Silent City on a Hill
Picturesque Landscapes of Memory and Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery
Blanche M. G. Linden
Library of American Landscape History
| ISBN: 978-1-952620-13-3 | 408 pages | 10 x 12 inches |
| $40.00 | Paper | Published: 10/01/2007 |
| 179 b&w photos and drawings | |
A revised and expanded edition of a classic work on the creation of America’s first rural cemetery. The first edition won both the Historic Preservation Book Award and an American Society of Landscape Architects Merit Award.
Originally published in 1989, this book offers an insightful inquiry into the intellectual and cultural origins of Mount Auburn Cemetery, the first landscape in the United States to be designed in the Picturesque style. Inspired by developments in England and France, and founded in 1831, Mount Auburn became the prototype for the “rural cemetery” movement and was an important precursor of many of America’s public parks, beginning with New York City’s Central Park.
This new edition has been completely redesigned in a larger format. It features new color photographs by Richard Cheek, new black-and-white photographs by Carol Betsch, and a new epilogue that carries the story forward into the twentieth century.
"In illuminating the furthest reaches of Mount Auburn's meaning, the author also sheds light on many other aspects of nineteenth-century American culture. . . . Each of the eleven chapters—especially the seven or eight that separate out for consideration specific strands of intellectual and aesthetic influence, such as that of the English garden, the French 'cult of ancestors,' or the American sensibility to melancholy—could stand on its own as an interesting study."
“The definitive book on the causes leading to the rural cemetery movement and the founding of Mount Auburn Cemetery. No one in the future will be able to write about nineteenth-century cemeteries in the United States without first studying this book. . . . Silent City on a Hill is a lavishly satisfying scholarly book.”
2007 Historic Preservation Book Award
2007 American Society of Landscape Architects Merit Award
About the Author
Blanche M. G. Linden
Blanche M. G. Linden, (1946–2014), was an independent scholar and writer. Her numerous publications in women’s studies, visual and material culture, and American history include Spring Grove: Celebrating 150 Years.