Mount Auburn Cemetery was established in 1831 as a designed landscape of exceptional beauty with the purpose of burying the dead and providing comfort and inspiration to the living. With its founding, Mount Auburn led the rural cemetery movement in this country and provided the landscape pattern for the public parks movement that followed. Today, Mount Auburn is a busy cemetery as a well as a National Historic Landmark, an internationally renowned arboretum and botanical garden, a wildlife sanctuary, important birding site, outdoor museum of commemorative art and architecture, and a beloved natural oasis in the midst of urban development. The Cemetery is known for its breathtaking horticultural beauty and its many historical associations. Curator Meg Winslow will shed new light on Mount Auburn’s fascinating history and landscape design.

About our speaker:

Meg L. Winslow is Curator of Historical Collections & Archives at Mount Auburn Cemetery where she is responsible for developing and overseeing the Cemetery’s permanent collections including more than 3,500 linear feet of archives, a library, historic photographs, works of art, significant artistic monuments on the grounds and stained glass. In 2013, Meg led the successful implementation of an Institute for Museum Services (IMLS) Museums for America grant to document and research Mount Auburn’s Significant Monument Collection, the first cemetery to receive such a grant. She is co-author with Melissa Banta of The Art of Commemoration and America’s First Rural Cemetery, Mount Auburn’s Significant Monument Collection, in its third printing. In 2017, Meg received the Historic Resources Preservation Award from the Watertown Historical Commission; in 2020 she was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) (CARES) grant for a crowdsourced transcription project to help transcribe Mount Auburn’s nineteenth-century records; and in 2022, Meg was awarded the Historic New England Prize for Collecting Works on Paper for developing the Cemetery’s collections on records and objects and providing greater access to them. Meg has a deep love of the connection between art and nature. She has served as board member of the Association for Gravestone Studies and is currently on the Sculpture Committee for the Friends of the Boston Public Garden and the Programs and Exhibits Committee of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Registration is required.

"Beyond the Library" and Cary Library's museum pass program is sponsored by the Friends of Cary Library.  Cary Library has 23 discounted passes to a variety of wonderful places. For more info about the Friends of Cary Library.