The Rural Cemetery Movement: Places of Paradox in Nineteenth-Century America

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 l...