Forest Hills Cemetery, Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts

Forest Hills Cemetery is a historic 275-acre rural cemetery, greenspace, arboretum, and sculpture garden in the Forest Hills section of Jamaica Plain, a neighborhood in Boston, Massachusetts. The cemetery was established in 1848 as a public municipal cemetery for Roxbury, Massachusetts, but was privatized when Roxbury was annexed to Boston in 1868.

Forest Hills Cemetery is located in the southern part of Boston's Jamaica Plain neighborhood. It is roughly bounded on the southwest by Walk Hill Street, the southeast, by the American Legion Highway, and the northeast by the Arborway and Morton Street, where its entrance is located. To the northwest, it is separated from Hyde Park Avenue by a small residential area. It abuts Franklin Park, which lies to the northeast, and is a short distance from the Arnold Arboretum to the northwest and forms a greenspace that augments the city's Emerald Necklace of parkland.

The cemetery has a number of notable monuments, including some created by notable sculptors, including Daniel Chester French, whose Death Staying the Hand of the Sculptor is in the cemetery, and John Wilson, whose Firemen's Memorial is there.

Forest Hills Cemetery is an active cemetery where interments take place on most days of the year.

On March 28, 1848, Roxbury City Council, the municipal board in charge of the area at that time, gave an order for the purchase of the farms of the Seaverns family to establish a rural municipal park cemetery. Inspired by Mount Auburn Cemetery, Forest Hills Cemetery was designed by Henry A. S. Dearborn to provide a park-like setting to bury and remember family and friends. In the year the cemetery was established, another 14+1⁄2 acres were purchased from John Parkinson. This made for a little more than 71 acres at a cost of $27,894. The area was later increased to 225 acres.

After operating as the municipal cemetery for Roxbury, Massachusetts for seven years, it was privatized in 1868 as Roxbury was annexed by neighboring Boston. In 1893, the first crematorium in Massachusetts was added to the cemetery, along with other features like a scattering garden, an indoor columbarium and an outdoor columbarium. In 1927, anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were cremated here after their execution; their ashes were later returned to Italy.

Wikipedia

Henry A.S. Dearborn (1783-1851) spearheaded the project to develop Forest Hills Cemetery as a rural cemetery. While he was president of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, Dearborn designed the Mount Auburn Cemetery landscape. By 1847, he was mayor of Roxbury, an office he held until his death in 1851. As Roxbury experienced urban pressures in the years leading up to the cemetery’s creation, Dearborn persuaded local leaders to provide political support for a new rural cemetery. Unlike Mount Auburn and many other rural cemeteries, Forest Hills was a municipal initiative. The cemetery was open to members of every religion, social class, or ethnic group. Lots were set aside for paupers as well as those who could afford to pay.

The site chosen for the new cemetery was a plot of farmland with natural attributes: a varied terrain, several ponds, and a mixture of open fields and dense woodland that made it ideal for development as a rural cemetery. The hills provided scenic views of Boston to the north, and The Blue Hills to the south. Dearborn worked with Superintendent Daniel Brims in laying out the cemetery. The resulting curved roads and naturalistic plantings were characteristic of rural cemetery design. By 1860, they established a nursery on site that allowed for the cultivation of both native and exotic plant species for the cemetery. A highlight of the completed cemetery was the four-acre Lake Hibiscus near the center of the cemetery, completed in 1861. Another interesting feature at Forest Hills was the use of local puddingstone in many of the dry laid stone retaining walls located in the older sections of the cemetery. A municipal cemetery for seven years, Forest Hills became a private nonprofit institution when the City of Boston annexed Roxbury in 1868.

Today, Forest Hills Cemetery encompasses 250 acres. The cemetery is known for its unusual collection of large specimen trees, some of which the Arnold Arboretum introduced to the United States. In addition to its horticultural collections, Forest Hills has an outstanding collection of art and architecture. In 1991, the Forest Hills Educational Trust was created. The Trust sponsors art exhibits, lectures, concerts, interpretive tours and other events, including a popular annual lantern festival. Forest Hills today includes a wide variety of vegetation types, ranging from natural woodland to formal Victorian flowerbeds. Of the many original small ponds on the property, only Lake Hibiscus remains.

Many famous people lie buried at Forest Hills, including statesmen, soldiers, industrialists, social reformers, artists, and poets. The unusually democratic approach to interment ensured that people from all parts of society would lie in rest there together. Some of the interred who had ties with conservation and landscape architecture include Henry A.S. Dearborn; the Olmsted Brothers; and Alexander Agassiz, a zoologist at Harvard University.

Forest Hills Cemetery is located at 95 Forest Hills Ave., in Boston, MA. The cemetery grounds are open to the publicFor additional information about the Cemetery, visit the Forest Hills Cemetery website or the Forest Hills Educational Trust website. The Trust was founded to preserve and interpret Forest Hills Cemetery and its website includes a calendar of events, a description of the site, information on exhibitions and sculpture, contact information, directions, and a calendar of events.

To discover more Massachusetts history and culture, visit the Massachusetts Conservation Travel Itinerary website.

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