Mount Hope Cemetery is a historic cemetery in southern Boston, Massachusetts, between the neighborhoods of Roslindale and Mattapan.

Description and history

Mount Hope was established in 1852 as a private cemetery, and was acquired by the city five years later. It was the city's first cemetery to be laid out in the rural cemetery style, with winding lanes. It was at first 85 acre in size; it was enlarged by the addition of 40 acre in 1929. Its main entrance is on Walk Hill Street, on the northern boundary. The cemetery's office building was designed by Boston architect James Mulcahy. The cemetery was added to the National Register of Historic Places on September 25, 2009. In May 2020, the remains of fifty victims of infectious diseases, including smallpox, typhus, yellow fever, syphilis, and other diseases, were removed from the cemetery on Gallops Island in Boston Harbor where they were threatened by storm damage and reinterred in the Graceland section of Mount Hope. Their identities are unknown; they died between 1871 and 1902 and the fifty include people of African, Asian, and European origin. In October 2021, a new memorial headstone for African American Civil War nurse Susie King Taylor was dedicated in a ceremony sponsored by the Massachusetts Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War and attended by Boston mayor Kim Janey. Originally, the grave marker only contained her second husband's name, Russell Taylor (1854-1901); cemetery records indicate that she was buried with him in 1912. The new stone includes Taylor's name as well as an inscription of her likeness.

Notable interments