Mount Auburn Cemetery, Baltimore Maryland

Date added: October 26, 2024

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Maryland
Cemetery

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Dedicated in 1872 and originally known as "The City of the Dead for Colored People," Mount Auburn Cemetery was one of the first and is the only remaining cemetery owned and operated by African Americans in Baltimore. The congregation of the Sharp Street Memorial United Methodist Church is one of the oldest in the city and was highly influential in organizing and providing services for the community, in the freedom movement during the Civil War, and through participation in the civil rights movement in the twentieth century. The Baltimore chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People conducted meetings, rallies and fundraisers at Sharp Street Church.

The Sharp Street Church dates from 1787 as a separate African American Methodist congregation. Free Blacks built the first Sharp Street Church in 1802 on Sharp Street in south Baltimore. It was a central meeting place for secret orders and for planning and organizing the community. The church established a day school, later to become the first Colored public school in Baltimore, and established a school for trained leadership, the Centenary Biblical Institute, now Morgan State University. The Washington Conference of Black Ministers was organized at the church in 1864. To further serve the community, the church purchased a home for the elderly in 1870. In 1898 the church moved to its current location on Etting Street, a granite Gothic Revival building by architect Alphonsus H. Bieler.

Mount Auburn Cemetery was founded in 1872 by Rev. James Peck, pastor, and the trustees of the Sharp Street Methodist Episcopal Church to continue the tradition of the church members to provide a final resting place in Baltimore where African Americans could be buried in dignity. The church had owned another cemetery dating to 1810, 2 ¼ acres on Belair Road purchased from Francis Hollingsworth. When the road was widened in 1886, graves were moved to nearby Laurel Hill Cemetery, another early African American cemetery, now gone.

In 1871 the Sharp Street Church purchased land from the Glen Estate in the Westport community of Mount Winans for $2,400. The cemetery was dedicated by Rev. Peck in 1872 and named the "City of the Dead for Colored People." The name was changed to Mount Auburn Cemetery in 1894.

Around the time of the creation of the cemetery, members of the Sharp Street Church had begun to settle in the Westport community. On March 10^th, 1886, the Maryland General Assembly gave sanction to the trustees of the Sharp Street Church to use a parcel of land within the cemetery to build a chapel to serve the community. Called the Sharp Street Mission, it stands at the corner of Hollins Ferry and Waterview roads. The deed to the chapel was transferred to Mount Winans United Methodist Church in 1986.

Mount Auburn Cemetery has served the African American community of Baltimore since its dedication. Sharp Street Church clergy, at least one bishop of the United Methodist Church, the founder of the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper John Henry Murphy, the president of the Baltimore branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Lillie Mae Carroll Jackson, the first African American lightweight boxing champion Joseph Gans, the first female African American mortician in Baltimore, the first female African American doctor in Baltimore, business owners, professionals, former slaves and thousands of Black families rest at Mount Auburn.

In the early nineteenth century Black churches provided burial grounds in Baltimore, most of which were relocated for construction projects or disappeared. After the decline of Laurel Hill Cemetery in the 1930s (it was condemned in 1957) and until desegregation, Mount Auburn Cemetery may have been the only burial site for African Americans in Baltimore. The cemetery remained in use in the 1970s and a number of monuments of substantial scale and finish date to that time, but 1980 marked the beginning of a period of decline. The cemetery was incorporated in 1982 and leased to the Westport Cemetery Corporation until 1986. The 1990s have brought efforts to maintain the landscape and to develop a preservation plan; a new board of directors was elected in 1995. The cemetery was once one of the most profitable ventures for the church. Today, no new lots are being sold, but there are frequent new burials in the family-owned lots.

Noteworthy individuals interred at Mount Auburn Cemetery:

1. Bishop W. A. C. Hughes (1877-1940)
Served as the pastor of Sharp Street Church, 1905-1912.

2. Bishop Edgar A. Love (1891-1974)
First Black resident bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1952-1964.

3. Rev. McHenry J. Naylor (1867-1940)
Pastor 1912-1921. Spearheaded the building of the Community House in 1921.

4. Rev. Nathaniel M. Carroll (1837-1931)
Pastor 1891-1896. The N. M. Carroll United Methodist Home for the Aged adopted his name in 1928 to honor him while he was pastor of Sharp Street Church.

5. Rev. Daniel W. Hayes (1851-1940)
Pastor 1896-1899. Sharp Street Methodist Episcopal Church (1898) was built under his leadership.

6. John Henry Murphy (1840-1922)
Publisher. Founder of the "Baltimore Afro-American" newspaper, was born a slave in Baltimore, but was emancipated in 1863.

7. William Ashby Hawkins (1862-1941)
Attorney. First African American in Baltimore to run for the United States Senate.

8. Lillie Carroll Jackson (1898-1975)
Civil rights activist. Served as the first woman president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for 35 years.

9. James E. Dougherty (1858-1941)
Caterer. Owned one of the first Black-owned catering services in Baltimore City.

10. Joseph Gans (1875-1910)
Lightweight boxer. First lightweight boxing champion of the world, 1901-1910.

Site Description

Mount Auburn Cemetery is located in the Westport / Mount Winans community of southwest Baltimore, Maryland. The main entrance to Mount Auburn Cemetery is from Waterview Avenue, which runs along the north boundary. Bounded on the east by Annapolis Road and on the west by Hollins Ferry Road, the cemetery of 33.917 acres overlooks the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River. Asphalt roadways organize the cemetery into a loose rectangular grid containing family-owned lots with monuments of various ages, materials and styles. A receiving vault dates from the earliest period of the cemetery; an office built at a later date exhibits alterations in siding and fenestration.

The entrance gate on Waterview Avenue is flanked by concrete walls; the wall on the left contains the name "MOUNT AUBURN CEMETERY" painted black on white on a plywood rectangle bordered with inlaid mosaic sandstone shards. The wall on the right carries the painted information, "FOUNDED 1872 BY REV. JAMES PECK / PASTOR 1970 REV. RICHARD L. CLIFFORD," also bordered with mosaic shards. The rest of the perimeter is fenced with chainlink.

The drive from the gate intersects with the main east-west axis, which runs the length of the cemetery from Hollins Ferry Road to Annapolis Road. The cemetery office is at this central intersection. Most of the roads are named and marked with signs. A receiving vault is located at the end of the axis toward Hollins Ferry Road. The main view corridor follows the longitudinal roadway axis and affords a broad vista to the harbor. The cemetery's location on an elevated viewsite at the city outskirts is a characteristic held over from the "rural" cemetery tradition. The variety and individuality of monuments also reflect the "rural" tradition.

The early monuments are of marble and the later are mostly of granite. Types of monuments include markers, vertical and horizontal tablets, crosses, pedestals, obelisks, shafts, cross gables, ledgers and boundary markers. Two marble sculptures are found: a life sized angel (c. 1911) and a child (1934). Three bronze portrait medallions were used in two of the family lots owned by funeral directors; only one medallion remains. Later use of bronze is found in flush markers, most dating to the 1970s. Curbing and a stoop with the family name are found at the lot of one of the funeral directors, and in a prominent lot across from the office. A few other lots carry complete curbing. There are cast concrete stones and crosses. Recent monuments are more modest in scale and ornamentation; changes in demographics are reflected in the grave marking traditions. There are home made memorials of wooden crosses, gravel, cast and impressed concrete, painted concrete and one early marble shaft monument garbed in fabric, topped with a head wrap and embellished with oranges and artificial flowers; bottles of water hang from a shrub within the lot.

A number of stones are tilted, fallen, broken and scarred. Some boundary markers are dislocated and most iron pipe railings are missing. Sections of curbing exist at some of the outlying lots. The landscape is rolling and open, with some remnants of original plantings: yuccas and roses, cedars and other evergreens, and a few deciduous trees. Most of the groundcover is grass, with some vinca. In some areas the landscape has grown to meadow. Shallow burials have left depressions in the soil. There have been recent efforts to fill the depressions.

The receiving vault is a one room, gable-roofed brick building, rectangular in plan with a door at the west gable end. The exterior is parged and whitewashed. The roof has asbestos shingles. The iron door hangs on strap hinges within a substantial granite frame above a granite threshold. There is a box lock on the inside of the door. Remnants and ghosting indicate the center of the door was embellished with a diamond shape framed with half round molding. The top of the door retains its flat molding.

The cemetery office is a hip roofed structure, rectangular in plan. Vinyl siding covers a mix of materials, including cinderblock, with evidence of numerous alterations. The ridge of the tarred roof is aligned on a north-south axis. The principal facade on the east elevation contains a central door flanked by another door to the south and a window to the north. On the north elevation, two windows flank a filled-in doorway. The west elevation has two windows flanking a block chimney stack. The south elevation has one window. Church oral history attributes construction of the office to Roland Pinkney, Sr.