"Mt. Hope Cemetery - A 20th Century History"
The Year 2000 marks the 166th birthday of Mount Hope Cemetery in Bangor, Maine. A 264-acre institution listed on the National Register of Historic Places, Mount Hope is the second oldest garden cemetery in America - a cemetery designed to serve as a haven for the living as well as a final resting-place for the decease. Mount Hope serves the needs of northern Maine in numerous capacities and offers the public a serene setting complete with period architecture, historical memorials and graceful monuments, several ponds, a brook, and the results of almost 170 years of horticulture.
Mount Hope Cemetery: A Twentieth-Century History traces the development of the cemetery in the twentieth century as well as the cemetery's 1834 establishment and its history to 1900. The text covers many facets of cemetery growth and management, some unique to Mount Hope, others common throughout the nation. Mount Hope met the challenges of modernity in the twentieth century through increased legal and fiscal astuteness and such innovations as automated machinery, paved roadways, a crematory, and a computer system. At the same time, the cemetery continued to add memorials honoring American veterans of the 1800s and 1900s and placed increase emphasis on cemetery beautification. Granite stairways, stone buildings, and bridges, and ornamental fencing erected in the 1900s augmented the garden cemetery aspects of Mount Hope and met specific design criteria.
Although largely an administrative history, Mount Hope Cemetery also discusses the more "glamorous" aspects of the cemetery, including cemetery lore, the filming of Stephen King's Pet Sematary, and the interments of such characters 1930s gangster Al Brady and Bangor's infamous madam Fan Jones. Such stories - along with close to sixty photographs by cemetery personnel, professional photographers, and a few by the author - help illustrate the rich heritage of Mount Hope Cemetery. At the turn of the twenty-first century romanticism in the midst of twentieth- century "progress."
Trudy Irene Scee, Ph.D., is a free-lance writer and historian. She holds under graduate degrees in Forestry and History, a Master of Arts in History from the University of Montana, and a Doctorate of Philosophy in History from the University of Maine.
Dr. Scee has taught history at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick and worked extensively for the University of Maine system. She has published several academic essays and worked as a journalist. In addition to Mount Hope Cemetery: A Twentieth-Century History, Dr. Scee has written In the Deeds We Trust: Baxter State Park, 1970-1995, A Bird for a Bonnet: Gender, Class and Culture in American Birdkeeping, 1750-1990, and Mount Desert: An Island History. Additional works are currently underway.
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