WATERTOWN, Mass.—Mount Auburn Cemetery’s front gates are in Cambridge, but more than 90-percent of the cemetery is actually in Watertown. Watertown was a major center of the 19th-century Armenian Diaspora and now boasts the third largest Armenian population in the United States.
In 2016, a group of local Armenian culture advocates, including members of Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) and volunteers, began an effort to create a monument for the unmarked grave of Simon Antranighian (1827-1855) – the first known Armenian buried at Mount Auburn.
Antranighian’s story was uncovered during preparation for a presentation that was held in 2014 celebrating the lives of Armenians buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery. The program was organized as part of the centennial commemoration of the Armenian Genocide by volunteer docent Stephen Pinkerton, who collaborated with founder and president of Project SAVE Ruth Thomasian and NAASR’s director of Academic Affairs, Marc Mamigonian.
Antranighian was a daguerreotypist who arrived in Boston in 1853. He died from a respiratory disease in 1855 and was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in an unmarked grave in the public St. John Lot on Vesper Avenue. He was the first known Armenian to be buried at Mount Auburn – but not the last. More than 3,000 Armenians have been buried there since.
Robert Shure, sculptor and president of Skylight Studios, has designed a monument appropriate for Antranighian’s gravesite.
Thanks to a generous seed gift from a local Armenian family, Mount Auburn is currently fundraising for the $50,000 needed to complete Antranighian’s monument, re-landscape the area surrounding the gravesite and produce interpretive materials for visitors about Antranighian and Armenian heritage at the cemetery.
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