When Mount Auburn opened as the first "rural" cemetery in the
United States in 1831, it represented a new way for Americans to
think about burial sites. It broke with conventional notions about
graveyards as places to bury and commemorate the dead. Rather, the
founders of Mount Auburn and the spate of similar cemeteries that
followed over the next three decades before the Civil War created
institutions that they envisioned being used by the living in new
ways. Cemeteries became places for leisure, communing with nature,
and creating a version of collective memory. In fact, these
cemeteries reflected changing values and attitudes of Americans
spanning much of the nineteenth century. In the process, they
became paradoxical: they were "rural" yet urban, natural yet
designed, artistic yet industrial, commemorating the dead yet used
by the living. The Rural Cemetery Movement: Places of Paradox in
Nineteenth-Century America breaks new ground in the history of
cemeteries in the nineteenth century. This book examines these
"rural" cemeteries modeled after Mount Auburn that were founded
between the 1830s and 1850s. As such, it provides a new way of
thinking about these spaces and new paradigm for seeing and
visiting them. While they fulfilled the sacred function of burial,
they were first and foremost businesses. The landscape and design,
regulation of gravestones, appearance, and rhetoric furthered their
role as a business that provided necessary services in cities that
went well beyond merely burying bodies. They provided urban green
spaces and respites from urban life, established institutions where
people could craft their roles in collective memory, and served as
prototypes for both urban planning and city parks. These cemeteries
grew and thrived in the second half of the nineteenth century; for
most, the majority of their burials came before 1910. This
expansion of cemeteries coincided with profound urban growth in the
United States. Unlike their predecessors, founders of these burial
grounds intended them to be used in many ways that reflected their
views and values about nature, life and death, and relationships.
Emphasis on worldly accomplishments increased with
industrialization and growth in the United States, which was
reflected in changing ways people commemorated their dead during
the period under this study. Thus, these cemeteries are a prism
through which to understand the values, attitudes, and culture of
urban America from mid-century through the Progressive Era.
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