On this episode, we continue our visit to Mount Auburn Cemetery. Joined by biographer Natalie Dykstra, we visit the Gardner tomb where Isabella Stewart Gardner is buried. We learn more about Gardner and her family's relationship to the history of Boston from Dykstra and Chief Historian Peter Drummey.

Mount Auburn is the first American cemetery that purposely combined commemoration with elements of experimental gardening, picturesque landscape design, and access to nature, starting a trend across the nation in the mid-19th century that led to the creation of the first public parks in this country.

Learn more about episode objects here: https://www.masshist.org/podcast/season-4-episode-5-Gardner-Tomb 

Email us at [email protected].

Episode Special Guests:

Natalie Dykstra is the author of Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life, which was a finalist for the 2013 Massachusetts Book Award.  For her recent book Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner, she received a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars grant and the inaugural Robert and Ina Caro Research Fellowship from the Biographers International Organization. Chasing Beauty is a finalist for the Marfield Prize, the national award for arts writing. Dykstra has been an elected Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society since 2011 and is an emerita professor of English at Hope College.  She lives near Boston.

Meg L. Winslow is Senior Curator of Historical Collections & Archives at Mount Auburn Cemetery where she is responsible for developing and overseeing the Cemetery’s permanent collections of historical and aesthetic importance. Meg is co-author with Melissa Banta of The Art of Commemoration and America’s First Rural Cemetery, Mount Auburn’s Significant Monument Collection, in its third printing.

This episode uses materials from:

Elderberry (Instrumental) by Chad Crouch (Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International)        Psychic by Dominic Giam of Ketsa Music (licensed under a commercial non-exclusive license by the Massachusetts Historical Society through Ketsa.uk)        Curious Nature by Dominic Giam of Ketsa Music (licensed under a commercial non-exclusive license by the Massachusetts Historical Society through Ketsa.uk)