In 1831 a new entity appeared on the American landscape: the garden cemetery. Meant to be places where the living could enjoy peace, tranquility and beauty, as well as to provide a final resting place for the dead, the garden cemeteries would forever change the culture of death and burial in the United States. The ideal cemetery would become one in which ornamental trees, bushes, flowers, and waterways graced the ever more artistic (for those who could afford them) monuments to the dead. Previous to the 1830s, the deceased were buried in church lots, in small and soon overcrowded public lots, and even, occasionally in backyards and fields. Graves were often untended, weeds and decay soon took over, and the frequently used wooden grave markers rotted away. Some turned to a movement emerging in Europe, in which horticulture was starting to become a factor in cemetery planning, at a time in which cemetery planning itself was a novel idea. New England was the first region in America to take up the new ideals. The first such cemetery, Mt. Auburn, opened in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1831, and Mount Hope Cemetery, in Bangor, Maine, followed in 1834. Today, these cemeteries are both beautiful places to visit and important historical sites. The author takes readers on a historical tour of eighteen of the Northeast's garden cemeteries, exploring the landscape architecture, the stunning beauty, and delving into the rich history of both the sites and of those who are buried there.

Includes cemetery names; year of consecration of cemetery or oldest known gravestone or burial; location of cemetery; printed and manuscript sources for the cemetery from New England Historic Genealogical Society, National Society Daughters of the American Revolution, and official Massachusetts vital records to 1850; and contact information for office affiliated with cemetery.

The graveyards of old New England hold an incredible range of poetic messages in the epitaphs etched into the gravestones, each a profound expression of emotion, culture, religion, and literature. These epitaphs are old, but their themes are timeless: mourning and faith, grief and hope, loss, and memory. This book tells the story of a years-long walk among gravestones and shares insights gained along the way. It identifies the source texts and authors chosen for these stones; interprets something of the tastes and beliefs of the people who did the choosing; offers some hypotheses on the various ways these texts were accessible to readers in remote towns and villages; gives a brief summary of the religious context of the times; and reflects on how the language and literature chosen for these epitaphs express these peoples' conflicted and evolving attitudes towards life, death, and eternity.

Evidence of the early history of African Americans in New England is found in the many old cemeteries and burial grounds in the region, often in hidden or largely forgotten locations. This unique work covers the burial sites of African Americans--both enslaved and free--in each of the New England states, and uncovers how they came to their final resting places. The lives of well known early African Americans are discussed, including Venture Smith and Elizabeth Freeman, as well as the lives of many ordinary individuals--military veterans, business men and women, common laborers and children. The author's examination of burial sites and grave markers reveals clues that help document the lives of black New Englanders from the 1640s to the early 1900s.

"Read the stories behind the scenery: Short, rich, uncommonly engaging histories and descriptions of New England's most notable and recognizable features are accompanied by pitch-perfect photos by one of the region's best architectural photographers."--P. [4] of jacket.

This book explores the relationship and organization of 17th Century burial landscapes within their associated settlements and the wider setting of colonial northeast British North America to provide readers with a more holistic understanding of settlers’ relationship with mortality.

In Puritan New England, with its abiding concern for things not of this world and its distrust of forms and ceremonies, one art flourished: the symbolic art of mortuary monument stonecarvers. This carefully researched, beautifully illustrated work was the first to consider this art in depth as a meaningful aesthetic-spiritual expression. It is reissued for today's readers, with a new preface outlining changes in the field since the book appeared in 1966.