Sunday in the Mount Hope Cemetery with Luci

practicing wall-climbing in a cemetery is clearly inappropriate!

Cemeteries are a curiosity to me. On the one hand, they seem like a terrific waste of sometimes very valuable land, and an inefficient way to deal with dead people. On the other hand, they do provide some much needed open space, especially in over-populated places like New York City. But as park-like as they are, they aren’t conducive to park activities (it would be “disrespectful” to sunbathe, or have a catch, and a friend and I were even kicked out of a Boston cemetery decades ago because we thought it would be a nice setting for a picnic, although picnics are allowed in Mt. Hope Cemetery).

I thought it would be fun to take a walking tour of Mount Hope Cemetery (a combination of a stroll in the park and a history lesson), and so did my friend Luci. So on a hot Sunday afternoon, our guide, Julie, educated and entertained us for two hours.

The cemetery was established in 1838, 1.5 miles out of town, on land carved by the glacial retreat. Its original 50 acres have grown to 196, contain the remains of over 370,000 (more than the current population of the city of Rochester), and still have room for more. In addition to Susan B. Anthony and Frederick B. Douglass, a plethora of famous locals are buried here, and even though I’m not a native, I’ve lived here long enough to recognize many of the names. But the fun of the tour is in the stories told by the guide (in order on our tour):

Luci by Knapp's grave

• Azariah Boody, a wealthy railroad industrialist, who owned land at University Avenue & Prince Street, which was named for his horse, Prince.
• Emily Sibley Watson, who founded the Memorial Art Gallery in her son’s memory, and who took another young man named David, a talented musician, under her wing and bought him a Stradivarius. After he died in the war, she founded a music school in his name (Hochstein).
• Laura Knapp, who died of meningitis at age 3, and whose marker symbolizes her short life.
• Bausch & Lomb (or Lomb & Bausch, depending on which side of the memorial you are viewing), who are buried together, under an enormous weeping beech, planted in 1848.

Bausch & Lomb under the weeping beech

Susan B. Anthony and her sister

• Susan B. Anthony, whose grave is one of the most visited, and whose unassuming marker gets plastered with “I Voted” stickers each election. (All of the women who illegally voted with her are buried here.)

our guide, Julie

• Margaret Woodbury Strong, the “wealthy hoarder” who called her house a “museum of fascination” and whose collection is the basis of the Strong National Museum of Play.
• Henry Rogers Selden, who turned down the opportunity to serve as VP under Lincoln in his second term.
• General Marshall, whose grave was vandalized in 2000, and whose skull remains missing.

• Henry Ward, Buffalo’s first traffic fatality in 1906, and whose brain was donated to Cornell University.
  
• Orphans from the Orphan Asylum, most of whom were girls who died in a tragic fire in the Corn Hill orphanage.
• Frederick B. Douglass, who didn’t die in Rochester, but who lived here longer than any other location, and whose two memorials have different birth dates.

There were also small markers that just said “Baby” or “My first born” – mostly, according to Julie, first-born boys who remained nameless in order not to waste the names of their fathers on them.

While the cemetery is owned by the City of Rochester, funds for its upkeep are primarily raised by the Friends of Mt. Hope Cemetery. Frankly, I was pleased to learn that the City has its priorities straight – spending money on its living residents, rather than its dead ones. And while the entropy on display (whether from natural decay or vandalism) might seem sad, it is really just a reminder that nothing is permanent. Or, more poetically:

 “The blossom falls on the mountain.

The mountain falls on the blossom.

All things fall.”

(“Chrysanthemum Tea” from Stephen Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures)