Mount Hope Cemetery, Two Americans on a Hillside

Mount Hope Cemetery opened in eighteen thirty-eight on a hillside south of downtown Rochester, and it is the kind of place where you understand immediately why Victorians thought of their cemeteries as parks. It spreads across nearly two hundred acres of glacially carved terrain, with winding carriage roads, mature trees, and views down toward the Genesee valley. About three hundred fifty thousand people are buried here. Its annual total grows by five or six hundred each year.

Two of its residents have shaped American history as much as anyone of their era.

Frederick Douglass, who spent the most productive years of his life in Rochester, who published The North Star from a building on Exchange Street and sheltered freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad, was buried here in eighteen ninety-five. He had asked to be returned to Rochester, the city he had chosen, and that had chosen him.

Susan B. Anthony would be buried here eleven years later, in nineteen oh six. She had lived within a few miles of Douglass for the better part of four decades. They had marched together on platforms, published newspapers within blocks of each other, and disagreed, sometimes bitterly, about whether the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave Black men the vote, was a victory or a betrayal because it left women out. They reconciled. Their friendship outlasted the argument.

In eighteen ninety-five, when Douglass died, Anthony spoke at his memorial service in Washington. They are buried at Mount Hope less than a mile apart. The cemetery is open to visitors daily.