Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts is a prime example of a 19th century rural New England cemetery. Horace Cleveland, who, along with Frederick Law Olmsted, is credited with the professionalization of landscape architecture, designed the 17-acre core of the cemetery. As with other rural or “garden” cemeteries, Sleepy Hollow’s design elements include gently curving roads adapted to the site’s natural contours and naturalistic plantings. Before its designation as a cemetery, local citizens called the area, a hilly part of the Deacon Reuben Brown farm, “Sleepy Hollow.” Townspeople, including local Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and author Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife Sophia, used Sleepy Hollow as a favorite spot for evening walks. While planning for Sleepy Hollow’s transformation into a cemetery, designers sought to maintain the natural beauty of Concord’s first large, designed landscape set aside for public use.