Sleepy Hollow Cemetery spreads along Bedford Street, near the center of Concord. This rural cemetery was designed in 1855 by landscape architects Cleveland and Robert Morris Copeland and dedicated on September 29, 1855; Ralph Waldo Emerson gave the dedication speech and would be buried here decades later. Ahead of you rises the hill known as "Author's Ridge," the burial site of a number of famous Concordians, including some of the United States' greatest authors and thinkers.
The designers' decades-long friendships with many leaders of the Transcendentalist movement are reflected in the plan you see around you. In 1855 Copeland delivered an address called The Usefull [sic] and The Beautiful, tying naturalistic, organic garden design to Emerson's Transcendentalist principles. As Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn writes, "Sleepy Hollow was an early natural garden designed in keeping with Emerson's aesthetic principles.
Shortly afterward, Copeland and his partner were retained by the Concord Cemetery Committee. Walk slowly along the lanes and let the landscape speak: the gentle slopes, the orderedness of the plantings, and the hush of Author's Ridge all point you toward the graves and ideas that rest here.