Mount Auburn Cemetery

Founded in 1831 by members of the newly formed Massachusetts Horticultural Society, Mount Auburn (www.mountauburn.org) was America's first large-scale designed landscape that was open to the public. It inspired the rural cemetery movement of the nineteenth century, which in turn became a major stimulus for the nation’s first public parks. By the mid-1800s, the site was internationally renowned as a horticultural attraction. Today, 185 years after its founding, the institution has become a leader in historic landscape preservation and ecologically sustainable landscaping, and has reached out to a new generation of horticulture enthusiasts. A private, non-profit corporation, Mount Auburn is an outdoor museum, a world-renowned ornamental horticultural landscape, an urban wildlife refuge, and an accredited arboretum of great complexity and beauty. It is also a National Historic Landmark and is visited each year by more than 200,000 people from around the world.