Legacy MattersEnvironmentally conscious Marin County is the first in the back to nature movement for the dead - in this century at least.
Mount Auburn Cemetery located in Watertown and Cambridge, Massachusetts, was founded in 1831 as America’s first landscaped cemetery. It's a National Historic Landmark inspiring the creation of the nation's public parks, an active cemetery, and its 175 acres are one of the best birding spots in Massachusetts.
The new owners of Forever Fernwood Cemetery in Mill Valley, California, plan the country's first permanently protected cemetery, nature preserve and wildlife sanctuary. Peter Fimrite, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle writes in Marin Cemetery: Ashes to ashes, dust to mulch The three new owners are Billy Campbell, a physician and environmentalist, Tyler Cassity, a funeral aficionado, and Joe Sehee, an expert on socially responsible business.
What they plan to do is restore the native habitat of the area, establish an interpretive center and open the whole kit and caboodle up to hikers, nature lovers, schoolchildren, and even birthing and wedding ceremonies.
Traditional funerals and cremation scatterings would continue on the land, but most burials would prohibit embalming, allow only biodegradable caskets and require natural grave markers, like planted shrubs, trees or boulders
Campbell sees Forever Fernwood as the pilot project in a sweeping movement to protect a million acres of land over the next 30 years by turning cemeteries into open space preserves. Already 500 people have put their name on a waiting list.
Will it attract as famous people as Mount Auburn Cemetery who include .....
Famous people buried at Mount Auburn include:
• Nathaniel Bowditch (1773 – 1838), navigator and mathematician
• Phillips Brooks (1835 – 1893), Episcopal Bishop
• Charles Bulfinch (1763 – 1844), architect
• Mary Baker Eddy (1821 – 1910), religious leader
• Buckminster Fuller (1895 – 1983), visionary
• Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840 – 1924), art patron
• Charles Dana Gibson (1867 – 1944), artist
• Asa Gray (1810 – 1888), botanist
• Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809 – 1894), author and poet
• Winslow Homer (1836 – 1910), artist
• Julia Ward Howe (1819 – 1910), reformer and author
• Harriet Jacobs (1813 – 1897), author and abolitionist
• Henry Cabot Lodge (1850 – 1924), statesman
• Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. (1902-1985), U.S. Senator
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 – 1882), poet
• Amy Lowell (1874 – 1925), poet
• James Russell Lowell (1819 – 1891), poet
• Bernard Malamud (1914 – 1986), novelist
• Josiah Quincy (1772 – 1864), politician
• Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin (1842 – 1924), civil rights leader, journalist
• Charles Sumner (1811 – 1874), abolitionist and senator