Mount Auburn Mausolea

Note: At the request of Mount Auburn Cemetery, this post has been modified to remove reference to the specific locations of these stained glass windows.

In general, I do not spend a lot of time thinking about Victorian-era gravemarkers. I often walk right past the marble monuments on my way to the slate ones.

Yet, I enjoyed my recent winter walk in Mount Auburn. I particularly enjoyed peeking into mausolea — they're really quite beautiful inside.

Jules Marcou

Jules Marcou 

geologist

Mount Auburn Cemetery

Poor Little Match Girl

I suppose this child is supposed to be praying, but he just looks so cold.

Red-Tailed Hawk in Mount Auburn

On my trip to Mount Auburn yesterday, I watched a pair of hawks circle around, startling a flock of starlings everywhere they went.

February Roses

This morning, I went walking in Mount Auburn Cemetery. It was snowing, but not too cold, which is perfect for evoking Victorian melancholy without suffering too much.

Near the Mary Baker Eddy memorial, I happened across a scene that appeared to have been stolen from a 14-year-old goth's imagination:

What kind of roses still cling to the bush in February?

Strange Monuments of Mount Auburn

Mount Auburn is full of elaborate monuments, so it's hard for any individual monument to stand out. Regular old angels and marble lace won't cut it.

What will draw attention? A 25-foot edifice embellished with a man-sized urn, giant mastiff, and marble relief panels depicting mail delivery.

This is the grave of William F. Harnden, founder of one of America's first private express companies. In 1839, when Harnden sent his first package, the United States was expanding tremendously, both geographically and economically. Many historians have pointed toward twin revolutions in transportation and communications to explain this growth. Harnden brought both together in his express company — he shipped packages via railroad and steamship. He died in 1845 at age 31.

In order to commemorate Harnden's important work, his family depicted elements of his business on his memorial.

Here we have well-dressed man handing a package to a woman. He seems to have driven to her door in a wagon — the wheel is behind him and she is hatless, suggesting that she is not dressed to leave the house. I find this image a bit surprising because historians generally emphasize the role of mail and railroads in expanding political connections and business opportunities between men. With a slight clothing change, this could be an image of me accepting a UPS package containing a book from Amazon. Did Harnden envision his business as customer-oriented rather than business-oriented? And did he envision his average customer as a woman?

The other relief is a bit more difficult to decipher, but no less interesting:

Here we have a woman (possibly the same woman) indoors, holding a baby and caring for a toddler. Behind her, a man stares out the window. There is a stove on one side of the room and an object in the foreground that might be a little cart (?). The man is resting his hand on a stack of lumpy objects that might be packages.

Is this image meant to show the interior of a house? Of a store? Is our female customer struggling to drag her offspring to the local post office to retrieve her package? Or is the man in the background her husband, waiting wistfully for someone to come and carry his packages away? Is the woman Harnden's wife, harassed by daily cares while he daydreams about deliveries? I don't know, but I'd appreciate any insight you might have. It's worth noting that the woman is still the focus of the image.

In addition to these panels, the monument has several other striking features.

The canopy is emblazoned with four virtues: hope, charity, faith, and justice. These are illustrated with icons — a dove, a cup, a cross, and a wide, staring eye. The eye is a bit jarring. I confess that I was expecting scales.

This dog reminds me of my childhood trips to Civil War battlefields. My parents would encourage us to look for animals on the monuments to keep our interest when we were very young. My sister had a special love for the 11th Pennsylvania's mascot, Sallie, and demanded to visit her statue on every visit.

Brighid and Sallie:

ABD

As of 4:30 this afternoon, I can add ABD to my email signature (though I probably won't).

I don't think I passed my oral exams elegantly or with flying colors, but I did pass. I'm fairly certain that one of my examiners passed me just to be rid of me.

I celebrated by going to Mount Auburn for the first time all summer. This monument caught my eye, perhaps because she reminded me of Dumbledore and his Pensieve. Since I don't have a pensieve, I'll have to empty my mind with a long weekend of ice cream and video games.

Dorothea Dix

I am very fond of Dorothea Dix's gravestone at Mount Auburn.

It looks like this:

Everything else at Mount Auburn looks like this:

or this:

When I was in high school, I spent some time transcribing various bits of Dix's Civil War era correspondence in the collections of the University of Connecticut. It was a chore — she had the handwriting of someone who was too busy to bother with the niceties of legibility. I've read many 19th-century letters by women, and they have generally been tidy, pristine exemplars of impeccable penmanship. Dix's letters are blotched with ink and the individual letters are scrawled so large that she can only fit 1/4 of the usual text on a page. That's ok, though, because her correspondence is terse and businesslike — it's very rare that she sticks in any of the usual blandishments or runs over to a second page.

I love her gravestone because it is so like her letters: terse, to the point, and unconcerned with the fripperies of Victorian convention. It stands out at Mount Auburn.

Charles Torrey, "Martyr for Liberty"

I've been watching Ken Burns' The Civil War this week as I update and revise my book lists for my general exams. Even though I know that Burns' reconciliationist narrative doesn't really fly with academic historians, I still enjoy the program. At the very least, it beats reading Battle Cry of Freedom again.

This time, as I watched, I reflected on how much Burns has shaped what I (and many others) know about the Civil War. For example, the murder of Elijah P. Lovejoy is a well-known incident in antebellum abolitionism that has undoubtedly enjoyed a resurgence in notoriety due to Burns' PBS series. Lovejoy was not the only abolitionist martyr of the antebellum period, but his inclusion in The Civil War has given his story new prominence in the minds of modern Americans.

Burns could just as easily have chosen to include the story of Rev. Charles Torrey in his documentary. I had never heard of Charles Torrey before I stumbled across his grave at Mount Auburn, but his epitaph made me think that I probably should have.

It reads:

Reverend

CH'S T. Torrey

Born at Scituate

Nov. 21, 1813.

Graduated at Yale College

Aug. 1833.

Ordained at Providence

March 1837.

Arrested at Baltimore

June 24, 1844.

Died in the Penitentiary

of that City

May 9, 1846.

The friends of the

American Slave

erect this stone

to his memory

as a Martyr for Liberty.

Yale-trained minister dies in Southern jail as "Martyr for Liberty"? That seemed like something I should hae heard about.

Turns out that Torrey was actually jailed several times for crimes such as attending a slaveholder's convention as an undercover reporter and assisting the escape of nearly 400 slaves from Maryland and Northern Virginia. He was sentenced to six years of hard labor in Baltimore, but died of tuberculosis in 1846. You can read his memoirs and letters on Google Books.

Torrey's impressive obelisk has its own island in the middle of one of Mount Auburn Cemetery's internal roads, where it is surrounded by flowers. A bas relief of Torrey's bust (toga-clad, natch) embellishes the monument. Though the marble is cracking, it is still quite beautiful. 

A quotation of Torrey's is engraved above the bust. When he was offered a pardon in return for a public apology, Torrey reportedly told his lawyers,

It is better to die in prison with the peace of God in our breasts than to live in freedom with a polluted conscience.

Whoever erected the monument wanted to make extra certain that viewers understood that Torrey was a MARTYR, so he/she/they topped it off with a crown of thorns.

Though largely forgotten in our day, Torrey was a celebrated figure in New England's abolitionist circles. Rev. Amos Beman, an African-American minister from New Haven had a grandson named Charles Torrey Beman who fought with the 5th MA Cavalry in the Civil War (and kept a journal). I don't know whether Charles Torrey Simpson, celebrated botanist, was named for the abolitionist, but since he was born in June of 1846, I think there's a good chance that he was.

Maybe I can find some way to slip this into my general exams . . . it might convince certain of my examiners that I'm not just wasting my time wandering around old graveyards.

Mount Auburn Angel

Horace and Sarah Breed, Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, MA

Metamorphosis

Gravestones often feature symols that indicate rebirth, ascension, or metamorphosis. These include soul effigies, hands pointing toward heaven, and rising suns. This obelisk in Mount Auburn takes a somewhat different approach — it shows a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis.

I'm not really sure whether that flame-like thing is supposed to be a leaf or some sort of silk — maybe it is actually fire. It looks like the carver made an effort to make this image look realistic — the stick is knobby, the little leaf has veins — but I've never seen a chrysalis erupt in fire. Also, that butterfly is not exactly the most graceful, elegant butterfly I've ever seen.

Willie, Mary, and Charlie

Willie, Mary, and Charlie

Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, MA

This sweet monument in Mount Auburn Cemetery is dedicated to three siblings, two of whom died within days of one another in 1849 and a third who was born after his siblings' deaths and died in 1856.

One interesting thing about this memorial is that it does not specify the children's family name. This caught my eye because, in the 18th century, children's grave markers almost always name the father and (usually) the mother. These Victorian children are not memorialized as dependents of earthly parents. Instead, they belong only to the God to whom they turn their smiling, noseless faces.

Colonial Revival

When I visited Mount Auburn, I was surprised by the number of 19th-century stones that reused 17th- and 18th-century imagery.

The most elaborate example of this trend is the James Russell Lowell/Maria White/Frances Dunlap stone (1891), which copies images from several different colonial-era stones. The faces on the finials resemble faces that appear on several Cambridge stones, including the Elizabeth Hastings stone (1702). The jowls, almond-shaped eyes, flowing hair, and thin nose all match. The death's head on the lunette is simplified, but is similar to the lunette design on the Jonathan Wyeth stone (1743). While the flowers on the Wyeth stone are
5-petaled rather than 4-petaled, the shape of the skull and wings are similar to those on the Lowell lunette. Other design elements, such as the fig/gourd/breasts on the vertical borders, are common to many early Massachusetts gravestones. The crossed bones and hourglass are also common, and are often combined in Cambridge stones, such as the Susanna Staesy stone (1702).

As a professor at Harvard, Lowell would have passed by the Unitarian Universalist Church and its graveyard on a daily basis. The gravestones must have appealed to Lowell, whose interest in literature and history is well known.

I don't know why James Russell Lowell chose to have such an unusual gravestone carved for him, but I suspect it had something to do with establishing his authenticity as a genuine New Englander. In the late 19th century, as immigrants and industry changed the social and cultural dynamics of Boston, the old fashioned New Englandy-ness of the stones in the Unitarian graveyard must have appealed to Lowell as an expression of that dying culture. I'm just speculating here - someone who is more familiar with Lowell's work could probably offer a more informed interpretation. For now, I'm going to assume that regional/cultural pride or nostalgia played some role, but I'll have to investigate further.

There are a few other stones at Mount Auburn that preserve colonial motifs. Most are just tripartite slate stones with faux-colonial floral designs along the borders. Only a very few have colonial lunette designs, but those that do are beautiful.

One of these is the Henry Howard Brown/Hannah Bangs Thayer stone (1941). The double mermaid appears on at least three stones in the Copp's Hill Burying Ground — the Michael Martyn stone (1682), the William Greenough stone (1693), and the John Briggs stone (c. 1690) — though none of these has the winged hourglass above the urn. There are also two double mermaid stones — Jacob Eliott (1693) and Benjamin Hill (1683) — at the Granary Burying Ground in Boston. The bulls-eye design on the urn is very similar to the concentric circles on the William Greenough stone. Ludwig attributes the 17th-century stones to the unnamed carver, "J.N." (Ludwig, 299). He calls the creatures Dagons and Nereids, but is unable to explain how they ended up on Puritan gravestones. I don't have any better guesses than he did.

The other elaborate gravestone is the Thomas Earle White stone (1916), which features a winged hourglass. The winged hourglass isn't a very common design for a full lunette - it's usually a smaller design element, but there are some examples of larger hourglasses. The William Field stone (1772) in Providence has a full winged hourglass, but it is more primitive than the White stone. I'll have to keep my eyes open for a similar stone in Boston.

Mount Auburn Civil War Memorial

In honor of Memorial Day, I am posting a few pictures of Mount Auburn Cemetery's Civil War memorial. Designed by Martin Milmore, the "American Sphinx" was dedicated in 1872, making it one of the earlier Civil War monuments.

This monument is also noteworthy because it is one of the few that explicitly acknowledges slavery as an important factor in the war. In wealthy, abolitionist Cambridge, it was perfectly acceptable to count emancipation among the war's positive outcomes.
The English version of this inscription, which appears on the other side of the monument's base, reads:

AMERICAN UNION PRESERVED
AFRICAN SLAVERY DESTROYED
BY THE UPRISING OF A GREAT PEOPLE
BY THE BLOOD OF FALLEN HEROES

On this Memorial Day, let us not forget the men, black and white alike, who fought for line #2.

Obligatory disclaimer: Of course, I am not claiming that all Union soldiers were abolitionists. For many Northerners, line #1 was plenty of motivation. But for a large number, including the nearly 200,000 African-American soldiers, line #2 was pretty important.