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Rural Cemetaries Offer Peaceful Sanctuary to the Dead and the Living

...Mount Hope, America's oldest municipal park-garden graveyard, is a refuge not only for the departed. Curious souls still tramp through the 196-acre arboretum by the tens of thousands each year, among them picnickers, bird watchers, joggers and history buffs.

In the Romantic era of Wordsworth and Beethoven, the Victorian vogue of mourning embraced a love of nature and artistry. So-called "rural cemeteries" a few miles out of town were a sublime departure from the austere colonial churchyards with morbid funerary where the dead typically ended up.

Some 200 were established in the three decades before the Civil War, beginning with Mount Auburn near Boston in 1831. They're invariably hemmed in now by urban sprawl, forerunners of large-scale city parks and the grid-pattern cemeteries that predominate to this day....

Read entire article at AP