.

Charles Sumner, the abolitionist senator from Massachusetts, assumed such high stature in the North that his fellow congress-men passed a version of his Civil Rights bill in 1875, a year after he died, “mainly as a gesture to his departed spirit.” Harper’s Weekly, perhaps the most popular northern newspaper of its day, devoted two full issues to Sumner’s death and funeral at Mount Auburn, and declared that his passing “more deeply touched the heart of the American people” than any event since Lincoln’s assassination.6

John Stauffer is a leading authority on antislavery, social protest movements and interracial friendship. He is a Harvard University professor of English and American Literature and African Ameri-can Studies, and Chair of the History of American Civilization program at Harvard. He is the author of eight books and more than 50 articles, on topics ranging from the Civil War era to visual culture. His essays have appeared in Time, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, Raritan, and the New York Sun.

1Congress had passed the Thirteenth Amendment in January 1865, and by April 1865 nearly three-quarters of the states had ratified it. See “Banquet in Charleston,” The Liberator, May 12, 1865; and especially Michael Vorenberg, Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), chap. 6.2 “Banquet in Charleston,” The Liberator, May 12, 1865; Thomas E. Schneider, Lincoln’s Defense of Politics: The Public Man and His Opponents in the Slavery Crisis (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 1053On the distinctions between antislavery advocates and abolitionists, see David Brion Davis, “The Emergence of Immediatism in British and American Antislavery Thought,” From Homicide to Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 238–57; John Stauffer, “Fighting the Devil With His Own Fire,” The Abolitionist Imagination, Andrew Delbanco et al., The Abolitionist Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 57–80. “Emancipationist” was coined in 1862 by the Continental Monthly. See Continental Monthly, 1 (January–February 1862): 97–98, 113–14; James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality (1964; repr., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 90–934 John Stauffer, GIANTS: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (New York: Twelve, 2008); James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 20075 Edward J. Blum, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865–1898 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 5; McPherson, Struggle for Equality, 81–90, 99–133, 229–32, 341–66, 417–32; McPherson, “Abolitionists and the Civil Rights Act of 1875,” The Journal of American History 52 (December 1965): 493–510; Vorenberg, Final Freedom, chapters 3–7; Garrett Epps, Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post-Civil War America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), chapters 6–11; Philip Dray, Capital Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen (Boston: Mariner Books, 2010); Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996); Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), chapters 1–2, 6–10.

On the significance of the Reconstruction Amendments, see Akhil Reed Amar, The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), part II; and Amar, America’s Constitution: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2006), chap. 10.6 James M. McPherson, The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 14 (quoted); McPherson, “Abolitionists and the Civil Rights Act of 1875,” The Journal of American History 52 (December 1965): 506; “Charles Sumner,” Harper’s Weekly, April 4, 1874, Front Page (quoted); Harper’s Weekly, June 20, 1874; Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends: From Letters, Diaries, and Recollections, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1903), 1:30–31, 234, 2:31; David Herbert Donald, Charles Sumner (1960, 1970; repr., New York: Da Capo Press, 1996); Stauffer, “Fighting the Devil with His Own Fire,” 64.

The first full biography of Sumner, exhaustive in scope and magisterial in style, remains the best. See Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, 4 vols. (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1893).

On 19th-century memories of the abolitionists, see James M. McPherson, The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 3–142; Tulloch, Debate, 71–74; Blight, Race and Reunion, 231–37; Julie Roy Jeffrey, Abolitionists Remember: Anti-slavery Autobiographies and the Unfinished Work of Emancipation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

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“The Funeral of Charles Sumner” sketches by L. Hollis for Harper’s Weekly, April 4, 1874. Above, right: “At the Gate of Mount Auburn Cemetery” Left: “Dust to Dust”

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More than 900 men and women who served and sacrificed during the Civil War are buried or com-memorated at Mount Auburn Cemetery. The stories of these soldiers, sailors, nurses, doctors, and clergy, who collectively served in virtually every major campaign of the war, are preserved in the memorials that honor their lives and serve as reminders of their great courage, as well as the tremendous loss experienced during that period of American history. Ornate marble monuments finely carved with personal military effects including a hat, sword, sash, and scabbard capture the family pride and the glory of military service. Inscriptions detailing battles fought, accounts of bravery, and wounds suffered capture the reality of the war on a highly individual level. Even simple markers with just a name and dates have, with additional research from our dedicated volunteers, unlocked rich personal histories and enlivened our appreciation of the past.

With the generous support of two grants from the Mas-sachusetts Sesquicentennial Commission of the American Civil War and matching funds contributed by individual donors, Mount Auburn has undertaken conservation treatment of our most threatened Civil War monuments. The first project, completed in 2013, targeted five monu-ments for cleaning, repointing, and surface stabilization, and provided landscape enhancements to a sixth. In 2014, an additional eleven monuments in urgent need of care were chosen for conservation treatment. The selected monuments are often included in lectures and tours, and are frequently visited for their symbolism, elaborate carvings, and emotional stories.

Joseph S. Hills (1841–1864), Lot 1450 Petunia PathCaptain, 16th Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteer InfantryCaptain Hills enlisted on July 12, 1861, at the age of twenty. He rose quickly through the ranks and participated in some of the bloodiest fighting of the Civil War, including the battles of Second Bull Run, Fredericksburg, Chancel-lorsville, and Manassas, before losing his life in the Battle of the Wilderness on May 6, 1864. Inscriptions on Civil War monuments like Captain Hills’s typically provide informa-tion about rank and biographical details. Many, including

his, include detailed and personal carvings of military effects, such as hats, belts, and swords. His evocative marble monu-ment (above) has carvings of a cavalry hat and a sword in its scabbard on top, and a flowing sash hanging over its front face. In addition to information about his service, his family had his gravestone marked Our Noble Boy Welcome.

Francis Welch Crowninshield (1843–1866), Lot 3026 Oak AvenueMajor, 2nd Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteer InfantryWhen the Civil War began, Francis Welch Crowninshield was a sophomore at Harvard University. Like many of his classmates, Major Crowninshield, who was called “Crownie” by his friends, pledged himself to the war effort. After months of failed attempts, he obtained a commission in February 1862. He was promoted repeatedly and wounded four times during the course of the war. He was wounded in the leg during the first battle of Williamsburg and the battle of Antietam, severely wounded during the battle of Gettysburg, and wounded during General Sherman’s campaign to Atlanta. After each wound, he recovered enough to rejoin the fighting, though he eventually passed away while traveling abroad with friends in 1866. While it was commonly held that he died from illness caused by his war experiences, scholar Jane Goodrich, who has recently completed a historical novel about 19th-century Boston that features a character based on “Crownie,” believes that tuberculosis was the most likely cause. Major Crownin-shield’s marble monument, which has detailed carvings of

a sword and a sash, is in-scribed with Sans peur et sans reproche (Without fear and without reproach), a reminder of his

Preserving Their Memory: Mount Auburn’s Civil War HeroesBy Jenny Gilbert, Senior Gifts Officer and Gus Fraser, Director of Preservation & Facilities

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unwavering courage. Conservation will stabilize the stone and help to preserve the carved details and the moving inscription on the monument.

I can hardly realize that there will come a day when I will go home for good and hang my sword up on the wall and draw it no more. I expect when the time comes, that it will be terribly hard for me to leave the old flag, that I have fought under so long.

— Francis Welch Crowninshield in a letter to his mother, Caroline Crowninshield, March 1865,

Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum

The inscriptions and carvings on gravestones are clues to the humanity of those who have gone before us. Recognizing and preserving them, no matter how much time has passed, reminds us we are all traveling together on similar journeys.

— Jane Goodrich

Dorothea Lynde Dix (1802–1887), Lot 4731 Spruce AvenueSuperintendent of Nurses for the Union ArmyDorothea Dix was a social reformer whose devotion to the welfare of the mentally ill led to widespread reforms. Only a week after the attack on Fort Sumter, Dix, at age 59, volunteered to form an Army Nursing Corps. As Super-intendent of Nurses for the Union Army, Dix organized hundreds of women volunteers into a functioning corps, established and inspected hospitals, and raised money for medical supplies. Under her leadership, Army nursing care was greatly improved. Dix’s simple granite monument, which is a frequent stop on guided and self-guided tours, is inscribed with only her name. As a result of the 2013 proj-ect, her monument is now protected from potential damage by mowers and trimmers with an elegant groundcover that draws attention to her headstone and her history.

As Superintendent of Union Army Nurses, Dix was the first woman with executive level governmental authority in American history. Thanks to Dix, three thousand women served as paid nurses, integrating the male-dominated health care field. —Denise Pappas, Council of Visitors member and author of John Simmons, The Measure of a Man.

Frank Howard Nelson (1843–1862), Lot 1825 Eglantine PathLieutenant, 19th Regiment, New York InfantryFrank Howard Nelson was the son of Henry Wells Nelson, a wealthy Boston merchant and investor. Like many other young men from Boston’s most prominent families, he was eager to serve the Union and he enlisted in the army at the age of nineteen. The inscription on his family’s sandstone cenotaph (above, right) tells that he fell at the Battle of Williamsburg, after receiving his fourth wound. Lieutenant Nel-son is memorialized with a cenotaph because he is not interred at Mount Auburn but was most likely buried in an unmarked grave near Williamsburg, where he fell. Only a small per-centage of soldiers were transported back to the North for burial as embalming techniques were still very new and the fee for embalming and transportation of remains was high. While conducting research on the life of Frank Howard Nelson to share with visitors on Civil War tours, Mount Auburn Volunteer Steve Pinkerton discovered a second cenotaph (below, right) erected in memory of Lieutenant Nelson in a different family lot, which was not noted in Mount Auburn’s records. Pinkerton also found a poem written in memory of Nelson by Lydia Howard Sigourney, a poet and Nelson relative. The poem begins, “Oh beautiful and brave!/ The highly nurtured, and the nobly bred,/ Who took the crown of manhood’s majesty/Upon thy youthful brow, – we mourn for thee/ So early fled.” Conservation will include cleaning, leveling the monument on its foundation, re-adhering flak-ing and delaminating sandstone, filling cracks, and patching some losses.

Donors to Mount Auburn’s Civil War Monument Conservation Projects:

Edith S. & David L. EngelJane L. GoodrichVirginia B. HarlanBarbara Brydon HillsClaudia and Peter Kinder Charitable FundJames B. & Laura P. Lloyd

in memory of Mary Phinney von OlnhausenElizabeth Hills O’LearyMassachusetts Civil War Sesquicentennial CommissionMildred Cambridge Memorial FundWhitney Hills Mitchell Harold I. PrattCharles E. Rosenberg & Drew Gilpin FaustAlan J. & Patricia C. ShapiroMatthew R. Walter & Patricia CaponeThe Ruth & Henry Walter FundOliver Wolcott, Jr.

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On July 21, 1865, Harvard College gathered to honor its Civil War dead. James Russell Lowell, asked to write a poem for the occasion, read out his now-famous Commemoration Ode. The oration did not go well: the draft from which he read was flawed and further suffered from Lowell’s mumbling recitation. Many believed that Lowell had failed to get beyond his personal grief: his three nephews had volunteered as officers in the Union Army and had all been killed. Critics have pointed, for example, to the awkwardness in verse VIII, which begins “we sit here in the Promised Land/That flows with Freedom’s honey and milk;/But ‘twas they won it, sword in hand./Making the nettle danger soft for us as silk.”

There was irony inherent in the commission. As a poet, Lowell had made his name with The Biglow Papers (1848), a long anti-war poem that gave voice to the unpopularity of the Mexican War among New Englanders and helped to cohere opposition to the extension of Slave Power as the nation careened toward civil war. Lowell’s generation of Transcendentalists had tried to shake things up, searching for meaningful lives and opposing slavery, and Lowell himself had edited The Anti-Slavery Standard before the war. Abolitionism had seemed at the time like strident protest, but it appeared less so now that their children had fought and died for the cause. James Russell Lowell spoke for all those who had lost loved ones in the recent conflict as they looked out on Harvard Yard: “In these brave ranks I only see the gaps,/ Thinking of dear ones whom the dumb turf wraps.”

Of Lowell’s three young nephews, the first to die was William Lowell Putnam, son of Mary Lowell and Samuel Putnam. A Lieutenant in the Massachusetts 20th, dubbed the Harvard Regiment, Putnam was wounded in the stomach at Ball’s Bluff, a fiasco of an unintended skirmish that became a baptism of fire. He died after prolonged agony, and his body was shipped home in a pine box, which his mother went personally to collect at the rail yards. When the coffin was opened and she saw her son’s body, still in uniform, his sweat-stained curls, and crudely cleaned face, “a strange peace stole into her heart & the words came ‘Peace I leave unto you—my peace I give unto you’”—Christ’s words to his disciples at the Last Supper. Among abolitionist Boston, William Lowell Putnam was hailed as a martyr. His impeccable breeding, physical beauty, and fervent

Remembering Dear Ones:Lowell’s “Commemoration Ode”By Carol Bundy

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abolitionism (rare among the upper classes), fused with his idealism and youth to symbolize a purity of righteousness that was deployed among Boston’s moneyed classes to support the war effort.

Almost exactly three years later, the oldest of the cousins, Charles Russell Lowell, Jr., was killed leading the final charge at the Battle of Cedar Creek. This fighting too had started as a fiasco—a surprise pre-dawn Confederate attack that overran the sleeping Yankees. Thanks largely to Lowell’s actions leading the Reserve Brigade of Union Cavalry, however, this near-defeat turned into a resounding Union triumph that destroyed the Confederate Cavalry, won the Shenandoah Valley for the Union, and, on the eve of the presidential election, provided Lincoln with a much-needed victory. Charles Lowell became the martyr for that victory. His body was escorted back to Boston with solemn fanfare and his public funeral was attended by the official dignitaries of the city, its major industrialists, and its key literary figures. Only after the tragedy had been milked for its political value did a smaller procession of intimates bring the body to be buried in Mount Auburn, alongside Lt. William Lowell Putnam.

Perhaps seeing the plot thus populated, Charles Lowell’s father, Charles Russell Lowell, Sr., determined to have his other son’s body brought to Mount Auburn. James Jackson Lowell had been mortally wounded in the Seven Days fighting on the Peninsula. Like his cousin, James took a wound to the stomach, and he understood immediately that his injury too would be mortal. Unable to join his

unit’s retreat that evening, he was given morphine and left to die among strangers.

The difficult task of finding his body was given to an elder sister, Anna Lowell, who had volunteered for the Union cause as one of the nurses trained by Dorothea Dix. As her brother lay dying behind enemy lines, she had tried unsuccessfully to get a pass to reach him. Anna then served out the rest of the war at the Armory Hospital, nearest the docks, where the worst cases were brought. When her father wrote to ask that she try to locate James’s remains, she was not encouraging: she had seen enough to know what became of those who died in field hospitals. But her father would not be dissuaded. In his second letter, he explained that Elmwood, the family house at the end of Brattle Street, had been a hospital during the Revolution. Whenever they widened the road or did work in the garden, they dug up the bones of dead soldiers. “I do not want Jimmy’s remains to be treated so,” he wrote. Her father’s wish could not be refused. Anna Lowell found a body—perhaps her brother’s, perhaps not even that of a Union soldier—which was brought to Cambridge and laid to rest between the two cousins.

Elmwood is now the home of Harvard’s President. But at the time of the Commemoration Ode, James Russell Lowell still lived there. From a bedroom window, he could look over rolling fields across what is now the maze of Route 16 traffic and a housing complex, to see on the far bank of a pond the three graves side-by-side, looking back at him. Perhaps this was his view as he penned the Commemoration Ode:

many loved truth…

They followed her and found her

…beautiful, with danger’s sweetness round her;

Where faith made whole with deed

Breathes its awakening breath

Into the lifeless creed,

They saw her plumed and mailed,

With sweet, stern face unveiled,

And all-repaying eyes, look proud on them in death.

Carol Bundy has written for film and art publications in both the UK and the US. She has two sons and lives in Cambridge, MA. She became interested in her great-great-great uncle, Charles Russell Lowell, when his worn saddle bags, rusted sword and spurs turned up after her grandmother’s death in 1983.

William Lowell Putnam (1841-1861) (left), Charles Russell Lowell, Jr. (1835-1864) (below, left), and James Jackson Lowell (1837-1862) (below, right). From a photomechan-ical by an unknown photographer, no date. From Portraits of American Abolitionists. Photograph number 81.422.Massachusetts Historical Society.

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Poetic Responses to the Civil WarBy Rob Velella

The Civil War changed literature in the United States, as it changed most other aspects of American culture and society. People were deeply affected by the massive bloodshed, the opposing ideologies, and the patriotic fervor, and nearly every family in the country was impacted by the conflict. The writers now buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery were no exception.

The first clarion call of the Civil War came from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose poem “Paul Revere’s Ride” was published just as the Confederacy was being formed. In such a confusing time, Longfellow called to mind a history in which people came together to fight side-by-side for a common cause. The factual account of the historic Paul Revere, which Longfellow certainly knew, was ignored for the more important symbolic message that “the fate of a nation was riding that night” with a spark that “kindled the land into flame with its heat.” In that hour of darkness, peril, and need, Longfellow imagined, the people would waken and listen to the message of a dedicated individual whose

patriotism brought the people together.

During the Civil War, this was the kind of poetry that prevailed: poems that bordered on military recruitment propaganda. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Longfellow’s friend and fellow Harvard professor, joined the fray. Like Longfellow, he had a son who joined the Union Army and saw action, making it hard to ignore the conflict. One of his best poems of the period, “Never or Now,” is also inspired by the Founders’ generation and is more explicitly a call to enlist:

Listen, young heroes! your country is calling!Time strikes the hour for the brave and the true!Now, while the foremost are fighting and falling,

Fill up the ranks that have opened for you!

The much younger poet Thomas Bailey Aldrich was the right age to become a soldier. When no appointment came through, he instead became a war correspondent and witnessed the havoc firsthand. By mid-war, his readers were less inclined to rush into battle, patriotism notwith-standing, as they faced the likelihood of death. Aldrich’s

most well-known poem of the war period, a sonnet titled “Fredericksburg,” exemplifies this second phase of the Civil War, a period in which literature more carefully expressed the reality of battle:

The increasing moonlight drifts across my bed, And on the churchyard by the road, I know

It falls as white and noiselessly as snow.‘Twas such a night two weary summers fled;

The stars, as now, were waning overhead. Listen! Again the shrill-lipped bugles blow Where the swift currents of the river flow

Past Fredericksburg; far off the heavens are red With sudden conflagration; on yon height,

Linstock in hand, the gunners hold their breath; A signal rocket pierces the dense night,

Flings its spent stars upon the town beneath: Hark! – the artillery massing on the right,

Hark! – the black squadrons wheeling down to Death!

Similarly, poet and artist Christopher Pearse Cranch expressed a deflated sense of patriotism in his sequence “Poems of the War.” His poem marking the end of the war, “The Dawn of Peace,” offers a judgmental assessment of his fellow Southerners (he was born in Virginia before relocating to New England) as traitors affected by “evil compacts” and “brutal laws.” But the cost, he notes, for this

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 580 Indian Ridge Path

Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Lot 6109 Grapevine Path

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Lot 2147 Lime Avenue

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war “justly waged” for a just cause (Cranch here acknowledges the fight to end slavery) is a high one. He ends the poem “Peace dawns at last. The Nation is re-born!” His optimism that the blood-shed was not for nothing carries into his sonnet “The Death-Blow,” even as he concedes a weari-ness amid the chaos of the times:

…Flowers of the Union, blue and white and red,Blooming on the balcony and spire and mast,Telling us that war’s wintry storm had fled,

And spring was more than spring to us at last.To-day, – the nation’s heart lies crushed and weak;Drooping and draped in black our banners stand.Too stunned to cry revenge, we scarce may speak

The grief that chokes all utterance through the land.God is in all. With tears our eyes are dim,

Yet strive through the darkness to look up to Him!

The aftermath of the Civil War was a substantial challenge—even to poetry. James Russell Lowell (Fountain Avenue) had earlier made his mark as an abolitionist poet with works like “The Present Crisis” and “On the Capture of Fugitive Slaves Near Washington.” During the Civil War, however, he published less poetry than he had in his youth—and certainly less significant political poetry. Still, he looked for the heroes of the battlefields, including Robert Gould Shaw (memorialized on Pine Avenue). After the fighting had ended, Lowell offered one of his most daring attempts at versifying: “Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration, July 21, 1865.”

The poem honored those Harvard-affiliated men who had died in the conflict, even as he acknowledged his own inability to do them justice: “Weak-winged is song,” he begins, when those who were killed wrote a “nobler verse” in their life-blood. Lowell, who lost three nephews in the war, struggled with its composition—a fact which is clear even in the final poem, which shaped itself as a melancholy expression

of regret, sadness, and despondency. In stanza VIII of the published version, he wrote:

I strive to mix some gladness with my strain,But the sad strings complain,And will not please the ear:

I sweep them for a paean, but they waneAgain and yet again

Into a dirge, a die away, in pain.In these brave ranks I only see the gaps,

Thinking of dear ones whom the dumb turf wraps,Dark to the triumph which they died to gain:

Fitlier may others greet the living,For me the past is unforgiving

I with uncovered headSalute the sacred dead,

Who went, and who return not . . .

Lowell’s “Commemoration Ode,” as it came to be known, represents the final act of Civil War–inspired poetry: how do we, as a reunited people, cope with the tragedies, the loss, the heinous acts against our fellow Americans? Some writers would romanticize the war and elevate its participants to near divinity. Others would struggle with definitions of patriotism or whether or not there was ever valor in the killing of another human being.

Even the genteel Longfellow had trouble coping with it all. In his 1866 poem “Killed at the Ford,” he begins without romance, “He is dead, the beautiful youth.” But the death of this soldier has repercussions off the battlefield as well, as Longfellow imagines that the bullet that killed him continued to fly and take the life of another:

And I saw in a vision how far and fleet That fatal bullet went speeding forth,

Till it reached a town in the distant North, Till it reached a house in a sunny street, Till it reached a heart that ceased to beat

Without a murmur, without a cry; And a bell was tolled in that far-off town,

For one who had passed from cross to crown,— And the neighbors wondered that she should die.

Rob Velella is an independent literary scholar and creator of the American Literary Blog.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 580 Indian Ridge Path

Christopher Pearce Cranch, Lot 5116 Vesper Path

James Russell Lowell, Lot 323 Fountain Avenue

10 | Sweet Auburn

“…It is an Egyptian symbol of might

and intelligence combined;

but, in its human features,

modern or American,

not brooding on death,

but looking forward to the larger life.

The sculptor was Martin Milmore; the

projector and donor was Jacob Bigelow.” — 1885 Moses King Guidebook pp 95-96, 1885

SphinxCirca 1910 photograph

Highlights from the Historical Collections

1885 Moses King Guidebook

Winter 2015 | 11

“The Egyptian sphinx, large and small, was also part of the landscape, the grandest such sculpture being the great creature carved by Martin and Joseph Milmore to commemorate the abolition of slavery, the preservation of the Union, and the Union dead in the Civil War. This impressive granite memorial was set at the top of the hill in front of the larger, Gothic chapel in Mount Auburn Cemetery in the early 1870s, not far from the cenotaph of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw who fell leading his regiment of black troops against Fort Wagner, in Charleston Harbor, SC.”

— Cornelius C. Vermuele III, Curator of Classical Antiquities, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1988.

“She is, however, a wholly new birth, we take it, and her past will date from to-day, —

the to-day which has brought the two races, depicted in the African mythic figure and

the American face, into such strange and close association. “

—The Atlantic Monthly, page 116, 1873

1872 newspaper article, Boston Evening Transcript

1883 Souvenir Guidebook

Mount Auburn’s Monument to Commemorate the Civil War

Circa 1880s Stereo View

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Beginning in the 1870s, the Victorian landscape aesthetic rejected the naturalistic compositions of the “Picturesque” style of the early 19th-century. It put cultivation at the forefront of design, emphasizing exotic plants, intensive maintenance, or the emphatic use of specimen plants. Flowering perennials and annuals were used extensively, and those with strong colors were preferred. For woody plants, the form was as important as any contribution the flowering might make. Low hedging (e.g., with boxwood) was common, as were the processes of espalier and topiary. Plants with distinct forms such as fastigiate or weeping, along with such dwarf forms as existed at this time, were prized as speci-mens. Unusual plant material was popular and the introduction of plants from Asia satisfied the demand for novelties. Geometric shapes, which lend a somewhat formal style to gardens, were used in laying out planting beds. Finally, elaborate flower-bed plantings of annuals were used to create mosaics in intricate patterns.

Following guidelines from the 1993 Master Plan for preserving and displaying landscape styles that characterize Mount Auburn’s history, we are in the early stages of an effort to re-introduce the Victorian landscape character in several sections of the grounds. The planting at Bigelow Lawn, installed in 1995, was the first attempt to see if the style could be achieved without committing to a high-maintenance regime. Because period photographs in our archives are black-and-white only, the Victorian emphasis on color could easily have been overlooked. Yet color plays

an important role in reinforcing the geometry of bed layouts and in adding depth and texture to the plantings.

Our archives contain lengthy lists of plants that were fashionable among the Victorians, and which might

surprise us today. Their approach to gardening was bold and experimental. The limits of many plants (tropical, sub-tropical, and southern temperate) were tested. Tropical plants such as palms and banana trees were used as exotic elements in the landscape. They were, of course, not hardy in the north and had to be overwintered in the Brattle Street greenhouses. In 2007, as an experiment, Mount Auburn grew a crop of banana trees from small plugs. They were used effectively in urns near the front

gate, and a number of them were successfully overwintered and have been re-used (as larger plants) ever since. The experimental garden established near the Greenhouse that same year has been able to test a range of different Victorian period plants for hardiness and performance. When the new greenhouse facility was built, one of the first things we did was to expand

these experiments with tree-ferns and cycads. With such trial and error, we’ll have a much better chance of succeeding when we resume the implementation of the Victorian landscape initiative.

Reviving the Victorian LandscapeBy Dennis Collins, Horticultural Curator

Winter 2015 | 13

Surgeon and Soldier for the UnionMy great-grandfather Zabdiel Boylston Adams followed the path of his forebears in attending Harvard College. Unlike his forbearers, however, he was expelled from Harvard for complicity in a prank and was subsequently “rusticated” to Bowdoin. After graduating from Harvard Medical School in 1853, he traveled to Paris for post-graduate study in medicine. But certainly his most extraordinary life experience was his Civil War service.

Zabdiel felt an intense, even fanatic, commitment to the Union cause, and enlisted immediately after the firing on Fort Sumter. Serving all four years of war, he was wounded repeatedly but always managed to re-enlist. He would later describe his “service in the Civil War in defense of the certainty and unity of the nation and the overthrow of a despotic and inhumane oligarchy” as the highlight of his life.

His fervent patriotism stemmed from his identity and his close kinship with some of America’s founding fathers. His great-grandfather was John Adams’s double first cousin, and Samuel Adams, “the Firebrand of the Revolution,” was a first cousin several times removed. Zabdiel’s opposition to slavery reflected his roots in abolitionist Boston. His sister Annie Adams Fields was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s biographer and close friend. Annie’s husband James Fields, a prominent Boston publisher and editor, was the first to publish Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” in 1862.

Upon his enlistment, Zabdiel became Assistant Surgeon in the 7th Massachusetts Volunteers Brigade. He served in some of costliest battles of the war, including An-tietam and Gettysburg, where he set up his operating tables at the very edge of the “Bloody Wheatfield.” Here he toiled non-stop for two days and three nights. At the end of this ordeal, he collapsed, blinded from stress and exhaustion. Among Gettysburg’s 1,000 monuments, only one is dedicated to a physician: the plaque cites the wisdom and heroism of Dr. Zabdiel Boylston Adams for operating at the very edge of the battlefield, avoiding much loss of life.

Because his impaired eyesight compromised his surgical ability after Gettysburg, Zabdiel was commissioned as a

Captain in the infantry and fought in the Battle of the Wilderness. His company lost 20 of its 45 men to death or capture. He himself was badly wounded, captured, and imprisoned for months. Amid squalid prison conditions, he saved his own gangrenous leg by pouring pure nitric acid into the open wound.

His final combat experience occurred in the spring of 1865 in the 2nd Battle of Petersburg, where he was once again wounded. Shortly thereafter, in the second week of April, he witnessed Lee’s surrender at the Appomattox Courthouse.

The succeeding chapters of his life were considerably less dramatic. In 1867, he co-founded the Roxbury Society for Medical Improvement, which meets regularly to this day. He moved to Framingham, Massachusetts, and practiced as a country doctor with long hours and little or no pay. He was an active leader in medical and civic affairs, helping to found the town’s hospital and library, where his portrait hangs today. He championed vaccination and served on the Framingham Board of Health and as Medical Examiner. The Massachusetts Medical Society elected him Vice-President and in 1897 asked that he serve as “Orator of the Annual Discourse.”

In a manuscript summarizing his life, Zabdiel wrote, “War is for beasts. There

should never be another one on earth.”

Mitchell Adams is a former member of Harvard University’s Board of Overseers and recently retired after 10 years as executive director of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, an independent public agency dedicated to the formation, retention, and expansion of technology-related enterprises in Massachusetts. He received both his bachelor’s degree (1966) and his M.B.A. (1969) from Harvard.

Stories Behind the Stones:Zabdiel Boylston Adams, MDBy Mitchell Adams

Zabdiel Boylston Adams (1829-1902) ©Harvard Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine

Zabdiel Boylston Adams, Surgeon, 32nd Regiment, Massachusetts; 56th Regiment, Massachusetts is buried in Lot 2700 on Elder Path at Mount Auburn Cemetery.

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Crucial Conversations:New Talk about an Eternal Subject By Bree Harvey, Vice President of Cemetery & Visitor Services

In late September, nearly 100 people assembled in Story Chapel to meet author, blogger, and mortician Caitlin Doughty. It was a remarkably diverse gathering: there were twenty-somethings and retirees; some in fleece and khakis and others in studded leather jackets; professional funeral directors and advocates for the green burial movement. People came from all over New England to hear Doughty speak about her professional experiences in the funeral industry and how these experiences shaped her view of death.

Doughty has been fostering a growing public conversation about death through her website Order of the Good Death (www.orderofthe-gooddeath.com) and now through her bestselling memoir, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory. She writes: “a culture that denies death is a barrier to achieving a good death. Overcoming our fears about death will be no small task, but we shouldn’t forget how quickly other cultural prejudices—racism, sexism, homophobia—have begun to topple in the recent past. It is high time death had its moment of truth.”

This sentiment has been driving a new focus in the public programming at Mount Auburn. In March, Mount Auburn held its first Death Café, an informal opportunity for people to engage in a facilitated discussion about death over tea and cake. The success of the first Death Café led us to sponsor two more, each filled to capacity. In October, we hosted the third annual production of “A Glimpse Beyond,” which approaches the subject of what lies beyond death through music, dance, and poetry. Finally, in November, Story Chapel and our beautiful grounds were the setting for a production of “Our Town,” Thornton Wilder’s classic play that reminds us not to wait until death to appreciate the beauty in each day (see below).

Since its founding, Mount Auburn has helped to shape the way Americans think about death, encouraging the view that it is a natural part of the life cycle that a person may contemplate without fear. In the second half of the

19th century, however, our view of death changed dramatically, in part because of the Civil War. Its grim legacy lives on in us: “We still struggle to understand how to preserve our humanity and our selves within such a world,” writes historian and Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust in This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. “We still seek to use our deaths to create meaning where we are not sure any exists.”

New forces are now at work, once again reshaping the American view of death. We hope that you will join Mount Auburn in carrying this vital conversation forward.

Boston-based chorus Voices Rising performs during 3rd annual A Glimpse Beyond in October 2014” (top) and “Caitlin Doughty poses with Mount Auburn’s Crematory Manager Walter Morrison after her talk at the Cemetery on September 25, 2014” (above, center)

This fall, the Friends of Mount Auburn, in collaboration with the Underground Railway Theater, a company-in-residence at Central Square Theater in Cambridge, presented a unique staged reading of Thornton Wilder’s masterpiece, “Our Town.” Director Megan Sandberg-Zakian staged the reading specifically for Mount Auburn, with Acts I and II taking place inside Story Chapel and Act III outside in Hazel Dell. In addition to two ticketed performances held for the general public, the Friends offered three free weekday matinees for students from Medford, Melrose, and Providence, RI. The participating students, who had read the play in

advance, toured the Cemetery to make further connections between the play and the place. One eighth-grade student wrote of the experience:

“Mount Auburn is a place for people not only to come and pay their respects to their loved ones but to reflect on life and the true meaning. The play Our Town is about life and death and what life is really about. Life after death is shown in this place… Mount Auburn is a great place to feel comfortable even with the idea of death. ”

Our Town was made possible with generous support from the Anthony J. and Mildred D. Ruggiero Memorial Trust.

“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? – every, every minute?”

— Emily, Our TOwn, Act iii

Winter 2015 | 15

People and Happenings Grants Update The Friends of Mount Auburn Cemetery received a $40,000 grant from an anonymous foundation to support the conservation of the Binney Monument and surrounding lot landscaping. Mount Auburn is delighted that this long-awaited conservation project was completed this summer. The 19th-century marble memorial, carved by Thomas Crawford in 1847, is the only monument at Mount Auburn that has been designated an “American Treasure” by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the White House Millennium Committee. Its conservation is part of our two-year Significant Monument Collection project.

A $9,000 grant from the Belmont Savings Bank Foundation will support the creation of a Family Field Guide, Mount Auburn’s first publication about natural history specifically created to educate and engage elementary-aged children. The Family Field Guide will be written and illustrated by Claire Walker Leslie and will highlight wildlife that can be found on the Cemetery grounds at different seasons of the year. It will contain pages for children to draw and record their own observations about the natural world, and will be available this spring.

The Friends of Mount Auburn was one of eight national recipients of an Innovation Grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The $7,500 grant provides partial funding for Mount Auburn staff to test two new computational photographic methods (Reflectance

Transformation Imaging and Photogrammetry) on historic grave markers. This technology can enhance photographic images in order to read faded inscriptions and reveal details not visible to the naked eye, as well as to define parts of a structure that are actively deteriorating. The project will allow the Cemetery to assess the viability of employing these new imaging techniques in the field for the efficient documentation of large numbers of historic grave markers and to share its experience and results with other stewards of historic sites.

A grant of $106,720 from the A.J. & M.D. Ruggiero Memorial Trust will support the initial phase of a three-year project to create a multimedia interactive visitors mobile app. This multi-platform people and location finder will provide better access to Mount Auburn Cemetery’s rich archive of materials about the individuals buried and commemorated at the Cemetery as well as its notable horticultural, art, and architecture collections.

With an $18,450 grant from the Stanley Smith Horticultural Trust, Mount Auburn will be able to purchase a new laser engraver and efficiently produce labeling for many of the plants on our grounds. Completing the labeling of our plant collections

will elevate our curatorial oversight and provide visitors with more information about the

diversity of our plant collections. In addition, new technologies will allow us to create special labels that relate to our mobile tours, website and planned mobile app.

Mount Auburn staff, Trustees and volunteers hosted the Massachusetts Cultural Council on November 4, for a site visit. Organizations, like the Friends of Mount Auburn Cemetery who receive annual funding from the MCC are required to host a site visit every four years. The visit to Mount Auburn included sessions about our public programs, a walking tour focused on our preservation activities, and a special sneak preview of films by our Artist-in-Residence, Roberto Mighty. The site visit team included Anita Walker, Executive Director and Kayln King, Program Officer at the Mas-sachusetts Cultural Council; Karen Brown, Director of Performance Op-erations at Celebrity Series of Boston, Inc.; Jennifer Gross, Chief Curator at the DeCordova Museum & Sculpture Park; and Jason Weeks, Executive Di-rector of the Cambridge Arts Council.

16 | Sweet Auburn

People and Happenings

Wildlife Action PlanIn December 2013, the Anthony J. & Mildred D. Ruggiero Memorial Trust awarded the Friends of Mount Auburn Cemetery a grant of $92,592 to develop a plan to continue restoration of, and additions to, wildlife habitat at our 175-acre site. In June 2014, Mount Auburn brought together a “dream team” of ten professionals—landscape architects, environmental engineers, hydrologists, ecologists, ornithologists, and herpetologists —for a three-day workshop. Each day included tours of different sites, group discussions, and one-on-one sessions. The range of discussion topics included the needs of specific types of wildlife for specific types of habitat (forest, shrub-land, meadow, etc.), the impact of climate change on bird migration and habitats, the management of water quality in the ponds, and the aesthetic challenge of successful placement of naturalistic landscapes amid more formally designed ones in an active cemetery. Following the June meeting, team members worked independently on planning and prioritizing the next stages of this long-term initiative. Christopher Greene and Craig Halvorson of the Halvorson Design Partnership, who served as facilitators of the meeting, are now compiling the final Wildlife Action Plan. Mr. Halvorson’s award-winning firm crafted Mount Auburn’s Master Plan, which led to Mount Auburn’s first efforts at habitat restoration.

Staff and consultants evaluated past habitat improvement projects and discussed new opportunities to create and improve habitat for a greater diversity of wildlife. Photo by Brooks Mathewson

FY2014 Annual Report is Now Available OnlineAs an institution, Mount Auburn is committed to leaving a smaller carbon footprint. In an effort to reduce its paper usage, the Cemetery has published its most recent Annual Report in an electronic format. To read the report, please visit www.mountauburn.org/AnnualReport

To request a printed copy of the report, please email friends@mountauburn.org or call us at 617-607-1980.

Mount Auburn Welcomes Three New TrusteesEliza Anderson, Laura Nash, and Jim Levitt (l to r) were appointed to Mount Auburn’s Board of Trustees at the Annual Meeting of Proprietors in October. Their collective expertise in conservation, education, and business leadership will greatly benefit the Cemetery for many years to come.

Winter 2015 | 17

People and Happenings

Council of Visitors MeetingOn October 2, 2014, Mount Auburn was pleased to host our third annual Council of Visitors meeting. Despite unseasonably rainy and cool weather, nearly 100 attendees joined us for this day of thoughtful conversation. After a pre-meeting tour highlighting the founders’ vision for Mount Auburn led by Meg Winslow, Curator of Historical Collections, guests gathered in a tent on Bigelow Chapel lawn for lunch and an update on the State of the Institution by Tom Cooper, Chair of Mount Auburn’s Board of Trustees. They then enjoyed a spirited keynote conversation between President & CEO Dave Barnett and Ned Friedman, Director of the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, on the leadership roles that their institutions have played and will continue to play in the fields of horticulture, ecology, and historic landscape preservation.

Each attendee also participated in one of four afternoon breakout sessions, which included presentations by content experts and community leaders, a walk on the grounds, and group discussion of Mount Auburn’s future opportunities and challenges. Each group reported the results of their discussion, which will help inform Mount Auburn’s strategic planning process, during the meeting’s closing remarks. At the end of the day, guests enjoyed a special sneak peek at videos created by Roberto Mighty, Mount Auburn’s first Artist-in-Residence. We are grateful to all of the day’s presenters for sharing their expertise and to our Council of Visitors members for their participation and their support throughout the year.

Above: Council of Visitors member Frank Reese moderates the keynote conversation by Dave Barnett and Ned Friedman.

Below: Pre-meeting tour led by Meg Winslow.

Special Garden TourOn June 5, 2014, Alan Emmet, a landscape historian and author of So Fine a Prospect: Historic New England Gardens, hosted twenty of the Friends of Mount Auburn’s 1831 Society members for a tour of the gardens at her home, Mole Hill, in Westford, Mass. This special tour was led by Claude Benoit, Mount Auburn’s former Director of Horticulture and the gardener at Mole Hill. While the tour began in a light rain, the sun cleared as the group walked the grounds. After the tour, Alan, a member of Mount Auburn’s Council of Visitors and the 1831 Society, graciously welcomed guests for a reception on the porch of her home.

Pat and John Jacoby, Ron Barbagallo, and Liz Goodfellow at Mole Hill

18 | Sweet Auburn

People and Happenings Volunteer Profile: Steve PinkertonBy Jennifer Johnston, Webmaster, Media & Imaging Coordinator

In the fall of 2010, when Steve Pinkerton retired from a demanding consulting career in which, among other things, he developed renewable and alternative energy projects, he sought a volunteer opportunity that would nourish his interests in history, genealogy, and philosophy while utilizing his background in engineering, teaching, and research. A Belmont resident, Steve was already familiar with Mount Auburn Cemetery from

years of taking walks here with his wife Vicky. Shortly after his retirement, he signed up for the spring 2011 docent-training workshop at Mount Auburn Cemetery.

Family-history research projects undertaken for himself and for friends and colleagues had already taken Steve to a number of cemeteries across the United States, providing a fantastic “primer” for his future endeavors here at Mount Auburn. But Steve also brings a scientist’s curiosity and skepticism to everything he does. As many of us on staff have come to realize, Steve rarely takes anything at face value, digging deeper into the crux of every comment or question posed to him at the Visitor Center, where he takes a regular Tuesday afternoon shift. His curious nature is also a great boon for the Historical Collections department,

where he helps to field the many genealogical questions that come in each week.

Steve has gotten involved in a broad range of projects, becoming an expert on a variety of topics in his three years as a volunteer. He has delved into countless mysteries and conundrums of fact and fiction that have arisen in our landscape of over 98,000 interments. In the process, he has become indispensable to other volunteers as well as to staff and visitors, generously sharing the data he pulls together.

Among many other projects, Steve cheerfully took on a box of nearly 200 unidentified photos taken at the Cemetery, quickly tracking down the location of every monument, lot, fence, and curb appearing in the wild assortment of images.

Steve has led numerous walks, often collaborating with Mount Auburn staff, other volunteers, and members of the larger community on a variety of topics involving notable people interred or memorialized at the Cemetery—including architects, African-Americans, the Banks Brigade Bee, Civil War figures, merchants, librarians, culinary figures, MIT affiliates, and more.

When Steve isn’t at Mount Auburn, he enjoys gardening and works as a volunteer at the Belmont Victory Gardens.

Steve Pinkerton, fellow volunteer docents and Mount Auburn’s Visitor Services staff gathered for dinner in November 2014.

Top: Steve and wife Vicky at Mount Auburn’s wine-tasting event, August 2011Bottom: Steve and Dave Barnett, September 2011.

Winter 2015 | 19

RememberingBlanche M.G. Linden

“Since it was first published in 1989, Blanche M. G. Linden’s Silent City on a Hill has been the cornerstone in our understanding of the 19th-century rural cemetery movement and Mount Auburn’s leadership role in that movement. Silent City provided the intellectual context for the 1993 Master Plan that has guided stewardship of the Cemetery for the past 20 years.”

— Shary Berg, Author of The Mount Auburn Cemetery Historic Landscape Report, 1993

“Our knowledge and understanding of Mount Auburn Cemetery and the rural cemetery movement begins with historian Blanche M.G. Linden. In fact, Blanche was the first scholar to discover and study Mount Auburn Cemetery’s archival collection of institutional records. With

penetrating scholarship, Blanche made the most important point of all: that these designed landscapes have meaning. ”

— Meg L. Winslow, Curator of Historical Collections, Mount Auburn Cemetery

“Blanche’s magisterial Silent City was just being published when I arrived as the new President of Mount Auburn in the spring of 1988. What a gift it was to me, a new chief executive trying to understand the Cemetery’s place in American history. And what a gift Blanche herself was to us, always an invaluable resource throughout my 20-year tenure at Mount Auburn.”

— Bill Clendaniel, President Emeritus, Mount Auburn Cemetery

(July 4, 1946 – July 31, 2014) Historian of Mount Auburn Cemetery, Author of Silent City on a Hill

We are saddened by the loss of our friend Blanche M.G. Linden and are forever grateful for her scholarship on the founding and early decades of Mount Auburn Cemetery.

“As Mount Auburn inspired the rural cemetery movement in 19th-century America, Blanche, through her work, inspired scores of scholars to study historic cemeteries as complex and layered landscapes.”

— Elise M. Ciregna, Cultural Historian

“Her passion and dedication to the study of cemeteries and grave-markers have served as an inspiration and model of excellence for those who follow.”

— J. Joseph Edgette, Ph.D.; Chair, Cemeteries and Gravemarkers Area American Culture Association

“Blanche helped us appreciate how Mount Auburn reflected the culture of its founding period and gave us insights to understand the changes that occurred over time. We shall miss her but hear her voice when we visit the Cemetery, read her books, and remember her spirit.

— Janet Heywood, Former Vice President of Interpretive Programs, Mount Auburn Cemetery

Blanche with her two children Marc Lindow and Julia Lentini on February 8, 2008 (above). At the signing of her revised and expanded edition of Silent City at the Harvard Bookstore, 2008 (below).

Also online at: mountauburn.org/2014/remembering-blanche-linden

“As Mount Auburn approaches its bicentennial it remains vibrant in a constant Renaissance, its beauties repeatedly renewed through the seasons while it serves actively as a place for burials and for preserving memory.”

— Blanche Linden

20 | Sweet Auburn

Did you know...?By Mount Auburn Volunteers

Buried at Mount Auburn are:

• 893 Civil War veterans. An additional 55 Civil War veterans are buried elsewhere but are memorialized at the Cemetery.

• Three Medal of Honor recipients from the Civil War.

• Two Confederate Army veterans, including one whose service is noted on his headstone.

• Two members of the Secret Six, radical abolitionists who funded John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia: Samuel Gridley Howe (1801–1876, Lot 4987 Spruce Avenue) and George Luther Stearns (1809–1867, Lot 1454 Sedge Path). A third co-conspirator, clergyman and author Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–1911), is buried nearby at Cambridge Cemetery.

• Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910, Lot 4987 Spruce Avenue), who wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” after visiting Union troops near Wash-ington, D.C., in November 1861.

• James and Mary McKinnon Tate, who married in 1858 and went to war together. Mary served as an Army Nurse and died in 1863 at Douglas Hospital in Washington, D.C.; James died shortly after the war in 1865. They are interred side-by-side in unmarked graves in the St. Matthews Lot.

• Artist Winslow Homer (1836–1910, Lot 563 Lily Path), whose sketches of Civil War camp and battle scenes appeared in the popular Harper’s Weekly magazine.

• Boston candy-maker William F. Schrafft (1846–1928, Lot 7385 Halcyon Avenue), who popularized the jelly bean and urged civilians to send the non-perishable candy to Union troops serving in the Civil War.

• Two of Paul Revere’s grandsons who perished in the war (Lot 286 Walnut Avenue). Edward Revere (1827–1862) was killed in action at Antietam; Paul Joseph Revere (1832–1863) died of wounds received at Gettysburg.

• Twenty-seven members of the Banks Brigade Bee, who gathered to make shirts, socks, quilts, nightclothes, and bandages for Union troops. The Bee also supported the work of Dorothea Dix (1802–1887, Lot 4731 Spruce Avenue) and Emily Elizabeth Parsons (1824–1880, Lot 608 Greenbrier Path) at the Western Sanitary Commission.

As the point of entry for more than 200,000 visitors annually, Mount Auburn’s Egyptian Revival Gateway is the Cemetery’s main entrance and a celebrated local landmark. For 182 years, the Gateway has welcomed visitors from around the world. Today its lodges provide shelter as well as interpretive materials for visitors about the history, art, and horticulture of Mount Auburn. An electronic kiosk is available year-round for Cemetery maps and to look up grave locations.

The Gateway is probably the most widely recognized symbol of Mount Auburn today, just as it was in the 19th-century. Dr. Jacob Bigelow (1786–1879), one of the Cemetery’s founders, designed this portal to the Cemetery in 1832 to be imposing, enduring, sacred, and sublime, and he chose the “Egyptian style” to express those intentions. First built in wood dusted with sand to look like stone, it was rebuilt in Quincy granite by Octavius T. Roger in 1842. The cornice stone is thought to be the largest piece of granite placed in a built structure in the United States at that time. Other improvements followed soon after, including construction in 1845 of the richly detailed cast-iron perimeter fence also in the Egyptian style.

Today the imposing granite Gateway and historic cast-iron fence are in urgent need of preservation. In June

2014, the Friends of Mount Auburn Cemetery received a $130,000 Capital Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Facilities Fund (CFF) to help fund a major $525,000 project to clean and repair the building’s granite exterior and to preserve the original cast-iron fence. In order to receive the CFF grant, the Friends must raise $130,000 in contributed funds and are seeking support from institutions and individuals to complete the required match. Once the grant is matched, work will begin on the fence and gates while the Friends continue to fundraise for the completion of the project.

Mount Auburn Cemetery’s Egyptian Revival Gateway is the first fully realized Egyptian Revival structure in the United States and served as a national model for later Egyptian cemetery gateways.

The much-needed preservation of the Egyptian Revival Gateway is part of an ongoing effort to improve the Cemetery’s Entrance Precinct. This project follows closely the 2012 completion of a new covered and accessible entrance to Story Chapel.

To learn more about the project or to make a gift, please contact Jane Carroll, Vice President of Development at jcarroll@mountauburn.org or 617-607-1919.

Preservation of the Egyptian Revival GatewayBy Jenny Gilbert, Senior Gifts Officer

Winter 2015 | 21

Left to right: Tours and programs begin at the Gatehouse. Damage to window molding and moss growing out of masonry joints. Detailed view of corrosion on horizontal rail.

22 | Sweet Auburn

Friends of Mount Auburn Cemetery580 Mount Auburn StreetCambridge, Massachusetts 02138-5517

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Upcoming Events Here is a sampling from the exciting schedule of upcoming programs. Visit us online today to register for any of these programs or to get a complete list of other events on our calendar.

k Winter Birding Walk Saturdays at 8 AM: January 17, February 21, March 21

Winter is an ideal time to get familiar with the year-round resident birds of Mount Auburn. If you are a beginner birder this walk with Visitors Services Assistant & Security Guard Al Parker will help you to learn the common birds of this area without the distractions of the migrating birds or the foliage on the trees. Dress warmly and bring your binoculars. $7 members / $12 non-members

k Longfellow Birthday Celebration Saturday, February 28, 10 AM

Join us for this annual program in Story Chapel, co-sponsored by the Longfellow House – National Headquarters National Historic Site. Following a talk about Longfellow’s lasting legacy, we’ll enjoy birthday cake and then walk to the Longfellow Lot on Indian Ridge Path for a wreath-laying ceremony. Additional details about the program will be announced on our website as the event nears. Free

k Winter Tree & Shrub Identification Thursday, March 19, 3 PM

Join Mount Auburn President Dave Barnett as the snow-covered ground gives way to the earliest spring flowers and buds. We will observe the early signs of spring’s arrival and learn how to identify some of the most interesting trees and shrubs at Mount Auburn by their buds, twig, and bark characteristics. $7 members / $12 non-members

k Lunch-Time Lecture Series: Civil War Stories

This spring will mark the end of a four-year sesquicentennial commemoration of the Civil War. Join us for this free series of lunch-time talks as we share some of our favorite Civil War stories. All talks will take place in Story Chapel. For full details visit mountauburn.org

• Thursday, January 22, Noon: Preserving Civil War Stories in Stone by Gus Fraser, Director of Preservation & Facilities, Mount Auburn

• Thursday, February 26, Noon: The Story of the Sphinx by Meg L. Winslow, Curator of Historical Collections, Mount Auburn

• Thursday, March 26, Noon: Revolutionary Memory, Civil War Sacrifice: Pauline Revere Thayer and Preserving the Revere Legacy by Nina Zannieri, executive Director, Paul Revere House