Tour audio Mount Pleasant Cemetery

The Mount Pleasant Cemetery is an example of the Victorian genre of rural cemeteries, which represented a cultural transformation in attitudes towards death and mourning practices—the emblem of death on tombstones refigured as trumpeting angels, conduits linking God and man, in stark contrast to the Grim Reaper extinguishing the flame of life in the barren "burial grounds" and "graveyards" of the eighteenth century.
The Victorian-era grave marker's decorative motifs have vanished from the iconographic repertoire of contemporary American cemeteries, as the twentieth century's modern cemetery plan promoted the natural beauty of an unbroken expanse of lawn, with smaller, standardized grave markers of functional simplicity. Only in the country's rural cemeteries can historians study the iconographic evolution of gravestones and epitaphs that reveal profound distinctions in eighteenth and nineteenth century philosophical and religious beliefs.