Mount Auburn Cemetery

Mount Auburn Cemetery is one of the most beautiful places in Cambridge — a 174-acre arboretum and garden that happens to contain the graves of some of the most significant figures in American intellectual and cultural history. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mary Baker Eddy, Charles Sumner, and Buckminster Fuller are all buried here. The landscape is meticulously maintained, with thousands of labelled trees and spectacular spring flowering.

The cemetery is open daily and has its own smartphone app with trail maps and historical notes. Birdwatchers come during migration season when the wooded paths attract large numbers of warblers and other passerines. The Washington Tower, a small granite tower at the top of the hill, offers views across the Boston skyline. It is a genuinely peaceful and unusual place, well worth the 15-minute walk from Harvard Square or a short bus ride.

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A story
Mount Auburn opened in 1831 as the first landscaped garden cemetery in America — a deliberate rejection of the grim churchyard burial tradition. The founders of the garden cemetery movement believed the living needed beautiful places to walk and grieve, surrounded by nature. The idea spread rapidly across the country; dozens of major urban cemeteries were designed in the same spirit within two decades.

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