The Beauty and Character of an Unconventional Cemetery

September 14, 2007

by Anna Feldman

This summer, I worked in a cemetery. Please allow me to explain, lest images of grave-digging and pallbearers flash through your mind. I was a public relations and marketing intern for Forest Hills Educational Trust, a non-profit organization that operates on behalf of Forest Hills Cemetery, located in Jamaica Plain. Forest Hills is not your typical cemetery, though. It’s a historic cemetery with beautiful grounds and breathtaking sculptural art. Forest Hills Educational Trust organizes walking tours, concerts, poetry readings, contemporary sculpture exhibitions, and community events, all within the confines of the cemetery, which is itself like a huge open-air museum, something you would not expect to find so close to Boston. It’s right under our noses, this gorgeous green space about which many people know nothing, as did I before I worked there. Granted, a cemetery may not be the first place one would think of to go for a walk or to enjoy a picnic or to ride your bike, but bear with me for a moment and hopefully, you will see why Forest Hills Cemetery is a place well worth exploring.

Imagine your surroundings. Rolling hills, scenic vistas, towering trees, shaded groves. You’re strolling “White Oak Avenue,” then “Rock Maple Avenue,” then “Peony Path.” You see a couple picnicking by the shores of Lake Hibiscus, reclining in the Poetry Chairs, part of the Contemporary Sculpture Path sponsored by the Trust. A group of people on a walking tour are admiring the collection of 19th century Victorian sculptured funerary monuments scattered throughout the landscape.

Founded in 1848 by Henry A.S. Dearborn, then mayor of Roxbury, Forest Hills Cemetery, following Cambridge’s Mount Auburn Cemetery—of which Dearborn was a designer—was one of the first rural garden cemeteries in the United States. Forest Hills essentially functioned as Boston’s first park, preceding the era of Franklin Law Olmstead’s stretch of green space, the Emerald Necklace, by 30 years. The concept behind the rural garden cemetery was multi-fold.

First, it addressed a simple sanitation problem. To prevent the spread of disease due to the build-up of decaying bodies in overcrowded urban plots, larger cemeteries outside the city center were deemed more effective. Second, it brought to fruition the intellectual ideology of the times, which re-conceptualized the idea of death in a fusion of philosophy and spiritualism. Finally, accompanying the scholarly was a new aesthetic mentality geared more toward the living. A visual transformation of the cemetery landscape using experimental horticulture was inspired dually by the lushness of 18th century English pleasure parks and by the vast, hygienic terraced Parisian cemetery Père Lachaise, inaugurated by Napoleon. American sculptors, unappreciated and untrained during colonial times, were also heavily influenced by European traditions. They studied and worked in Europe, particularly Italy, and returned to the United States refined and refreshed, initiating the 19th century movement of Victorian sculptural art.

With the new artistic mentality also came an intellectual one. The Victorian Era—the years roughly from 1830 to 1900—brought to the United States a new conception of death and the afterlife. Ideas cultivated in Europe by writers like John Milton and Alexander Pope, as well as horticulturists Lancelot Brown and Humphrey Repton, emerged as a driving force in the re-structuring of public cemeteries. Romantic ideals overtook the strict Puritan tradition of eternal damnation, as death came to be regarded in a softer light. The burial plot was merely an earthly resting place, and the afterlife afforded a chance to reunite with family and loved ones already deceased. Communing with nature was also increasingly considered a way to unearth the mysteries of life and death.

The visual quality of the rural garden cemetery was thus of utmost importance, and was indeed one of its most defining aspects. No longer was the experience of going to a cemetery a gloomy one. The cemetery as a town, with its hills, paths, trees, ponds, and impressive architectural and artistic monuments, allowed mourners the chance to approach death with a calm and positive attitude. One would appreciate the beauty and soothing atmosphere of the surroundings, and paying a visit to the plot of the deceased became a way not to reflect too sadly on their parting but to remember them fondly as they were in life.

To make the leap from small, flat, sparsely planted colonial cemeteries to the grand, romantic, bucolic Victorian garden cemeteries now being requested by the growing public was no small feat. The transformation of the landscape became a skillful integration of art, architecture and horticulture. Forest Hills Cemetery became a destination not just for the mourning of loved ones and for the experimentation of creative horticulturists, but also as a place to view the most recent artistic trends. Some of the most famous sculptors and architects of the time were commissioned to create funerary monuments for wealthy families or individuals. One of the most famous pieces at Forest Hills and one of the most coveted is the raised relief bronze sculpture of “Death and the Sculptor” by Daniel Chester French, the designer of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

About five years ago, Cecily Miller, executive director of the Educational Trust, initiated the Contemporary Sculpture Path in an effort to revive the 19th century tradition of creating contemporary art to adorn such a unique environment and encouraging the public to come view the art. Thirty-eight pieces of sculpture, both permanent and site-specific, now make up the one-mile Path and provide a fascinating visual contrast beside the Victorian carved statues or Gothic-style mausoleums hidden around every corner.

Another reason to visit? Many famous people are buried at Forest Hills: famous Boston revolutionary war heroes, abolitionists, suffragists, inventors, philanthropists, poets, authors, artists. Abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Lysander Spooner, suffragist Lucy Stone, founder of the fountain pen Louis Waterman, poets e.e. cummings and Anne Sexton, playwright Eugene O’Neill, and basketball player Reggie Lewis are just a few of the illustrious people buried at Forest Hills. In October and November, there are two poetry reading events commemorating poets e.e. cummings and Anne Sexton. Several area poets convene to read the works of cummings or Sexton, some who actually personally knew the poets, with a concluding walking visit to their tombs.

Every season brings its distinct visual appeal to the Forest Hills Cemetery. Spring is glorious, if only for the colorful eruption of flowers, bushes and trees accompanied by the rejuvenating song of birds newly awakened to the season. Summer brings its sweltering heat but respite can be found amid the green shade of towering trees lining the winding paths or by the cool waters of Lake Hibiscus.
Winter finds the floral carved gravestones, draped urns and Egyptian obelisks peeking out from under the bright white blanket that covers the ground. The shoulders and heads of the female figure sculptures and the tips of the marble angels’ wings are dusted with a clean pure snow, their bodily positions betraying nothing of their frigid environs. The imposing trees, now naked, still bend their branches over their resting brood, the entire landscape serene and tranquil. And then there is fall, a most spectacular time to visit the cemetery and to appreciate the hues and temperature of the season. The reds, oranges, and yellows of the changing leaves are of an unparalleled vibrancy in the setting of the cemetery.

Forest Hills Cemetery is an environment, a unique natural setting in which one is prone to poetic turns of the tongue and to personal reflections of the deeper mind. Entering through the Gothic revival main gate and spending time amid its art and architecture can be an experience of various degrees: spiritual (Does God exist?), philosophical (Is death the end or will I see an afterlife?), emotional (I cry because I stand before my grandparent’s tomb, remembering them), physical (I walk up these hills, past this lake, around these monuments as my afternoon walk), recreational (picnicking by the lake or riding a bicycle), or intellectual (historical walking tours organized by the Trust). It was not named one of the Boston Globe’s “Ten Favorite Places in New England” or added to the National Register of Historic Places without good reason.

A place of old and new, of history and family, of art and creativity, of solitude and splendor—this is Forest Hills Cemetery. This weekend, be a bit unconventional and visit. Only then will you be able to confidently say to others, as I now do: The cemetery is really not that creepy.