Stephen Kendrick discusses Mt. Auburn Cemetery at The Boston Athenaeum

The Boston Athenaeum is pleased to welcome Stephen Kendrick, author of The Lively Place, the story of one of Greater Boston’s most famous attractions and how it’s founders and “residents” have influenced American culture.

When Mount Auburn Cemetery was founded, in 1831, it revolutionized the way Americans mourned the dead by offering a peaceful space for contemplation. This cemetery, located not far from Harvard University, was also a place that reflected and instilled an imperative to preserve and protect nature in a rapidly industrializing culture—lessons that would influence the creation of Central Park, the cemetery at Gettysburg, and the National Parks system. Even today this urban wildlife habitat and nationally recognized hotspot for migratory songbirds continues to connect visitors with nature and serves as a model for sustainable landscape practices. Beyond Mount Auburn’s prescient focus on conservation, it also reflects the impact of Transcendentalism and the progressive spirit in American life seen in advances in science, art, and religion and in social reform movements. In The Lively Place, Stephen Kendrick celebrates this vital piece of our nation’s history, as he tells the story of Mount Auburn’s founding, its legacy, and the many influential Americans interred there, from religious leaders to abolitionists, poets, and reformers.

Stephen Kendrick is senior minister at the First Church in Boston, Unitarian Universalist. He is the author or coauthor of Holy Clues: The Gospel According to Sherlock Holmes, Sarah’s Long Walk: The Free Blacks of Boston and How Their Struggle for Equality Changed America, Douglass and Lincoln, and the novel Night Watch.

This event is the second of four programs in the “Memory: Mine and Ours” series. The series explores the many facets of how we individually and collectively remember and memorialize people and events. Join us for the other three programs in the series: September 29, “Immigration on Display”; October 14, “Meet us There! Day Trip”; and November 22, “A Cemetery’s Lament”.