"Too Mean to Live, and Certainly in No Fit Condition to Die": Vandalism, Public Misbehavior, and the Rural Cemetery Movement

When the Rural Cemetery Movement began with the establishment of Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1831, the new institutions served the needs of the living as much as for the dead. While providing ample space for burials, the beautifully landscaped environments offered to visitors the opportunity to enjoy "nature" in a park-like setting. Established in the years prior to the development of large public parks, rural cemeteries were experimental public spaces in which people had to navigate what might be considered proper versus improper behaviors. Newspapers and journals would prove instrumental in exposing visitors' disregard for propriety and the efforts by cemetery proprietors to curb misbehavior would lay the groundwork for the establishment of rigidly enforced regulations during the public parks movement in the second half of the nineteenth century.