(gentle music) (orchestral music) - What you have is when it was founded in 1838 by the city fathers, it's a municipal cemetery the largest in the United States.

That means it is run by the city.

It's not the largest cemetery by any means.

It's the third oldest Victorian cemetery in the United States.

And what that refers to is a cemetery style that took into consideration Victorian rural values.

That being in nature in the out of doors which was a good thing, and it was good for your health and for your moral life as well.

People forget that in the 1830s there were no public parks.

And that's why you have these open green areas.

You have fountains here, trees, open spaces, people would come and have picnics.

And you might've noticed when you come into the cemetery there's a set of rules, and a lot of it today is about keeping your dog's leash.

But in the past it was like don't fire, shoot off your guns and things of that sort.

And Mount Hope is in fact so popular that on Labor Day and Memorial Day, you would have to buy a ticket to come into the cemetery because there was so many people here.

(orchestral music) - There were three reasons for this cemetery to exist.

One of them was that the land around here was particularly fertile and very well suited to raising wheat.

And the second reason the high falls provided a lot of power to grind that wheat into flour.

The third reason for all of this happening was the building of the Erie Canal, which was completed to Rochester in 1823.

And that provided inexpensive transportation before the roads and railroads to transport that flour to markets in the East and also to the West.

In its day in the 1820s, '30s and '40s, Rochester was called the Flour City.

It produced more flour than any other place on this earth.

So Rochester became the first boom town in America.

When the population was exploding, that created a lot of pressure on the land downtown.

And in those days, they buried people in church graveyards and in very small public grounds, which were all downtown.

- One of the things that happened 1836, 1837 is there was a cholera epidemic.

And there were a number of people who died.

And at the time it was believed that the corpse could infect the living.

Well, this isn't true but they didn't know that.

And so they wanted to move the cemeteries out of downtown Rochester and move it to some place out of town.

So that started the search for a new cemetery out on the city limits.

- The mayor of the city, Mayor Gould formed a commission and told them to find a place to build a cemetery, a public cemetery that would be out of downtown.

- [Emil] And believe it or not, this was considered out of the city limits.

It's only a mile or so from downtown but they thought this could be a good area.

- When a cemetery was designed, the original architect they had here wanted to flatten everything and make it just a total like a field.

And these people, the committee here in the city of Rochester objected to that.

So they fired that gentlemen and they brought in someone else who wanted to leave this environment as natural as possible.

- [Emil] And the reason was, first of all, you had all of these hills and dales and people like that in the Victorian sensibilities about getting back into nature.

But it was also because you couldn't have any agriculture here because it was such stony ground.

So you weren't gonna take any valuable land out of productivity by designing a cemetery here.

- Now, Mayor Gould came out here to take a look and he thought this was just a poor decision.

My God, that land is all up hill and down dale with a gully at the entrance.

But when the cemetery was made presentable a year later in 1838, he was the first person to buy a plot in here and build a mausoleum into the hill next to the chapel.

(gentle music) (soothing music) - [Emil] There was an overall planning.

You had kind of basic ideas about the cemetery but when you bought a plot, families started to design it on their own.

- So the family would buy a plot often before any member of the family died.

And they would erect as in this case, a fence to surround that family plot.

Sometimes it was just cornerstones, but this one has a rod iron fence.

(gentle music) - One of the things that we see a lot in Mount Hope, we have sacred to the memory of, in memory of and the person's name.

We also sometimes see relationships, father, mother, baby John.

Families where six of seven members die within the space of a week and are buried together.

What this represents are relationships which are so important to people.

And it's about what we call symbolic immortality.

I mean, everybody dies.

While we die, we're not annihilated, that somehow we live on or will be resurrected or so forth.

So the first kind of symbolic immortality is biological.

That you live on in your relatives, somehow that that's going to perpetuate you as an individual and as a people.

The second type of symbolic immortality we're all familiar with is called theological.

And we've seen examples of that with crosses or you'll see what the star of David and so forth that you live on in an afterlife.

A reincarnation or resurrection or so forth.

So that you will have some form of immortality beyond the body.

Then there's also a kind of symbolic immortality in terms of your work.

If you're a teacher, you live on and your students.

If an artist, you live on in your artworks, your music, your writings.

And so we will see one of the oldest forms of commemoration on gravestones, even in Europe is your profession.

We will see fireman's hats.

And that becomes an important form of immortality.

The Puritan notion of death was it was basically the trap door to hell.

Most people were not chosen to be among God's saints.

They were sinful and they were going to hell.

And if you go out to say Boston or into Manhattan and go to the old cemeteries, you find black slate stones oftentimes with skulls and crossbones on them.

And it'll say, here lies the body or here lies the bones.

But as you moved on in into the 1800s, there was a kind of a shift in the way people saw life and death.

And so you start to see these differences in trends in cemetery architecture.

We don't have black stones.

If you can even look over here, what you see are actually these were marbles.

Before acid rain, this would have been brilliant white.

That obelisk is more to the effect.

And as you walk through Mount Hope, you'll see these large areas of bright colors.

And it won't say here lies the body anymore.

It's gonna say sacred to the memory.

(gentle music) You have a variety of symbols when you wanna talk about life and death.

Fountains, windows often depict water.

And again, this is another symbol of life.

And so here we have what's called the Florentine Fountain.

People used to believe Florentine Fountain, it came from Florence, but in fact it came from the Mott Iron Works in New York city and they called it the Florentine Fountain.

It was a style.

It was put here in the 1800s and has recently been restored thanks to the Mount Hope Cemetery and the help of the friends of Mount Hope.

Another ancient reference that you find throughout Mount Hope is symbols of vegetation, of flowers, of acanthus leaves, of palm leaves.

And many of these will have additional resonance with Christianity and Palm Sunday, for instance.

But the acanthus leaf that we'll see all over Mount Hope Cemetery comes from ancient Greece.

And the legend goes that a man was mourning a young person that died and he sees the acanthus growing out of the tomb.

And he says, "Ah, look at that, "the life is coming from death."

And this is one of again, the ancient symbols of resurrection as people are plants that wither and die and come again in the spring.

- One of the reasons for symbols was the people, or many people at that time could not read.

So they could look at a symbol on a gravestone and understand immediately what it represented.

(gentle music) - When Mount Hope was founded in the Victorian Cemetery Movement, there were no museums.

And so cities encouraged richer members of the community to put sculpture into the cemetery as a way of enlightening and educating the public.

So you'd have these allegorical statues of hope, of faith, angels, the books of heaven, weary pilgrims, and so forth.

And the idea was again so that the public could see real sculpture.

When you look around Mount Hope, you'll see a variety of images.

And one that's quite prominent of course are angels.

But not all angels are alike.

Is it male?

Is it female?

Is it androgynous?

I happen to think this one is male.

And then, but that one over there is clearly female and you have different types of angels.

This one it would be referred to is the angel of grace or the angel of mercy.

It's often has this kind of far away look of sadness, the flower being ready to drop on the grave.

And we even have inscriptions from some of the early Puritan monuments about especially for children's graves that the angels are protecting them and overseeing them.

Then you have other kinds of angels, like the one over here and it's pointing up.

And those angels usually refer to and they often, they might have a tablet here it'll say gone home.

The idea is they've gone to heaven, or they might have a trumpet announcing the resurrection day.

And so angels have always been these figures of connecting earth and heaven.

A very common figure is that as a woman with an anchor and that is an allegorical figure for faith and hope that's your anchor.

And that's going to take you to heaven.

Another common motif is the woman who is leaning on the cross.

You'll see a number of variations in cemeteries, Victorian cemeteries and it is commonly interpreted as Mary Magdalen who was in according to the gospel stories was the first person to see Jesus after his resurrection and who is the sinner who converted and changed her ways because of Jesus.

And so she's seen kind of like against the cross in sadness.

An old metaphor for death was the tree is chopped off.

We'll see a number of trees made out of stone within Mount Hope that represent that idea.

Then that went one step further in the sense of the tree as the cross.

So death leads to resurrection in Christianity and you have around it the oak leaves which represent sturdiness and strength.

This is a beautiful piece.

It is the weary pilgrim.

The weary pilgrim is a theme it's from a hymn.

But it's also the idea of the pilgrim's progress.

The famous book by in English literature, the idea of going to heaven but it symbolized as the pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

And you know he's a pilgrim because he has a staff.

He has the shell emblem on his cloak, which was used in the medieval days to show that you were pilgrim.

He also has his watering jug here.

He has the far away look.

Well, here's a classic example of a child's stone.

You have oftentimes the little hand, it holds a rosebud symbolizing love but it's a bud because he never had the chance to flower.

You have the oak leaves against strength probably for the family.

And it says, Willie, his little crib is empty and our hearts are empty too.

Common epitaph that you'll find on children's graves.

This is the fish plot.

And he was a mirror in Rochester.

And it's a good boy.

It's their child here, Henry who died young.

And the story goes that shortly before he died, they found him asleep on his dog.

And they use that as the inspiration for this monument.

And so this is one of several dogs that you find in Mount Hope.

They usually are like this.

They're protecting their loved one.

Or they're looking for the loved ones return or sometimes they'll look sad.

This is the monument to Laura Knapp.

She was their daughter.

She died at the age of three.

Here we have the tree life that's been cut off.

And lo and behold, there are three stumps representing three years of age.

But what else we have here is a flower basket.

Here's our morning glory.

Again, we've seen that on children's graves and they're only here for a day then gone.

How do you show that somebody's gone?

How do you embody absence?

This is a child's flower basket.

Laura has been gathering flowers, put them in her basket.

She put her basket down and left and she's not coming back to take it.

And I think this is one of the most beautiful examples in Mount Hope Cemetery of embodied absence.

And that's how you as a family have to come to terms that that person's not coming back.

They can live in your heart, that live in hearts that love is not to die.

You can have that memory, but you at one point or another, you're just going to have to face the fact they're gone.

(gentle music) And what we're standing in front of here is a composite structure designed by the architect Warner.

And first we have the gothic chapel where ceremonies were held.

And then what was added on in 1911 is that is the first crematory in Western New York.

And you can see here, this is a smokestack.

And this structure goes back into the hill.

And what they did in there is that is where they stored bodies during the winter.

Because before you had the backhoe, you could not dig here once the ground was frozen.

And so around November when people died, they were stored back in the hills.

And then at the new chapel, there's a storage area to underground.

And then they would be brought out usually around March and April and there would be burials.

Variety of architecture here, over here we have are called tubulus tombs or mausoleums that go back into the hill.

This is an old kind of tomb that you find in the ancient in England near stonehenge and so forth, where you use the hill itself and then you build into it to plant your dead.

And then you see all sorts of interesting architectural features.

You have like the cloverleaf, which represents the trinity, but then you have the obelisk over here.

You'll see a lot of obelisks, which in essence an obelisk is a pyramid that sets a top a shaft.

- And here we have a whole row of mausoleums.

And these are the mausoleums of mostly a second generation of very wealthy Rochesterians.

We like to call this a row mausoleums philanthropists row, because we have starting with Nathan Stein over here who created Stein Block Clothing, which made Rochester the third largest clothing manufacturing city in America.

And we have Sticker of sticker Truong, the lithographic company.

We have over here William Stuber who was the third president and the great emulsion maker for the Eastman Kodak Company.

And we have the second generation of the Bouses and Alarms here.

And they became even wealthier than their parents.

And so they demanded these large mausoleums.

The Nathan Stein mausoleum which is a great Greek revival building.

It's sleeps 20, and it's filled there.

- [Emil] They're massive construction sometimes.

These are above ground burials.

They can be in a variety of styles from like a doric style here that we see with these pillars to a more elaborate gothic style that we see over here.

There's a beautiful example of the palm branch, the rising sun, the acanthus leaves right there on the corner that I mentioned before.

Sometimes they'll have stained glass.

- Well, this is the Strasenburg monument here.

And Edwin Strasenburgh was the head of Strasenburgh Laboratories, and it was he and his wife, Clara who also provided the funds to build the Strasenburgh planetarium at the Rochester Museum and Science Center.

Edwin Strasenburgh had hired a monument designer to build a suitable monument for this site.

And when he died and his wife Clara found the design for this monument, for the big monument that he wanted here, she was appalled.

She just didn't like it.

It was too monumental and she didn't really want something that grand.

And she decided that she was going to help in the design of it.

And she took a bottle cap or top from a Strasenburgh pharmaceutical product, the jar cover.

And she modified it into a large stone.

- So here you have Frederick Douglas, one of the more famous people that are buried in Mount Hope Cemetery.

And various forms of stones that have been put here over the years to commemorate him and his two wives that are buried here with him.

This one says 1818, 1895.

That one, since he was born in 1817 and died in 1895.

And the reason we have a discrepancy, as a slave, he didn't know when he was born.

That was just the best guess.

After his first wife died, he married Helen Pitts Douglas and who was very much involved in perpetuating his legacy.

And so the Frederick Douglas Museum is in Washington DC, though his grave is here.

And it's one of the major tourist attractions as you can imagine.

One of the things you're seeing here are items left behind by visitors.

The stone hearkens back to an ancient Jewish custom of leaving a stone any time you visited a grave.

Until today in the Middle East people, Muslims, Jews and Christians will often leave a stone.

And in fact, sometimes they start piling up and in times it may even become a shrine over years.

That they will use those stones and construct a shrine.

In a sense of Susan B. Anthony, if you know about her religion, that her stone speaks a lot because originally she was a Quaker.

And then she was a Unitarian.

And both groups at the time when she died in 1906, did not believe in ostentatious.

And so it is a very simple white marble headstones like the head of a bed, that's it.

And everyone in the family pretty much has that.

On the monument however, we have elements of Quaker and Unitarian belief in liberty, equality, justice, and humanity.

So elements of both religious traditions as well as the women's suffrage movement.

This is Medina Sandstone.

And this is the tubulus mausoleum of Lewis Henry Morgan who is the father of modern anthropology.

He has a wonderful epitaph up there.

It says Non Hic Sumus, which is Latin for we are not here.

That is our bodies are, but our souls are gone.

Our souls are in heaven.

And he's here with his wife and his two daughters.

His two daughters died when they were relatively young.

They never had the opportunity to go into high school.

I don't think, I think they died in their early teens.

And he gave his estate to the University of Rochester to promote women's education.

We all know about Susan B. Anthony and the efforts she did for women's education.

But Lewis Henry Morgan was as important.

You don't hear about it as much.

But here's a beautiful Victorian style mausoleum that I'm told that there is a metal spiral staircase that also goes down to the burial area.

Part of the Victorian cemetery is to come to grieve for your loved ones but you know that you're not alone, that everyone dies.

And as the natural world around you shows, there is a form of resurrection in some form or other.

This is life affirming.

(playful guitar music) (gentle music) - It all came together for me one day when I came to Mount Hope Cemetery, get out of my car and started walking around and started to notice the graves of those civil war soldiers who are buried here.

In fact, that led me to a project of putting together a list of all the soldiers that were in here.

And it ended up being 2,100 and plus civil war participants.

And I say participants because it's not just soldiers, there were nurses, there were surgeons, there were chaplains, there were pay masters.

So there are a whole bunch of peripheral people that also participated in a civil war and sometimes lost their lives in doing so.

I think that's the thing that surprised me the most when I started getting involved with the civil war research here, I found out that there was about 10,000 civil war soldiers that left and participated in the civil war from Rochester, New York.

The other thing that was very surprising it was to learn about the individuals.

You start to find out who they actually were as people.

- What we have here is the stone of Colonel Pond.

As it says here, he was born in Brockport.

He fought in the civil war for five years.

He owned Rochester Printing Company and died in 1921.

He was the commander as colonel of the first colored cavalry in the union army.

That is they were African-American cavalry, but of course in the civil war, even on the North, they weren't allowed to be in charge of themselves.

So it was a white colonel who took charge.

- And many people have seen the movie "Glory" which is the history of the 54th Massachusetts which was one of the most famous and early United States colored troops.

And I was able to learn that we actually have one gentlemen buried in our civil war section here who was a member of the 54th Massachusetts, fought in the battle that's in glory and survived it and came back to Rochester.

And he was a barber, which was a very common profession for African-Americans at that time.

He was very involved in his church and he got to know Frederick Douglas quite well.

And when Frederick Douglas passed away and they were going to design a statue, which you see over in Highland Park of Frederick Douglas, he was on the committee that worked on that.

- When Mount Hope was dedicated in 1838, one of the guest of honors was a man named Millener.

His grave site is in the back area of Mount Hope today.

But why was he here?

Because he was one of George Washington's drummer boys.

And that gave them a sense of history and continuity that they wanted to hear.

And so what you see especially with the Victorian cemeteries in America is two trends were involved.

One were historical societies.

That they wanted a fine cemetery that they called the last great necessity of the city.

City fathers were usually on the board of directors.

And they saw this as a repository of local history and the larger American history.

The other movement that was involved was horticultural.

That again, of trying to get almost have an arboretum effect in your cemetery and right across the street from Mount Hope Cemetery was the Ellwanger Barry Nursery which was the largest nursery in the United States.

People would come here, especially after the building of the Erie Canal, they would buy their trees, shrubs and so forth and move West.

And so the Ellwanger Barry Nursery gave various trees and shrubs to the cemetery.

And so you get these elements that come together history and horticulture that blend within a cemetery.

When the park boom it came that cemeteries were becoming filled, people were putting in fencing and all sorts of things around graves and you were losing that open effect.

And in time that displaced some of the people who would normally come to a cemetery, but Mount Hope has always been active.

And it still is today.

The friends of Mount Hope have weekly tours.

And then they have special thematic tours throughout the year.

They're trying to bring emphasis to the the kind of life affirming aspects of a Victorian cemetery.

- I think if you come to the cemetery very often, it isn't going to take you very long to learn that you're gonna see the same people over and over again.

It's not just because the community around here has access to it, although that's one thing, but many people just come here on weekends or evenings to walk and the cemetery has its own social environment.

So you will get so that you know the people in here that are walking their dogs, so they may just be walking in groups.

They may be jogging.

They may be taking pictures.

They may have a book in their hand and they're walking around looking for specific objects and you get so that you know them.

And you may never see these people any other place but you feel like you know them and you look forward to meeting them here.

(gentle music)