Note: Presenting via Zoom as part of the Smithsonian Associates program.

Washington, D.C.’s cemeteries offer a lens into the city’s history, where landscape design, architecture, and memory intersect. Carolyn Muraskin, founder of DC Design Tours, explores four distinctive burial grounds: Oak Hill Cemetery, Mount Zion Cemetery and Female Union Band Society Cemetery, Glenwood Cemetery, and Rock Creek Cemetery. Each site reflects different communities, eras, and approaches to commemoration. From the picturesque, garden-inspired design of Oak Hill and Rock Creek to the rural cemetery movement embodied at Glenwood, these spaces reveal how 19th-century ideals shaped both the physical landscape and the cultural meaning of burial grounds in the nation’s capital. By examining their design and symbolism and the lives they commemorate, Muraskin presents cemeteries not as static resting places but as dynamic cultural landscapes that continue to shape how we understand the city’s past.