The Sphinx and Mt. Auburn Cemetery

"It seems as if Nature had formed the spot with a distinct idea in view of its being a resting place for her children, where wearied & disappointed they might stretch themselves beneath the spreading cypress & close their eyes "calmly as to a nights repose or flowers at set of sun."

- Emily Dickinson, 1846, describing Mount Auburn in a letter to a friend

This spring when the weather turns nice and you're looking for a new place to explore, try spending a day at the Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge Massachusetts. That's right, spend a day exploring a cemetery.

Actually, the first thing to know is that Mt. Auburn is not just "a cemetery". In 1831 it became the United States' first rural cemetery, fashioned after those that had begun cropping up in Europe 30 years before. The main ideas of rural cemeteries are that they aren't associated with any church and are therefore nondenominational, and (more importantly to me) they are created as a garden style public park that is meant to be enjoyed. Mt. Auburn Cemetery features 170 acres of of roads and pathways that total more than 10 miles in length, and is adorned with over 700 species of trees and thousand of bushes. It also features some of the most magnificent tombstones, memorials, and chapels I've found in New England.

These are all impressive facts which Tina and I knew very little of when we visited Mt. Auburn in the summer of 2016, we only knew the cemetery was said to have some pretty cool gravestones. So while in Boston one day we decided it would be a good place to eat lunch while maybe spending a half hour or so checking out. We arrived and quickly learned our mistake. Mt. Auburn is not the type of place you can just "check out" for half an hour, it's the type of place you need to spend the day and experience.

Here's an example of us putting ourselves in a too rushed a position to properly enjoy Mt. Auburn. Flipping through my pictures I found this beautifully carved dog and I don't even know if he is overseeing a single grave or a family plot. If we'd not been so pressed for time and had stopped to look, I'd not only know his story but probably would have a half-dozen pictures of Tina scruffing his ears and telling him he's "such a good boy!"

This angel statue, which could be the highlight of many other cemeteries, almost gets lost in all the beauty Mt. Auburn has to offer.

Our greatest surprise of the day was that Mt. Auburn is not only a cemetery, but a memorial park as well. We found this out coming around a corner and seeing this giant sphinx. I was slightly bummed it wasn't guarding the mummified corpse of some Egyptian Pharaoh, but instead it is a civil war memorial. Off the top of my head I don't recall what role Egypt played in our country's civil war, but it was amazing nonetheless.

Another memorial is the Washington Tower, named after our first president and located on the highest knoll within Mt. Auburn. Climb the 62 feet to its top platform and you'll be rewarded with an overview of the cemetery and the Boston skyline in the distance.

Beyond all these amazing sights, Mt Auburn is still a cemetery and they do still frown on certain things. Like grave robbing. Tina.

I have dozens more pictures of the spectacular things at Mt. Auburn which I actually forced myself to withhold from this post. I wouldn't want to spoil all the fun, and instead encourage you to visit the cemetery and experience it all for yourself.

Links:
Directions to Mt. Auburn Cemetery

Forbidden Files - Family Hike to an Abandoned Train

Some families spend a beautiful summer's day wandering through the mall, while other families spend a beautiful summer's day hiking through the woods in search of an abandoned train.

No need to tell you which category we fall into, I'll just jump right into the story.

From bits of info I gathered off the Internet, including a YouTube video and NPR article, I knew that a half-dozen train cars were abandoned somewhere in the woods of New Hampshire. Their location was never given but I did know what city they were in, so off I went to one of my favorite friends in these types of situations - Google Earth. Three beers later I was confident enough I'd spotted them that I planned a trip with family and friends for that weekend, and on a blistering Sunday morning we made the 2-hour drive to hunt them down.

We met at a railroad crossing nearest to where we planned on entering the woods, gathered up our survival gear (waters for all of us plus goldfish for the youngsters), and feeling much like the kids in the movie Stand By Me we began hiking the tracks.

Unlike the challenge of trying to find something you could walk right past without spotting (like an elusive man-made cave), the only question on this day was whether we were headed in the right direction. As long as we were we'd be guaranteed to find the train.

And in less time than I expected this question was answered.

Six cars made up this abandoned train, with three being open wagons that still had traces of cargo in them. The one below carried both rocks and mischievous boys - one in front of the camera and one behind it. That night I googled the serial number of this car and learned it was built in 1941 and came with the chuckle-inducing name of a "bottom dump".

Besides that tidbit of information I don't know any other history of the train, so instead I'll share some pictures. We climbed aboard a passenger car which in its day must have been state of the art, but was now just a shell of its former glory.

This was Madison walking the aisle of another passenger car as if trying to remember where her seat is. She told me to make her look "wistful" in this picture.

And here's a shot of the overhead compartments. Never mind a suitcase, you'd be lucky to fit just your toiletries into one of them.

With a bit of muscle some of the benches still actually worked. They could either all be facing forward, or you could pull a lever and flip the back so that every other bench was facing each other.

Logan found a seat at the front of the train that looked like it came with some importance, so of course he claimed that as "his spot".

To answer a couple of questions about this trip, yes the tracks we were walking down are active tracks in the summertime, and no we probably should not have been in this area. But we were careful of our surroundings, respectful of the property, took nothing but pictures and left nothing but footprints.

Which made this one of the more memorable ways I've ever spent a beautiful summer's day with the family.

Our Alice

Make a particular half-mile hike into the woods of Barrington and you will find this old cellar foundation, one of hundreds that exist throughout the woods of New Hampshire.

But while at first glance this might seem like just another place where a house used to stand, one thing differentiates it from any other foundation I've come across. This one has a gravestone in the middle of it.

The stone belongs to Alice L. who died in 1863 at 11 months and 10 days of age, details which are listed on one side of the gravestone. On the other side is the simple yet loving phrase; Our Alice.

What does it mean that this gravestone stands alone within these walls? My first thought was the obvious one. Most people in the 1800's didn't have much money, which I assumed was the case here, and so I guessed the family buried their infant girl in the basement of their house because they couldn't afford a plot. Then over time the house was destroyed and only the things that were made of stone - the house foundation and the headstone - remained.

That is one possibility, but then the question becomes how could they have afforded the headstone if they had no money?

A second possibility is that the gravestone was maliciously placed in this spot. If you walk about 300 feet deeper into the woods you will find a family graveyard with roughly a dozen gravestones, ranging from small chunks of rock to full-size slabs. Many are toppled or in various states of decay, and the popular theory is that Alice's gravestone was moved from this nearby graveyard to the middle of the foundation. But since the graveyard was cataloged in its current condition 40 years ago, it had to have happened sometime prior to that.

I hate the idea of anyone's gravestone being vandalized, but if that's what happened I'm at least happy that Alice's headstone - perhaps due to its location and the extra attention it's been given - has endured in better condition than many of those remaining in the family's forgotten graveyard.

Our Alice can be found along Tibbets Trail in the Atlantic White Cedar Swamp