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  • 21 Aug, 2019

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Sleepy Hollow Cemetery (Concord, Massachusetts)
Sleepy Hollow Cemetery is a rural cemetery located on Bedford Street near the center of Concord, Massachusetts. The cemetery is the burial site of a number of famous Concordians, including some of the United States' greatest authors and thinkers, especially on a hill known as "Author's Ridge."

History

A sign by the cemetery

Sleepy Hollow was designed in 1855 by noted landscape architects Cleveland and Copeland, and has been in use ever since. It was dedicated on September 29, 1855; Ralph Waldo Emerson gave a dedication speech and would be buried there decades later. Both designers of the cemetery had decades-long friendships with many leaders of the Transcendentalism movement and is reflected in their design.

"Sleepy Hollow was an early natural garden designed in keeping with Emerson's aesthetic principles," writes Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn in his Nature and Ideology. In 1855, landscape designer Robert Morris Copeland delivered an address he entitled The Usefull [sic] and The Beautiful, tying his principles of naturalistic, organic garden design to Emerson's Transcendentalist principles. Shortly afterward, Copeland and his partner were retained by the Concord Cemetery Committee, of which Emerson was an active member, to design a cemetery for the growing community.

On September 29, 1855, Emerson delivered the opening address of the cemetery's consecration. In it he lauded the designers' work. "The garden of the living," said Emerson, was as much for the benefit for the living, to communicate their relationship to the natural world, as it was to honor the dead. By situating the monuments to the dead within a natural landscape, the architects conveyed their message, said Emerson. A cemetery could not "jealously guard a few atoms under immense marbles, selfishly and impossibly sequestering [them] from the vast circulations of nature [which] recompenses for new life [each decomposing] particle."

Known as Sleepy Hollow for some 20 years prior to its use as a cemetery, Emerson told his audience at the consecration ceremony that September day in Concord, "When these acorns, that are falling at our feet, are oaks overshadowing our children in a remote century, this mute green bank will be full of history: the good, the wise, and the great will have left their names and virtues on the trees... will have made the air tuneable and articulate."

To realize their vision, Emerson noted that the cemetery's designers had fitted the walks and drives into the site's natural amphitheater. They also left much of the original natural vegetation in place, instead of removing it and replanting with ornamental shrubs, as was often the case. Several years after Emerson's address, a visitor to the new cemetery noted the abundance of wild plants such as woodbine, raspberry, and goldenrod, as well as the natural moss and roots of pine trees which were left in situ by the designers.

The Melvin Memorial, also known as Mourning Victory, sculpted by Daniel Chester French marks the grave of three brothers killed in the Civil War.

Melvin Memorial (1908) (Daniel Chester French, sculptor; Henry Bacon, architect)

Several notable literary figures are buried on "Author's Ridge".

People are still being buried in Sleepy Hollow. The back of the newer portion of the cemetery leads to a path system which connects to the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge.

Notable burials

The grave of Louisa May Alcott at Sleepy Hollow
The grave of Franklin Benjamin Sanborn at Sleepy Hollow
Ralph Waldo Emerson's grave in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

See also

References

  1. ^ "National Register Information System". National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service. July 9, 2010.
  2. ^ McAleer, John. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Days of Encounter. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1984: 664. ISBN 0-316-55341-7.
  3. ^ Places of Commemoration: Search for Identity and Landscape Design | Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture (18th : 1995). Dumbarton Oaks. October 25, 2001. ISBN 9780884022602. Retrieved October 25, 2022 – via Google Books.
  4. ^ Architecture (18th : 1995), Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape (October 25, 1997). Nature and Ideology: Natural Garden Design in the Twentieth Century. Dumbarton Oaks. ISBN 9780884022466. Retrieved October 25, 2022 – via Google Books.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  5. ^ Architecture (18th : 1995), Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape (October 25, 1997). Nature and Ideology: Natural Garden Design in the Twentieth Century. Dumbarton Oaks. ISBN 9780884022466. Retrieved October 25, 2022 – via Google Books.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  6. ^ Roe, Alfred S. (Alfred Seelye) (October 25, 1910). "The Melvin memorial : Sleepy Hollow cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts, a brother's tribute; exercises at dedication, June 16, 1909". Cambridge [Mass.] : Privately printed at the Riverside Press. Retrieved October 25, 2022 – via Internet Archive.
  7. ^ "Sleepy Hollow Cemetery Tour". The Town of Concord Massachusetts. Retrieved November 27, 2022.
  8. ^ Glenn, Sharlee Mullins (2018). Library on wheels : Mary Lemist Titcomb and America's first bookmobile. New York: Abrams Books for Young Readers. p. 42. ISBN 9781683352921. OCLC 1030992512.
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