DEATH’S HEAD

Before cemeteries such as Mt. Auburn were created, the dead were laid to rest in burial grounds. The burial ground is a dark contrast to the pastoral cemetery. The Granary, a burial ground near Boston Common filled with American Revolution heroes, is a macabre scene of death. Skeletons line dark gray tombstones and nearly every marker has a frightening  image of a skull attached to wings, called “Death’s Head.”

“Colonial period, they didn’t have cemeteries,” says Robert Allison, History Chair of Suffolk University and an expert on Colonial History. “The Puritans were very clear that when you were dead, your soul is what mattered. It was incredibly utilitarian in that burials were used to discourage disease. Once you’ve been the ground from 10 to 20 years, it was safe to put someone on top of you.” Thus, burial grounds were viewed only as a convenient place to store the dead. “When they dug through [Boston Common] a couple years back, skeletons were literally falling down onto the workers.” There was no interest in mystery or love of nature; insofar as the Puritans were concerned, a burial ground was a only a necessary evil, like a prison.

“Once mortality rates decreased, colonists’ perspective of death was softened,” Allison says. “Places like Mt. Auburn and Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain were created as an alternative to burial grounds, which had filled up through plagues and the harsh life of the early colonial period.” That the peace of Mt. Auburn made me so serene is fitting—it is a place designed to reflect the prosperity of its era.

“When Mt. Auburn comes around, an idea emerges of a pastoral setting where you had a gravesite and the family would go to picnic at that site,” Allison goes on. “[Some families] would own a sketch in the bedroom of the family burial plot at Mt. Auburn. Throughout their week, they looked at the sketch.” This acceptance of death was reflected in the art of the time as well. In the mid-19th century, the city of Boston built a wall around the Granary Burial Ground with the image of an hourglass with wings on the gates. This iconography stands in stark contast with the Death’s Head that adorns the graves.

“Mostly it had to do with the change from Puritanism to Unitarianism,” says Allison, “changing from ‘God is wrathful and thinks you sinful’ to ‘God really likes you a lot and doesn’t want you to suffer.’” The metamorphosis from viewing humans like ants to be crushed by the hands of an angry God to viewing them as individuals whose intrinsic qualities earn God’s favor can be seen not only in the memorialization of those who died in the 19th century, but also in the community conscience of what it meant to be a Bostonian.

“It used to be said there were three requirements to be a Bostonian: you had a reader’s card for the Athenaeum, a pew at Trinity Church, and a plot at Mt. Auburn,” says Allison. In this way, cemeteries are highly representative of their time, designed to provoke a certain feeling, whether fear of God or love of nature. Mt. Auburn was designed for serenity.

CEMETERY SENTIMENT

There exists at Harvard a small group of faculty who show students Mt. Auburn’s beauty and encourage them to explore it. Professor John Mathew, who teaches Freshman Seminar 26y: “Science, History, and Theatre,” discovered the cemetery for himself over a decade ago, and now he guides his students through it when he gets the chance. I asked his freshman students if they had been to the cemetery yet and was met by a resounding chorus of affirmations.

“The deeper we went into Mt. Auburn, the farther down my jaw dropped,” says Jess R. Lucey ’15, a student in the class. “It’s called the City of the Dead, and time suddenly stops even though the city outside is whirring around you.”

Mathew takes personal trips to Mt. Auburn throughout the year, sometimes two or three times per week. “I grade papers there, go there to train actresses, or just to think,” Mathew says. “I’ve honestly have been waiting for eight years to teach this class.”

Some Harvard faculty hold Mt. Auburn in high regard for its role in Boston’s history. Chair of Folklore and Mythology Maria Tatar realized its beauty after a trip last spring to visit the grave of Jeremy R. Knowles, former Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

“[Knowles] was such a charismatic, wonderful leader, and I had been meaning to go for quite some time,” she says. “I’m also a firm believer in facing reality.”

After the visit, Tatar told her children that she’d like to be buried in Mt. Auburn after her death and spoke to its significance for Harvard and Cambridge.

“I have lived in Cambridge most of my life, and think of myself as a dweller of New England,” she says. “Most of the people that Harvard chooses to be buried [on Harvard Hill] have made a huge contribution to the community ... [but] I’m certainly not angling for anything.”