The grass has not yet fully grown back around the tomb of former Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III, who died in August.

On a recent weekday morning, a bouquet of deteriorating flowers at the base of a monument neighboring Epps’ grave is the only sign that anyone has walked through Harvard’s171-year-old burial ground near the center of Mount Auburn Cemetery.

But there is so much demand to be laid to rest on Harvard Hill and so little space that in 1996, the Harvard Corporation forbade almost all casket burials at the plot.

“It has been very active in recent years,” says Plummer Professor of Christian Morals Peter J. Gomes, who revived interest in the plot. “There probably have been 10 interments up there in the last 10 years—almost one a year—after a long absence of burials.”

Indeed, over the last decade, as many people have been buried on Harvard Hill—including philosophers John Rawls, Conant University professor emeritus, and Pellegrino University Professor Robert Nozick—as had been buried there over the previous century.

All but one of the recently interred have been buried on the side of the hill that overlooks, in the distance, campus landmarks like Memorial Hall, William James Hall and the steeple of Memorial Church.

THE BIRTH

In 1833, George C. Shattuck, a physician and philanthropist educated at Dartmouth College and the University of Pennsylvania, gave Harvard four lots in the then newly founded Mount Auburn Cemetery. The cemetery had only been established two years earlier.

“Dr. Shattuck proposes to present to this University for a place of burial for such officers and students of the College as may decease there and whose friends are pleased to deposit their remains at that place,” wrote Charles P. Curtis, Shattuck’s lawyer, in an April 5, 1833 letter to University President Josiah Quincy, Class of 1790.

That same day, at a special meeting attended by Quincy, the Harvard Corporation accepted the gift and instructed Quincy to “address a letter to [Shattuck], expressive of their grateful sense of this donation.”

There are several plausible reasons why Shattuck, whose wealth derived from his wife’s sugar and trading fortune, gave the land to Harvard.

“I only know it happened,” says Douglas Marshall, who is writing a biography of Shattuck’s son. Marshall says Shattuck had also donated money to construct Harvard’s observatory and to rebuild an Ursuline convent after it was destroyed in an anti-Catholic riot.

According to Janet L. Heywood, vice president of interpretative programs at Mount Auburn Cemetery, Shattuck was a “good friend” of Jacob Bigelow, Class of 1806, who was a major player in the design and establishment of the cemetery and a Harvard science professor.

It’s possible the proponents of the cemetery, like Bigelow, were acting through Shattuck to try to ensure that Harvard students and faculty would be buried there.

“A private corporation set [Mount Auburn Cemetery] up...Very much like developing a mall today. You need to have an anchor store,” Gomes says. “The most quality visible place around was Harvard. The proprietors of Mount Auburn persuaded the [Harvard] Corporation to invest in their new cemetery.”