
Mount Auburn Cemetery
Wooded natural valley with a vernal pool, restored wetland alive with frogs, toads, and migrating songbirds.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Mount Auburn Cemetery in Boston starts at Consecration Dell, the steep wooded hollow where over two thousand people gathered in 1831 to dedicate America's first rural cemetery. It follows what happened to the dell's frogs and toads over the next century of tidy Victorian landscaping, and introduces biologist Joe Martinez and conservation official Patrick Fairbairn, who in 2012 set out to do something about the silent pool. Listen for the pool itself as you approach the dell in the evening.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Forest Hills Cemetery
Bronze memorial of Death staying a young sculptor's chisel mid-carving, cast in Paris and prize-winning.
Kings Chapel Burying Ground
Colonial graveyard whose tidy rows of headstones no longer sit above the bodies they mark.
Back Bay Fens
Engineered salt marsh with hidden tide gates and sewage interceptors, disguised as parkland.
Granary Burying Ground
Colonial burying ground holding the shared grave of the Boston Massacre victims and other Revolutionary-era patriots.
Copps Hill Burying Ground
Colonial cemetery where a smuggler's headstone still bears British bullet scars.
Spectacle Island
Capped former landfill turned harbor park, with drumlin hills, five miles of trails and a lifeguarded swimming beach.