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    Forest Hills Cemetery
    Forest Hills Cemetery
    Forest Hills Cemetery
    Ebook246 pages1 hour

    Forest Hills Cemetery

    By Anthony Mitchell Sammarco

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    About this ebook

    Laid out in 1848 as a rural garden cemetery by Henry A. S. Dearborn, Forest Hills Cemetery celebrates its 160th anniversary in 2008 as Boston's premier arboretum cemetery. Since the mid-19th century, its 250 magnificent acres have been the resting place of people of all walks of life, ethnicities, religions, and races. Among these are poets Anne Sexton and E. E. Cummings, playwright Eugene O'Neill, and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Forest Hills's landscape is a museum of sculpture, art, and monuments that chronicles the Victorian age to the present. The first crematorium in New England was here, and prominent Bostonian suffragette Lucy Stone was the first person to be cremated at Forest Hills in 1893. An active cemetery and an all-embracing place, Forest Hills offers a bucolic and picturesque setting for the "gathering of generations" and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateOct 26, 2009
    ISBN9781439620519
    Forest Hills Cemetery
    Author

    Anthony Mitchell Sammarco

    Anthony Mitchell Sammarco is a noted historian and author of over sixty books on Boston, its neighborhoods and surrounding cities and towns. He lectures widely on the history and development of his native city.

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      Book preview

      Forest Hills Cemetery - Anthony Mitchell Sammarco

      noted.

      INTRODUCTION

      He That Keepeth Thee Will Not Slumber

      Henry Dearborn laid out Forest Hills Cemetery. He had impressive credentials, as in 1829, he was among the founders and the first president of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, and he laid out Mount Auburn Cemetery, a rural cemetery north of Boston. Opened in 1831, Mount Auburn Cemetery was the progenitor of the picturesque rural cemetery movement in the United States that closely followed the example of Pere La Chaise, a cemetery founded in 1804 in Paris. Like its predecessor, Forest Hills Cemetery was envisioned as a very different place from the colonial burying grounds throughout the city of Boston, addressing the public health problems and concerns of these overcrowded places of burial. Rural cemeteries were laid out on lands undulating in different topography, including dells, valleys, and curvilinear carriage roads and paths lined with a variety of trees and shrubs, all of which created not just a place of burial but an arboretum or park to be enjoyed by family and friends visiting their departed ones.

      The Seaverns farm was in the area of Canterbury, was bounded by Morton, Canterbury, and Walk Hill Streets, and was a short distance from Washington Street, the old Providence Turnpike that connected Boston and Providence, Rhode Island. The farm was selected because of its varied natural features, which included hills, valleys, lakes and diverse types of vegetation ranging from dense woodland to open fields. It was increased in size the same year when the farm of John Parkinson was purchased, bringing the total to 71 acres. Roxbury had been named for the large outcropping of stone and ledge throughout the area that was to become immortalized by Oliver Wendell Holmes in his poem The Dorchester Giant and to be henceforth known as Roxbury puddingstone.

      Since its founding, the impressiveness of the buildings at Forest Hills has made it a special place. In 1848, Dearborn designed an Egyptian Revival gateway that served as the entrance on Forest Hills Avenue for almost two decades until it was replaced by the present Gothic Revival Roxbury puddingstone and sandstone designed by Charles W. Panter and built in 1865. The entrance gate was flanked by two pedestrian gates and two square gatehouses, which now serve as public restrooms. A two-story Gothic Revival gatehouse was designed by Gridley J. Fox Bryant and Louis P. Rogers and built in 1868 on Forest Hills Avenue. Just inside the cemetery, a Gothic Revival receiving tomb designed by William Ralph Emerson and Carl Fehmer was built in 1871. The erection of the bell tower in 1876 made a dramatic impact, as it rose 100 feet from a massive outcropping of Roxbury puddingstone known as Snowflake Hill. The Gothic Revival Forsyth Chapel was designed by the Boston architectural firm of Van Brundt and Howe and was completed in 1884, with a large office building added to the structure in 1921. Off Walk Hill Street is the crematorium, designed by Ludvig S. Ipsen and built in 1893 by the Massachusetts Cremation Society as the first crematory in New England. Sold to Forest Hills Cemetery in 1925, the crematory has columbaria for those choosing cremation rather than full burial, as well as the Lucy Stone and Pitman Chapels for memorial services. Each of these buildings, impressive in their individuality, contribute to the impressiveness of Forest Hills Cemetery.

      As there is so much history and so many persons of note associated with Forest Hills Cemetery, it is impossible to include all aspects. It is hoped by the author that this photographic volume can convey in some small measure the myriad aspects of history, landscape design, and biographies that make this a truly special place.

      One

      DEARBORN’S VISION

      Calm woodland shade! We here would lay

      The ashes of our loved away;

      And come at length ourselves to sleep,

      Where thou wilt peaceful vigil keep.

      In the creation of Forest Hills, Gen. Henry A. S. Dearborn, with his own hand, marked out the winding avenues and shaded paths, observing how each should reveal some beauty while making available the gentle slopes or the rugged steeps as resting places for the dead.... He modeled the imposing gateway at the principal entrance; he projected the chief adornments, and in a word, he stamped his own idea upon the cemetery in all the varied forms with which art has developed and increased the beauties of nature, an untiring industry, and a pious regard for the claims of the dead. Hardly was there a sign that he even desired to associate his name so intimately with the sacred shades of Forest Hills . . . though such an ambition were no unworthy one. But he labored rather for the love of his work, for the honor of the dead and the solace of the living. In some ways, Victorians believed that nature offered special keys for unlocking the mysteries of life and death.

      In essence, Forest Hills Cemetery began in 1848 with what was then a radical plan for burial and commemoration that linked nature, landscape design, and horticulture with art and architecture, according to a history of the cemetery.

      Henry Dearborn (1783–1851) laid out Forest Hills Cemetery in 1848. A graduate of the College of William and Mary, Dearborn studied law and served as collector of the port of Boston, a representative and state senator, as well as a member of the United States Congress. He served as the first president of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society and as mayor of Roxbury from 1847 to 1851. (Courtesy of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.)

      Lake Hibiscus was originally a smaller, spring-fed natural pond, but in 1852, it was greatly enlarged to a four-acre lake lined with stone, and its undulating shoreline was curbed in granite. In the center of the mirrorlike lake is Swan Island, completed in 1861. It is still a refuge for a variety of swans, geese, and ducks, as well as a parklike landscape of shade trees over a century and a half later.

      At the solemn consecration ceremony on June 28, 1848, Rev. George Putnam (1807–1878) of Roxbury praised the new cemetery as a place of "wooded heights and shaded valleys, grass slopes, little lake of

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