Pine Grove Cemetery tours scheduled

LYNN – The Lynn Community Association, in collaboration with Lynn Historical Society and Pine Grove Cemetery Commission, will hold free guided tours of Pine Grove Cemetery, Sunday, Sept. 28 at 1:15 p.m. The self-guided tours can begin any time from 1 to 4 p.m. All tours will begin from the entrance at 145 Boston St.Pine Grove Cemetery, recently added to the National Register of Historic Places, is a 152-acre city-owned cemetery established in 1850 with more than 80,000 burials dating from 1850 to the present. Pine Grove is closely linked with the history of Lynn and retains strong historical associations and distinctive landscape features, buildings, monuments and gravestones dating from the mid-19th century to the present. The cemetery was designed in the rural cemetery style by Henry A.S. Dearborn, noted for his design of Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge and Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain. Landscape architects Robert Morris Copeland and Ernest W. Bowditch later laid out other sections of the cemetery. Notable in the cemetery are the Rhodes Memorial Chapel built in 1891 and designed by Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge in the Richardsonian Romanesque style and made of Longmeadow granite and brownstone with a red slate roof; the Copeland Sunken Gardens surrounded by the old Lynn City Hall Gates, designed in the 1860s by architect Gridley James Fox Bryant; and the Fieldstone Perimeter Wall built by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s that (almost) extends along the cemetery’s entire 152-acre perimeter.The military lots’ distinguished funerary art includes the Lynn Civil War Memorial, a granite monument erected by the Grand Army of the Republic around 1866. It is one of the tallest monuments at the cemetery and the figure, sculpted by John A. Jackson of Florence, Italy, depicts a Civil War soldier at rest. Nearby is the Spanish American War Memorial commonly known as “The Hiker,” which was designed by Theodora Alice Ruggles Kitson. The World War I Memorial is dramatically located on an open hilltop and backed by an American flag and a cannon and highlights the prominence of a bronze figure of an ordinary soldier posed at rest and carrying his equipment.