If you’re in Rochester, and you want someplace interesting and inexpensive in which to walk about and recreate yourself, you might try Mount Hope Cemetery. A lot of people might be baffled by the thought. If so, they don’t know Mount Hope.
It started out small, as these things do, and it started out early. (Nathanael Hawthorne wrote that whenever you have a new community, no matter how idealistic, the first things you build are a jail and graveyard.) As usual they relegated the cemetery to the least useful ground – the ground they could grudgingly spare from food production. It was hilly, rocky and confusing (people got lost), with pockets of mist, and a reputation for haunting that went back to the Iroquois days.
In the mid-19th century views of death started to change. Queen Victoria, losing her husband young, set off on a decades-long career of Mourning, and just as today, the British royals set the mode. Death and burial became a little less homespun, both now involving dedicated spaces and dedicated professionals. The Civil War brought forth hundreds of thousands of new mourners. People didn’t want graveyards and more. They wanted cemeteries.
Enter Frederick Law Olmsted, godfather of a new field of endeavor – landscape engineering. He created Central Park in Manhattan, and Highland Park and Seneca Park in Rochester, plus the original Cornell campus. Meticulously manicured spaces didn’t look natural – they looked BETTER than nature. Olmsted created dramatic folds and dells and hills and dingles, diverted streams and gave them rocks to play with, planted forests. City folks could feel that they were getting a day in the country, but without the long trip, the manure, the brambles, and the resentful rustics.
Mount Hope became one of many cemeteries that took a leaf from Olmsted’s book. It became something new – a “rural cemetery,” off (at that time) on the edge of the city, and landscaped to be something of a park.
The city has caught up with the “rural” cemetery, but Mount Hope still covers 200 green-clad acres with 350,000 interments, and 500 to 800 more each year. It’s the final resting place for Nathanael Rochester – Frederick Douglass – Susan B. Anthony – newspaper tycoon Frank Gannett, who got his start in Elmira – Seth Green, “the father of fish culture” – Mr. Bausch, AND Mr. Lomb.
(Some are worried that Miss Anthony’s gravestone is being loved to death, covered all over each election year with “I Voted” stickers.)
One section near Strong Hospital includes a TALL 19th-century firemen’s monument, and a burying ground specifically for fire fighters. (It also includes a memorial to the old-time horses.) Nearby is a monument to Boyd and Parker, who were killed near Cuylerville in Sullivan’s invasion during the Revolution, and a mass grave of unknowns, relocated from the neighborhood of the early poorhouse, prison, and insane asylum.
One very moving space is dedicated entirely to veterans of the Civil War. This includes the massive 1908 sculpture of a soldier and a drummer boy, “Defenders of the Flag.”
A stroll through the stones is a hike through Rochester history, with every ethnic group, every religion, every occupation represented. Some stones are in Hebrew, some in Cyrillic script. No doubt if I explored further, I’d find inscriptions in Arabic and in far eastern scripts. It’s inspiring. It does a heart good.
A Walk Through History in Mount Hope Cemetery
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