US-MA-Sleepy+Hollow+Cemetery


 * =Birding in Massachusetts=

Middlesex County
=Sleepy Hollow Cemetery= 34 Bedford Street B Concord, Massachusetts 01742 Sleepy Hollow Cemetery webpage

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Sleepy Hollow Cemetery
Coordinates: 42.4641828, -71.3436538 eBird links: Hotspot map View details Recent visits My eBird links: Location life list Submit data

About Sleepy Hollow Cemetery
Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts is a prime example of a 19th century rural New England cemetery. Horace Cleveland, who, along with Frederick Law Olmsted, is credited with the professionalization of landscape architecture, designed the 17-acre core of the cemetery. As with other rural or “garden” cemeteries, Sleepy Hollow’s design elements include gently curving roads adapted to the site’s natural contours and naturalistic plantings. Before its designation as a cemetery, local citizens called the area, a hilly part of the Deacon Reuben Brown farm, “Sleepy Hollow.” Townspeople, including local Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and author Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife Sophia, used Sleepy Hollow as a favorite spot for evening walks. While planning for Sleepy Hollow’s transformation into a cemetery, designers sought to maintain the natural beauty of Concord’s first large, designed landscape set aside for public use.

Near the apex of the cemetery is Cat’s Pond, a manmade body of water laid out by Henry David Thoreau. In 1860, a year after the pond’s completion, Thoreau, noticing lilies and other plants growing in the pond, meditatively observed, “in the midst of death we are in life.”

Sleepy Hollow inspired the writings of Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and even became memorialized in William Ellery Channing’s poem “Sleepy Hollow.” The cemetery also became the final resting place of these authors. Their graves, alongside those of other notable New England authors, including Louisa May Alcott, are located in the area known as Author’s Ridge, a popular destination for tourists wishing to pay homage. As a community cemetery, Sleepy Hollow is also the burial site of several community members with important conservation connections. One of them, Samuel Hoar, donated the first parcel of land for what would become Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge. From Sleepy Hollow Cemetery webpage



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media type="custom" key="28860086" || L2349090 US US-MA US-MA-017 42.4641828 -71.3436538 Sleepy Hollow Cemetery