UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Blanche M. G. Linden
Foreword by William C. Clendaniel

Winner of the Historic Preservation
Book Award

Winner of an ASLA Merit Award

A revised and expanded edition of a classic work on the creation of America's first rural cemetery

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, with new photographs and a new epilogue that carries the story forward into the twentieth century.

Praise for the original edition:

"Perhaps the greatest virtue of this book is its comprehensiveness. . . . 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."

New England Quarterly

"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."

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians

Blanche M. G. Linden received a Ph.D. in the history of American civilization from Harvard University. She is the author of several books, including Boston Freedom Trail.

American Studies / Landscape Design
396 pp., 8 color and 300 black-and-white illus., 10" x 12" format
$39.95s paper, ISBN 978-1-55849-571-5
December 2007

Published in association with the Library of American Landscape History

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