Sleepy Hollow Cemetary
Melvin Memorial and Chestnut Ridge Preservation Plan

Concord, Massachusetts
1999

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery is the hallowed resting place of Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott and other nineteenth century New England notables. Chestnut Ridge, along a wooded esker in the Cemetery’s center, is notable, too, as an exemplar of the Rural Cemetery Movement by landscape architect, Horace W. S. Cleveland and as the setting, at the southern tip, of the Melvin Memorial by sculptor, Daniel Chester French. The Memorial is among French’s most distinguished works, “Mourning Victory” overseeing the graves of three brothers slain in the Civil War. DDA’s recommendations for this extraordinary blend of nature and art include: restoration of the Memorial’s inhospitable bituminous setting; restoration of the Ridge’s stone retaining walls and cobble paths; tree conservation; slope understory clearing; revegetation; and recreation of a hitherto forgotten pond designed by Thoreau.