Mount Auburn Cemetery

Four years later, he sold the home and returned to New York City, where he died on June 7, 1893.

But Edwin, like Junius, chose not to rest in peace in Baltimore, but in Mount Auburn Cemetery outside Boston next to his first wife and infant son.

In one of history's eeriest coincidences, just as the organist struck the opening chords of Chopin's haunting funeral march at Edwin's funeral service, three floors of Ford's Theater, which had been purchased by the federal government in 1866 and converted into War Department offices, collapsed into the basement.

22 federal employees died.

Just three years earlier, something new had taken root outside of Boston.

In 1831, Mount Auburn Cemetery opened in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and it changed how Americans thought about death.

Gone were the cramped churchyards crowded against city streets.

In their place came the rural or garden cemetery, a landscape of rolling hills, winding paths, and sheltering trees, where the living could walk among the dead in peace.

All right, so there is a story of a spooky house that is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, actually right on Mount Auburn Street.

So if you know Cambridge, you know Mount Auburn Street is where the beautiful, historic Mount Auburn Cemetery is.

It is one of the most amazing cemeteries I have ever visited.

In fact, as you walk the grounds, Some of the statues which are carved after the people that are buried beneath them almost seem like they're just walking around with you.

There is just something really magical about Mount Auburn Cemetery.

So this story took place not too far from the gates of Mount Auburn.

So we're going to go back to the late 1800s for this story.

Some of the windows were actually boarded up from inside the house which made it really kind of an odd thing.

The last couple years, she was not well.

She's buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery.

My mother designed her headstone.

There's a granite marker there.

Uh, I get, I get, uh, images sent from my sister all the time.

She manages, um, Mount Auburn Cemetery, and she's always sending me, like, the, the very first bees to emerge in spring, and then the caterpillars that are, you know, that are... that she's finding and, uh, it's just, it's just great, great stuff.

But let me just move on here because you were, you were talking about just kind of the, the, the, the USDA and the, and the farming systems, and I'd love to know about your connection with NRCS and really just with all the beginning farmers, because I, I come across a lot of people who are just trying to get back to the earth.

So with beginning farmers or just your beginning farmers, like, what is the importance of the relationship with NRCS? Um, and, you know, how does, how does that all fit in with what, with what you're doing?

And the not-so-fun fact, on May 31st, 1884, founder Harvey Parker died at the age of 79 in his room 1012, or 1012.

He was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery.

Well, Kurt, why did you do that last fun fact? Well, let's focus on that one because it's the spooky one.

We go to room 1012 on the 10th floor...

Think the Transcendentalists, Emerson and all that.

And so some bright soul came up with the idea of, what if we move our cemeteries outside the city and make them a beautiful place, a place where people can walk and contemplate life and death and nature in the midst of God's creation? And so Mount Auburn Cemetery in Boston, Greenwood Cemetery in New York, these were all early examples of the rural cemetery movement, where you took the cemetery, instead of having just a narrow, crowded little churchyard, you suddenly had this vast, beautiful rolling expanse that was as much a park as it was a burying ground.

And in fact, I think this is something people don't realize, Greenwood Cemetery was one of the inspirations for Central Park.

Um, it predated Central Park.