Mount Auburn Cemetery was dedicated in 1831. Here, on grounds dedicated in 1831, you encounter the nation’s first rural or garden cemetery: 174 acres (70 ha) of rolling landscaped terrain set with classical monuments. You can feel how radically different this place was from the older Colonial burying grounds and church-affiliated graveyards — a deliberate shift toward a gentler language about death reflected in the use of the word “cemetery,” from the Greek for “a sleeping place.”
This is not only a burial ground — it is the resting place of many prominent Boston Brahmins and a National Historic Landmark. The landscape itself links traditions: imagine an arc from Capability Brown’s 18th-century English landscape gardens to the later work of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux on Central Park (1857–1876). Mount Auburn’s role as an arboretum and as Watertown’s largest contiguous open space reinforces that sense of cultivated nature and remembrance.
Stand here and take in the classical monuments, the careful plantings, and the broad sweeps of lawn. To the east the grounds run into Cambridge and meet Cambridge City Cemetery and Sand Banks Cemetery, all of it a sleeping place in the old Greek sense of the word.