- It is a tale of two cities, one above ground, and the other subterranean.

A tale of inspiration and struggle against oppression.

- [Peter] And after having been a slave myself for 37 years.

- For 43 years, we had an incredible relationship.

- There definitely is a larger and larger percentage of people choosing cremation each year.

- And this glorious tree is the mighty oak.

(dramatic orchestral music) - The world's greatest cemeteries hold more than mortal remains.

They are monuments to landscape, design, horticulture, and history.

(driving rock music) In a world where differences are seen as dangerous, it's more important than ever that our history is as inclusive as possible.

I've spent years investigating the lives of the dead, finding out all I can about extraordinary people who were outsiders in their own day, but still managed to make significant contributions to humankind.

Welcome to World's Greatest Cemeteries.

(dramatic orchestral music) Mount Auburn Cemetery, consecrated in 1831, is a national historic landmark, an award-winning botanical garden, an arboretum, an oasis for migratory birds, and a certified tourist attraction, with over 200,000 visitors a year.

There are over 90,000 people buried here, and in this episode, we're gonna meet a few.

We'll also speak with an historian, a cemetery volunteer, an art history consultant, an epidemiologist, and we're gonna talk about my favorite subject, trees!

It is a time of contagion.

A dread disease terrorizes the city.

Immigrants and the underprivileged suffer the most, and are also blamed for the condition.

Are we talking about COVID-19?

No.

It is circa 1859, the immigrants are Irish, and the disease is smallpox.

(children cry) (horseshoes clop) Doctor, in historical records going back to ancient times, smallpox is described as a dread disease.

What was so dreadful about it?

- So historically, smallpox has killed about 30% of the people who get it, and those who survived it would usually have some sort of disfigurement because of the poxes that would come out on the skin, and people would often commit suicide because they were so disfigured by it, so it would kill way more than just the people that died from the disease.

And that's why whenever it came to places like Boston, everything would shut down and people would be kept in their homes if they were even thought to have been exposed to smallpox.

- Why are epidemics so often associated with immigrants and the poor?

- Immigrants and the poor are usually the scapegoats from a political point of view.

They usually don't have as much power or as much of a voice, and so they get accused of bringing in these diseases from far-away countries.

Immigrants are also tend to be poor, and they tend to have work that has to do with dirty things, and so people often think of them as being the ones that are carrying disease.

- In an attempt to isolate the victims, the authorities build a quarantine hospital in Boston Harbor.

There, brave medical professionals tend to the sick and the dying.

One of those is a young Harvard Medical School student named Edward Thomas Damon.

We don't know much about this young man.

He grew up in a small town, Wayland, Massachusetts.

He graduated from Harvard in 1857, and his family was known to be susceptible to smallpox.

But history does record this.

Edward Thomas Damon died of smallpox two weeks after tending smallpox patients in the quarantine hospital.

(somber woodwind music) - To our dear friend and classmate, Edward Thomas Damon.

We shall long mourn the silence of that voice, and the loss of ready sympathy of that friendship which existed between our friend and many of us.

There has died one who promised to become a most honored and distinguished member of our profession.

- I am struck by his sacrifice, and that of today's medical caregivers who still risk it all to fulfill their oath.

(happy acoustic guitar music) There are more than 5,000 trees here at Mount Auburn.

I asked Dave Barnett, the CEO, formerly an arborist, to show me three of his favorites.

Hi Dave.

So I asked you to think about three glorious trees here at the cemetery, and you chose this one.

Now, why is that?

- This is a Japanese maple, and I chose this tree because of many things.

The architecture is spectacular, the branching structure, also the color of the leaves all summer long being purple, and even richer in the fall, there's just so much about this tree that I love.

This is a metasequoia glyptostroboides, dawn redwood, which is native to China and was thought to be extinct until 1940s when it was rediscovered, and this tree was planted here as a seedling in 1951, so you can see that in 70 years, it has grown very rapidly and it is an enormous, spectacular tree right now.

And this glorious tree is the mighty oak, or quercus alba or the native white oak, which is native to much of the Eastern half of the United States and certainly is one of the dominant trees in our Northeastern forests.

It is used for so many reasons and has so much to talk about.

It's used in shipbuilding and home building and so much more, but here in the cemetery, it's been a very commonly used tree to, on monument symbolism, to symbolize strength and endurance and longevity, so it really is an important tree to us for so many reasons.

(thoughtful piano music) - Yes, cemeteries can be beautiful, and yes, cemeteries are wonderful places for hiking, birding, or just relaxing with friends.

But let's face it.

Cemeteries are where people bury their loved ones.

Let me introduce you to Virginia, Ginny to her friends.

Ginny, how did you and Bill meet?

- It was 1976, and I was at a laundry mat doing my laundry, and this man came in, so I looked up, and here's this gentleman, he looked like a professor, sitting in the corner forlornly in front of a washing machine, eating his dinner, and unbeknownst to me at the time, I sorta looked at him and said, "Oh, poor guy," and I just turned my attentions away, I was reading a book, and up he comes and starts to talk with me, and he had said to himself, which he tells me later, "I've never dated a nurse."

So he said, "Well how 'bout a cup of coffee?"

I just, I'm, I said, "Well I'm almost done with my laundry."

He said, "That's okay, I won't, and such, "and I'll come pick up."

I said, "I just live up the street."

So that's how we met.

- Tell us about your daily routine coming here to see Bill.

- I walk over from the house, which is about six blocks away, and usually around 9:30, 10 o'clock in the morning, and I come down the hill, I see him, I kneel down, I say a Hail Mary and talk to him, and then I usually turn around and sit on this stoop that we're not supposed to sit on, but it's no place else to sit, so then I read from my meditation book that I was given to by a really good friend.

It's called "Healing After Loss."

- Ginny, why did you choose this setting for Bill's grave?

- For 43 years, we had an incredible relationship, and suddenly, he's gone, and it's been very helpful to be here in this environment of Mount Auburn.

As you can hear, the breeze whistling through the trees, just the really beautiful setting, sometimes you hear birds and chipmunks and occasionally a hawk, and it just brings to fruition that life is ongoing, and even though you may not have your loved one with you anymore, he's basically buried in your heart forever.

- I can't help but notice that beautiful necklace.

What's that about?

- So I wanted a piece to celebrate Bill and my love, and while we were in New Zealand, we were introduced to what's called a twisted ring, and it's the symbol for eternity.

It's three, or two to three circles, no beginning, no end, all interwound with one another, and I took it to a local jewelry smith and showed him the design and he and his partner worked on making this 3D funerary piece of jewelry, if you want, and it has a plug on the end and we were able to put Bill's, some of Bill's ashes into it, so I have him at my heart forever.

- She is an American original who some say created her past, present, and future out of whole cloth.

I invited art historian consultant Marilyn Richardson to come and tell us about, well, I'll let her tell you.

Hi Marilyn.

Thank you so much for coming.

So tell us, who was Edmonia Lewis?

- Edmonia Lewis was that mysterious thing.

She was something or somebody new under the sun.

- Hm.

- She was the first person, male or female, of color to be an internationally recognized celebrity sculptor.

- About what time period was this?

- She was born in the early 1840s in upstate New York, but she has a Boston connection.

After she left Oberlin College, she arrived in Boston, and this is where her career really took off.

- [Roberto] So is Edmonia Lewis buried here?

- No she's not.

To say that she was an international figure is to also include the fact that she's buried in London.

- So why is her sculpture here?

- Statue is of the goddess Hygeia, a goddess of health, and it's commissioned, it was commissioned by one of the earliest women doctors, not only in the Boston area but in the country, Harriot Kezia Hunt.

- So I understand there's a controversy in the outdoor museum art world.

Should we or shouldn't we allow outdoor sculptures to naturally decay?

- Oh, it'd be a great loss to have not only Edmonia Lewis's Hygeia further decay, but there're number of other marble statues here at Mount Auburn and in other historic cemeteries that are at risk.

The more that can be preserved, maybe even a bit restored, but certainly kept from further deterioration, the better.

- You can see Hygeia here at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, but you can also see some of her other sculptures at the Smithsonian American Museum of Art in Washington, D.C. That's a great trip.

(thoughtful piano music) (indie guitar music) World-class cemeteries are usually horticultural showplaces.

I asked Grace Chapman Elton, a master gardener, to come here to Mount Auburn and go over with us what goes on in just one of these small garden plots.

- We are at Willow Pond, right in the middle of the butterfly garden, and a butterfly garden is an area that provides both food and habitat for pollinators.

So behind me, we have lots of wonderful pollinator plants.

The most showy is this echinacea or cone flower, and I've seen lots of honeybees and bumble bees buzzing all over it today.

- When you say pollinator garden, what does that mean?

- So, many people are interested in butterflies, but pollinators can also be honeybees, bumble bees, flies even, and in some parts of the country, bats can pollinate, and basically pollinators are taking pollen from one flower and transferring it to another flower.

- Does each plant in a garden have a purpose, or do you choose them because they look nice?

- So in a pollinator garden, it's very important to have different plants of different sizes, different shapes, and also that bloom at different times, so behind me across the way, you can see the bright yellow flower, it's a coreopsis or tickseed.

Above it, you have a baptisia that's actually already gone to seed.

They have a really beautiful purple flower earlier in the spring, but what looks like flowers on it right now, it's a nice kind of white seed pod.

These are a couple of my favorite plants to add to a butterfly garden, so this right here is nepeta.

It's catmint, and as a mint, it has a really great smell if you rub the leaves.

It also has these nice purple flowers and they have a really long bloom season, so this is just at the end of their season, but even with just a couple purple flowers left, I've seen lots of bees and butterflies on this plant today.

Right next to it, this is sedum, and sedum is a wonderful hearty plant up here in the Northeast, and you could see, it still has tight buds, so I really like doing a combination like this because you have something coming out of bloom and then the next food source is ready to go, so you wanna make sure that you have a sequential bloom sequence in your garden so something is always growing, always blooming, and here we have a bumble bee right on cue.

(laughs) (somber piano music) - Imagine being enslaved in Virginia, escaping when you're in middle age, coming to the North and, I'm gonna let one of the great volunteers here at the cemetery explain the extraordinary tale of Peter Byus who fled to Boston for freedom.

Steve, thanks so much.

So what would you like people to know about Peter Byus?

- Peter Byus was an accomplished tailor in Boston.

He was a, he had self-emancipated from behind the Cotton Kingdom.

He had been enslaved in what was then Northern Virginia, and he came to Boston around 1840 and immediately became a successful journeyman tailor.

- What do you admire about him?

- He didn't write per se, but he left this wonderful will that spells out his bequests to friends and supporters and caretakers, as well as to the Freedmen's Society, and the Home for Little Wanderers in Boston.

(somber piano music) - [Peter] And I am grateful to my God, that after having been a slave myself for 37 years, that my deliverance was effected, and that I have been enabled to save something that I can leave behind me to aid in the blessed work of elevating and saving those of my brethren whom the providence of God is now emancipating.

- [Roberto] I asked L'Merchie Frazier of the Museum of African American History to describe the ways Boston's 19th century free Black community assisted escaped enslaved people.

- When we talk about a man named Peter Byus, who's coming here in 1837, and others who had escaped slavery, they would come to this house, they would get directions, they would hear things that would be circulated and networked through the community on how they could get started in their businesses, what would help them to be funded, and so there were those who were aiding others to be able to remain and sustain themselves until they were able to stand up within themselves and do it.

(somber piano music) (indie guitar music) - If you say the word funeral to me, I just think of a casket being lowered into the ground, but nowadays, there's all sorts of new ideas about shuffling off this mortal coil.

I asked Bree Harvey about these growing trends.

Hi Bree, thanks so much.

So there's all kinds of new trends in cemeteries.

What are some things that you're seeing around here?

- In this area of the country, there definitely is a larger and larger percentage of people choosing cremation each year.

- [Roberto] In fact, the press reports a massive increase in Americans planning cremation, green burials, natural burials, or something called direct earth burials.

- Direct earth burial means burying an individual directly into the ground without use of an outside container.

So a family would actually pour the remains directly into the earth at time of burial.

- Compared to traditional casket burials, these new ideas are generally less expensive and address the trend toward a more natural relationship with the Earth.

(thoughtful piano music) So there are many well-known people buried here, like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the romantic poet, Harriet Jacobs, author of "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl," and Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Christian Science Church.

But today, we're gonna meet someone who is not a household name anymore.

In her time, she was both widely admired and privately deplored.

This is her final resting place.

Her name is Dorothea Dix.

Her grave is plain and unadorned, much like Dorothea herself.

Our story begins on a cold day in an unheated women's prison in a rough part of town.

There to teach Sunday school, Dix discovered that the mentally ill, instead of being treated with compassion, were simply warehoused along with common violent criminals in appalling conditions.

Dix became a crusader for the humane treatment of the insane.

She spent over a year traveling around the state, documenting the often horrific treatment of the mentally ill. By 1843, she compiled her findings into a now legendary document, her Memorial to the Legislature of Massachusetts, in support of the enlargement of an insane asylum for the mentally ill. (calm flute music) - [Dorothea] I come to present the strong claims of suffering humanity.

I come to place before the legislature of Massachusetts the condition of the miserable, the desolate, the outcast.

I come as the advocate of helpless, forgotten, insane and idiotic men and women of being sunk to a condition from which the most unconcerned would start with real horror.

- Besides her mission to help the mentally ill, Dix took on other historic duties, including her appointment in 1861 as the Union Army's first superintendent of nurses during the Civil War.

By the time of her death, Dix's efforts had led to the creation of over 120 mental health asylums across the United States, with humane conditions mandated by law.

On the next episode of World's Greatest Cemeteries, join me for a jaunt across the pond.

We're gonna go to London to check out internationally renowned Highgate Cemetery.

Tell me about the history of this place.

- This is a rather incredible location here on the slopes of Highgate Hill.

Until the cemetery was opened in 1839, it was just paddock here, cows or sheep grazing under a tree.

It was quite rural.

It was away from the hustle and bustle of the city of London.

- We're gonna look into the life of a world-famous science fiction author, and also someone you might not be familiar with, a soldier who single-handedly made a big difference during World War I.

All this and more on the next episode of World's Greatest Cemeteries.

Join us all season long as we travel to the world's greatest cemeteries, touring masterpieces of landscape, gardens, and culture while reliving dramatic stories about diverse historical figures.

- I will be speaking on behalf of the political arrangements of the working class and secular and free education.

- We'll discover artistic designs, check out stunning vistas, and uncover surprising facts about the past.

(speaks in foreign language) Wow.

London's Highgate Cemetery.

- So it's a phenomenal ecological embracing of the urban environment.

- Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati, Ohio, Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

Well here at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn is the grave of one of my childhood heroes.

His name is Leonard Bernstein, and he was an American composer.

Famously, he did the music for "West Side Story."

This is an interesting collection of artifacts.

Talk about this.

- So he, along with Leonard Bernstein, are the most visited, most asked about people here at the cemetery, and so on any given day, people will leave all sorts of tokens, whether it's pens or brushes.

- [Roberto] Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles.

- In spite of whatever she was going through, she gave 100,000%, every time she sang.

- [Roberto] All on World's Greatest Cemeteries.

You can find out more about this episode, just get in touch, or tell us about your favorite cemetery or historical figure at WorldsGreatestCemeteries.com (dramatic orchestral music) (minimal electronic music) (melodic string music) (orchestral theme music)