Upcoming book on Forest Hills Cemetery

A new photographic history of Forest Hills Cemetery is currently being written by Anthony M. Sammarco to celebrate the 160th anniversary of the cemetery. This book will be lavishly illustrated and sales will benefit the Trust's education and preservation projects.

Forest Hills Cemetery
1848-2008

Laid out in 1848 as a rural garden cemetery by Henry A.S. Dearborn, Forest Hills Cemetery in 2008 is celebrating its 160th anniversary as Boston’s premier arboretum cemetery. Since the mid nineteenth century, its 275 magnificent acres have been the resting place of people of all walks of life, ethnicities, religion and race. Among these are poet Anne Sexton, playwright Eugene O’Neill, ee cummings and William Lloyd Garrison.
Forest Hills’ landscape is a museum of sculpture, art and monuments that chronicle the Victorian age to the present. The first crematorium in the United States was here and prominent Bostonian suffragette Lucy Stone was the first person to be cremated at Forest Hills in 1893. An active cemetery and an all embracing place, Forest Hills offers a bucolic and picturesque setting for the “gathering of generations,” and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Anthony Sammarco has written over fifty books in the Arcadia series, and is a trustee of the Forest Hills Educational Trust and teaches at the Urban College of Boston.

Forest Hills in the News!

After every Trust event, someone will come up to me to tell me that this is their first visit to Forest Hills; they are always amazed that they didn't know about such an extraordinary place, and only discovered it because of a concert, walking tour, or poetry reading. Often these people are life-long Bostonians!

So, we are very grateful to to The New York Times for featuring Forest Hills in their travel section recently. Five staff writers from around the nation described their vision of a perfect day in their home cities for a travel feature called "5 Big Cities, 1 Winter Day." Abby Goodnough started her ideal day in Boston with a walk through Forest Hills:

Boston is a city of ghosts, but on the coldest of days, don't expect them to come to you. Instead, visit Forest Hills Cemetery, a rambling Victorian-era burial ground about four miles from downtown and a splendidly quiet place to roam. Winding paths crisscross its 275 acres, and if you pick up a map by the entrance, you can find the graves of Anne Sexton, E. E. Cummings and Eugene O'Neill. Drive slowly along the narrow roads until you find a good place to park and wander. On a recent morning, snow crunched underfoot and fell in soft chunks from the treetops. Bliss.

We thank the Times and Abby Goodnough for helping people to discover one of Boston's hidden treasures!

Read 5 Big Cities, 1 Winter Day
and Abby Goodnough's article on Boston