Mount Auburn Cemetery

Founded in 1831, Mount Auburn Cemetery is widely recognized as the first large-scale rural or garden cemetery in the United States. Its creation introduced a new kind of designed burial landscape outside the crowded city center, blending horticulture, winding paths, ponds, hills, sculpture, and permanent family lots. The cemetery helped inspire the American rural cemetery movement and influenced the later development of public parks.

Visitors can explore an extensive network of roads and walking paths, view historic monuments and funerary art, visit the graves of prominent Americans, observe birds and seasonal plantings, and climb Washington Tower when open for broad views of Cambridge and Boston. It remains an active cemetery as well as a National Historic Landmark, making it especially valuable for visitors interested in landscape architecture, social history, art, and the evolution of public green spaces.