Mount Auburn celebrated its 175th Anniversary with a year-long celebration beginning in September 2006.  Sponsored by the Friends of Mount Auburn, the yearlong 175th anniversary celebration featured public programs that highlighted the Cemetery’s cultural, historic, and natural resources.  A lecture series at the Boston Public Library featured nationally known speakers on topics ranging from horticulture, landscape architecture and birding to the role of biography and nonprofit institutions in our life.  Art shows featuring works by artists buried in or inspired by Mount  Auburn were planned as were music performances commemorating the founders of local musical organizations and composers buried in the Cemetery.  The seminal book on the creation of Mount Auburn and the rise of the rural cemetery movement, Silent City on a Hill, by Blanche Linden was revised and redesigned for publication during the year.

In honor of the 175th anniversary Mount Auburn also constructed a significant new landscape for interments and commemoration and undertook a major restoration of its historic Bigelow Chapel with its significant collection of early 19th century Scottish stained glass. A comprehensive exhibit explaining the landscape of the Cemetery, funded in large part by the National Endowment for the Humanities, was unveiled in Story Chapel and the completion of a multi-year project to digitize the Cemetery’s lots and many of its records allowed for greater public access to its archives.