Forest Hills Cemetery is a historic

rural cemetery A rural cemetery or garden cemetery is a style of cemetery that became popular in the United States and Europe in the mid-nineteenth century due to the overcrowding and health concerns of urban cemeteries. They were typically built one to five ...

, greenspace, arboretum and

sculpture Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. Sculpture is the three-dimensional art work which is physically presented in the dimensions of height, width and depth. It is one of the plastic arts. Durable ...

garden A garden is a planned space, usually outdoors, set aside for the cultivation, display, and enjoyment of plants and other forms of nature. The single feature identifying even the wildest wild garden is ''control''. The garden can incorporate bot ...

located in the Forest Hills section of the

Jamaica Plain Jamaica Plain is a neighborhood of in the City of Boston, Massachusetts, United States. Settled by Puritans seeking farmland to the south, it was originally part of the former Town of Roxbury, now also a part of the City of Boston. The commun ...

neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. The cemetery was established in 1848 as a public municipal cemetery of the town of Roxbury, but was privatized when Roxbury was annexed to Boston.

Overview

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 Arborway (also known as The Arborway) consists of a four-lane, divided parkway and a two lane residential street in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. It was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted in the 1890s as the south most ...

and

Morton Street Morton Street is a street in southern Boston, Massachusetts. It extends from the southeastern end of the Arborway in Jamaica Plain to Washington Street in the Lower Mills Village of Dorchester. Most of the road is a connecting parkway, signed ...

, 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 by famous sculptors. Among these are Daniel Chester French's '' Death Staying the Hand of the Sculptor'' and John Wilson's Firemen's Memorial. Forest Hills Cemetery is an active cemetery where interments take place on most days of the year.

History

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 the 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 were purchased from John Parkinson. This made for a little more than at a cost of $27,894. The area was later increased to . In 1893, the first

crematorium A crematorium or crematory is a venue for the cremation of the dead. Modern crematoria contain at least one cremator (also known as a crematory, retort or cremation chamber), a purpose-built furnace. In some countries a crematorium can also b ...

in Massachusetts was added to the cemetery, along with other features like a scattering garden, an indoor

columbarium A columbarium (; pl. columbaria) is a structure for the reverential and usually public storage of funerary urns, holding cremated remains of the deceased. The term can also mean the nesting boxes of pigeons. The term comes from the Latin "''colu ...

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.

Notable persons interred at Forest Hills

Firemen's Monument, Boston by John A Wilson- far

* Harrison Henry Atwood, US House of Representatives (1895–1897), Architect of Boston * Simon Willard celebrated

U.S. The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...

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* Rufus Anderson, missionary and author * Hugh Bancroft, president of ''

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'' * Clarence W. Barron, president of Dow Jones & Company * Cyrus Augustus Bartol, American preacher and writer *

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, composer and pianist * Andrew Carney, Entrepreneur and Philanthropist *

James Freeman Clarke James Freeman Clarke (April 4, 1810 – June 8, 1888) was an American minister, theologian and author. Biography Born in Hanover, New Hampshire, on April 4, 1810, James Freeman Clarke was the son of Samuel Clarke and Rebecca Parker Hull, though h ...

, author * Channing H. Cox,

Governor of Massachusetts The governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is the chief executive officer of the government of Massachusetts. The governor is the head of the state cabinet and the commander-in-chief of the commonwealth's military forces. Massachuset ...

(1921–1925) * E. E. Cummings, poet and artist * Fanny Davenport, actress *

William Dawes William Dawes Jr. (April 6, 1745 – February 25, 1799) was one of several men who in April 1775 alerted colonial minutemen in Massachusetts of the approach of British army troops prior to the Battles of Lexington and Concord at the outset ...

(possible), tanner and American colonial

minuteman Minutemen were members of the organized New England colonial militia companies trained in weaponry, tactics, and military strategies during the American Revolutionary War. They were known for being ready at a minute's notice, hence the name. Mi ...

* William Dwight (1831–1888), general in

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* Eugene N. Foss,

(1911–1914) * Lee M. Friedman (1871–1957), lawyer and historian *

William Lloyd Garrison William Lloyd Garrison (December , 1805 – May 24, 1879) was a prominent American Christian, abolitionist, journalist, suffragist, and social reformer. He is best known for his widely read antislavery newspaper '' The Liberator'', which he foun ...

abolitionist Abolitionism, or the abolitionist movement, is the movement to end slavery. In Western Europe and the Americas, abolitionism was a historic movement that sought to end the Atlantic slave trade and liberate the enslaved people. The British ...

* William Gaston,

(1875–1876) *

Kahlil Gibran Gibran Khalil Gibran ( ar, جُبْرَان خَلِيل جُبْرَان, , , or , ; January 6, 1883 – April 10, 1931), usually referred to in English as Kahlil Gibran (pronounced ), was a Lebanese-American writer, poet and visual artist ...

(1922–2008),

Sculptor Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. Sculpture is the three-dimensional art work which is physically presented in the dimensions of height, width and depth. It is one of the plastic arts. Durable sc ...

* Adoniram Judson Gordon (1836–1895), preacher, writer, composer, and founder of Gordon College *

Curtis Guild Curtis Guild Jr. (February 2, 1860 – April 6, 1915) was an American journalist, soldier, diplomat and politician from Massachusetts. He was the 43rd Governor of Massachusetts, serving from 1906 to 1909. Prior to his election as governor, Guil ...

(1906–1909) *

Edward Everett Hale Edward Everett Hale (April 3, 1822 – June 10, 1909) was an American author, historian, and Unitarian minister, best known for his writings such as " The Man Without a Country", published in '' Atlantic Monthly'', in support of the Union ...

, author *

William Heath William Heath (March 2, 1737 – January 24, 1814) was an American farmer, soldier, and political leader from Massachusetts who served as a major general in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. Life and career Heath m ...

, general in

American Revolutionary War The American Revolutionary War (April 19, 1775 – September 3, 1783), also known as the Revolutionary War or American War of Independence, was a major war of the American Revolution. Widely considered as the war that secured the independence of t ...

Karl Heinzen Karl Peter Heinzen (22 February 1809 – 12 November 1880) was a revolutionary author who resided mainly in Germany and the United States. He was one of the German Forty-Eighters. He advocated terrorist violence against ruling dynasties and unin ...

, author * Rev.

Edgar J. Helms Goodwill Industries International Inc., often shortened in speech and writing to Goodwill (stylized as goodwill), is an American nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that provides job training, employment placement services, and other community-bas ...

, Founder of Goodwill Industries * Charles Hiller Innes, Massachusetts Politician * Jennie Kimball, 19th-century actor, soubrette, theatrical manager * Faik Konitza, Albanian thinker, writer, journalist, politician *

Samuel P. Langley Samuel Pierpont Langley (August 22, 1834 – February 27, 1906) was an American aviation pioneer, astronomer and physicist who Invention, invented the bolometer. He was the third secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and a professor of a ...

, aviation pioneer, namesake of NASA Langley Research Center *

Reggie Lewis Reginald C. Lewis (November 21, 1965 – July 27, 1993) was an American professional basketball player for the National Basketball Association's Boston Celtics from 1987 to 1993. Early life Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Lewis attended high schoo ...

, basketball player for Boston Celtics *

Francis Cabot Lowell Francis Cabot Lowell (April 7, 1775 – August 10, 1817) was an American businessman for whom the city of Lowell, Massachusetts, is named. He was instrumental in bringing the Industrial Revolution to the United States. Early life Francis Cabot ...

, after whom

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is named *

John Lowell John Lowell (June 17, 1743 – May 6, 1802) was a delegate to the Congress of the Confederation, a Judge of the Court of Appeals in Cases of Capture under the Articles of Confederation, a United States district judge of the United States Distr ...

, 18th century federal judge *

, 19th century federal judge *

Martin Milmore __NOTOC__ Martin Milmore (1844–1883) was an American sculptor. Life and career Martin Milmore was born in Sligo, Ireland on September 14, 1844. He immigrated to Boston at age seven, graduated from Boston Latin School in 1860, took art lesso ...

, sculptor * Carlotta Monterey, actor and wife of

Eugene O'Neill Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (October 16, 1888 – November 27, 1953) was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Nobel Prize in Literature, literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into the U.S. the drama tech ...

* Godfrey Morse (1846–1911), lawyer * Albert W. Nickerson, railroad executive * Theofan S. Noli, Bishop, Prime Minister of

Albania Albania ( ; sq, Shqipëri or ), or , also or . officially the Republic of Albania ( sq, Republika e Shqipërisë), is a country in Southeastern Europe. It is located on the Adriatic and Ionian Seas within the Mediterranean Sea and shares ...

, playwright * Joseph C. Pelletier, district attorney of Suffolk County, Massachusetts and the Supreme Advocate of the

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* Ambrose Ranney (1821–1899), U.S. Representative from Massachusetts *

Anne Sexton Anne Sexton (born Anne Gray Harvey; November 9, 1928 – October 4, 1974) was an American poet known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her book '' Live or Die''. Her poetry details ...

, poet * Pauline Agassiz Shaw, reformer and philanthropist *

Lysander Spooner Lysander Spooner (January 19, 1808May 14, 1887) was an American individualist anarchist, abolitionist, entrepreneur, essayist, legal theorist, pamphletist, political philosopher, Unitarian and writer. Spooner was a strong advocate of the labor ...

, early American abolitionist, writer, anarchist * Amy Wentworth Stone, children's writer * Lucy Stone, suffragist * Anna Eliot Ticknor, distance learning pioneer *

George Ticknor George Ticknor (August 1, 1791 – January 26, 1871) was an American academician and Hispanist, specializing in the subject areas of languages and literature. He is known for his scholarly work on the history and criticism of Spanish literature. ...

scholar, founding Trustee of the

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Joseph William Torrey Col. Joseph William Torrey, Rajah of Ambong and Marudu, (April 22, 1828 in Bath, Maine; – June 22, 1885 in Boston) was an American merchant, president of the American Trading Company of Borneo and co-founder of the American colony "Ellena" ( ...

, merchant, founder of the American colony of "Ellena" in

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, physician and patriot, killed at Battle of Bunker Hill *

Lawrence Whitney Lawrence "Larry" Atwood Whitney (February 2, 1891 – April 24, 1941) was an American athlete who competed in the 1912 Summer Olympics. Career Whitney graduated from Worcester Academy in 1911, where he lettered in baseball and basketball ...

, Olympic bronze medalist *

Mary Evans Wilson Mary Evans Wilson (1866-1928) was one of Boston's leading civil rights activists. She was a founding member of the Boston branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the founder of the Women's Service Club. Early ...

, civil rights activist * John A. Winslow, admiral in

* Jacob Wirth, restaurateur * Two British

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, of a Royal Field Artillery soldier of

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and a Merchant Navy sailor of

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.
CWGC Cemetery Report, details obtained from casualty record. File:WilliamLloydGarrisonGrave.jpg,

grave. File:EugeneONeilGrave.jpg,

grave. File:EECummingsGrave.jpg, E. E. Cummings grave. File:AnneSextonGrave.jpg,

grave.

Gallery

File:Forest Hills Gate.JPG File:Weeping_European_Beech_Tree_(distance),_Forest_Hills_Cemetery,_Jamaica_Plain,_MA_-_August_15,_2015.jpg, Large Weeping European Beech inside Forest Hills Cemetery File:Copper_European_Beech_Tree_at_Forest_Hills_Cemetery,_Jamaica_Plain-Boston,_MA_-_August_15,_2015.jpg, Copper European Beech by the pond File:Forest Hills Bell Tower.JPG File:Forest Hills Monument.JPG File:Forest Hills Soldier Inscription.JPG File:Forest Hills Soldier 2.JPG File:Forest Hills Soldier.JPG File:Forest Hills Firefighter 2.JPG File:Forest Hills Firefighter.JPG File:Jamaica Plain Mary 2.JPG File:Jamaica Plain Mary.JPG File:Forest Hills Lake.JPG

References

External links

Forest Hills Cemetery
official site
Forest Hills Educational Trust

Photos of Forest Hills Cemetery

Heart of the City
article and photos {{Authority control Cemeteries in Jamaica Plain, Boston Cemeteries on the National Register of Historic Places in Massachusetts 1848 establishments in Massachusetts National Register of Historic Places in Boston Jamaica Plain, Boston Rural cemeteries