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The art of Forest Hills cemetery

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1998 by Jonathan L. Fairbanks, Rebecca Ann Gay Reynolds

The famous clockmaker Simon Willard, who came to Roxbury, Massachusetts (now part of Boston), in 1778, died there at the age of ninety-five in 1848, the year that, with laudable pride, the citizens of the town dedicated a new cemetery named Forest Hills. There Willard is buried under a Gothic revival headstone, which was the height of fashion in the 1840s (Pl. IV).

Today, 150 years since its founding, Forest Hills is the final resting place for more than ninety-nine thousand of the departed. Its 280 acres contain a far greater number of original works of art by the country's most celebrated sculptors than any other cemetery in the United States. The eight-year-old nonprofit organization, Forest Hills Educational Trust, continues this tradition by adding to its collections indoors and out, contemporary and antique.(1)

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Forest Hills began with what was then a radical plan for burial and commemoration that linked nature, landscape design, and horticulture with art and architecture. The goal was to move burials from the traditional confines of urban churchyards to the countryside. This was undertaken as much for the benefit of public health as for the sake of beauty. The massive cholera epidemic that swept the United States in 1832, then medically inexplicable, caused reformers to press for improved sanitation in cities. Searching the past for answers turned up the fact that the ancient Greeks and Romans buried their dead outside the city walls, a course that was advocated for American cities.

In his consecration address, delivered at Forest Hills on June 28, 1848, the Reverend George Putnam (1807-1878) said:

The practice of burying the dead in the heart of cities, and in the midst of dense populations, is one of the barbarisms of modern civilization, and a decent regard both for the dead and the living requires that it should be discontinued.(2)

At the time Forest Hills Cemetery was established, its site, Jamaica Plain (now part of Boston), was noted for its farmlands and open countryside. The setting allowed the first president of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, Henry A. S. Dearborn, to express his creativity with romantic garden and landscape design. It also allowed sculptors to display their talent in large-scale monuments. By the 1840s American travelers to Italy were not only acquiring an appreciation of Renaissance and classical art, but also of works being made there by Americans. At the same time, with the founding of the American Institute of Architects in 1857, architecture was becoming professionalized in this country.

Mount Auburn Cemetery, established in 1831 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, took the lead in the picturesque suburban cemetery movement in the United States. It was followed by Laurel Hill Cemetery on the banks of the Schuylkill River in north Philadelphia, founded in 1836. In 1838 Green-Wood Cemetery was established in Brooklyn, New York. The movement reached the Midwest in 1845 with the founding of the Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati and the South in 1847 with the inauguration of Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia.

By integrating romantic landscape design with symbolically appropriate architecture and memorial sculpture, the proprietors of these cemeteries offered new aesthetic experiences to sustain mourners and create a consoling sanctuary. Most were nondenominational and organized as nonprofit corporations with shareholders and proprietors having voting rights - a peculiarly American plan.

Period guidebooks acknowledge the inspiration of Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, laid out in 1805 to the designs of Alexandre Theodore Brongniart (1739-1813). There was also the example set by cemeteries in and near London established during the 1830s.(3) However, American picturesque cemeteries have a distinctively different look from their cousins abroad. This is especially true for Forest Hills, which is heavily wooded and has generous parklike open spaces punctuated by noble monuments and outcroppings of what is known as Roxbury pudding stone. Forest Hills is surrounded by private cemeteries, Franklin Park, and the nearby Arnold Arboretum. All are connected to the Boston park system known as the Emerald Necklace, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) during the 1880s, which extends from the Back Bay Fens to the Boston Garden.

By the middle of the nineteenth century Forest Hills and other suburban cemeteries had become so popular for picnics and other public outings that they set the stage for the development of the great urban parks. These romantic cemeteries were so well recognized as progenitors of public parks that when Olmsted and Calvert Vaux (1824-1895) designed Central Park in New York City it was requested that no place be set aside for graves.(4)

Henry A. S. Dearborn, who with Dr. Jacob Bigelow (1787-1879) founded Mount Auburn Cemetery, became the mayor of Roxbury in 1847. He headed the first board of commissioners for Forest Hills Cemetery and worked with its first horticulturist and superintendent, Daniel Brims (w. at Forest Hills 1848-1858), a Scotsman, to shape the landscape. In the first year, ten thousand seedlings were planted, most representing imported species. Dearborn designed the first entrance (Pl. III), like Mount Auburn's granite gateway, in the Egyptian style, but it was made of wood that was painted to look like stone by sprinkling the wet paint with sand. Dearborn claimed that it was "copied from the ancient portico at Garsery on the upper Nile."(5) It sufficed for a time to stimulate visitors to speculate on eternity.

The art of Forest Hills cemetery

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1998 by Jonathan L. Fairbanks, Rebecca Ann Gay Reynolds

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