The Mount Hope Cemetery de Rochester NY is one of the most impressive Victorian cemeteries of the United States. It is located between lofty hills and valleys created by a glacier it does about 14000 years.

Many left, solitary and mysterious places exist in him, in which the deterioration does not prevent to appreciate the beauty that they had in other times. The neogothic chapel of the cemetery, with its beautiful banks, its decrepit but magnificent organ and its tenebrous cellar, is conserved still well. In spite of the rubbish, the wood planks and the spiderwebs, to enter itself in this small incinerating Victorian church and the adjacent one are fascinating.

Next to the banks that occupied the feligreses is a great rectangular hollow, as large as a coffin, from which the cellar can be seen. Right under this hollow, in the cellar, still it remains the marble slab in that the coffins were deposited and the hydraulic elevator that allowed, in a while certain, to elevate them until the chapel.

Another interesting place is the crematory, designed by J. Foster Warner, that was added to the chapel in 1912. In a dark corner of the crematory, a steel coffin is deposited, in which, possibly, the bodies of the people put who had died of some infectious disease. It has 18 I close, that had to be used to avoid that it was abriera and the air was contaminated.

This cemetery began to be used as of year 1838. At the end of 1820, the cemeteries of the zone were insufficient. After the bud of 1832 rage, the city of Rochester made the decision to create a larger cemetery that was remote of the city and located in an pleasant place. In the 1837, City council it bought almost 54 hectares that were destined to the cemetery, that it abrió the 3 of October of 1838.

In the following years, one went embellishing the cemetery with different constructions like a decorative entrance, the gothic chapel, constructed in 1863, a great excavated long ornamental source and criptas in slopes of mountains. Little by little, the city was extending the cemetery, that got to extend by 200 hectares.

Numerous symbols of the Victorian funeral art like Egyptian obelisks and gothic towers exist. Also are sculptures of all type: from the typical angels of the hope to dogs very loved for the deceased.

For the Victorian ones, the death did not bring about the fear and the rejection that produces in the 21st century but she was considered the waiting room of the eternal life. By that reason, the citizens of Rochester of century XIX, attracted by the landscape and the spectacular views of the Genesee river, used the cemetery like a park to which regularly they went to take a walk on foot or in caleche or to organize picnics Sundays in the evening, after attending the misa.

Nevertheless, at the time of the depression, the cemetery began to deteriorate itself and only as of 1979 a plan arose, on the part of a disinterested group of people (Friends of Mount Hope Cemetery), to obtain that this beautiful cemetery returns to have the splendor of other times.

It interests to you:

• tenebrous cemeteries
• impressive cemeteries