Mount Auburn Cemetery

Mount Auburn Cemetery is a 170-acre garden cemetery on the Cambridge-Watertown line, laid out in 1831-32 by Alexander Wadsworth for the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. Its winding roads and footpaths follow the natural topography of a glacial moraine with ponds, knolls and a 136-foot hill, and the original road pattern remains virtually intact. The nomination describes it as America's first rural garden cemetery and one of the best preserved. Its informal plan broke from the rigid rows of churchyard burial grounds and shaped later cemeteries such as Laurel Hill, Greenwood and Forest Hills, as well as public parks like Central Park and Franklin Park. Buildings include the Egyptian Revival gate of 1843, Bigelow Chapel, a granite lookout tower of 1853 and Story Chapel of 1897. More than 70,000 interments are marked by monuments in many styles. Buried here are Louis Agassiz, Charles Bulfinch, Dorothea Dix, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Winslow Homer.