The St. Paul Parish in Hingham is launching a five-year restoration and expansion project to upgrade its cemetery on Hersey Street. They are working with Halvorson Design Partnership, a Boston-based landscape architecture firm that has provided planning and design for Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, and Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, to draw up redesign options for their 141-year-old cemetery.
Halvorson Design’s plans include filling in smaller side roads in the cemetery to create more burial space, installing a landscape buffer at the perimeters, paving existing gravel roads, and replacing old trees with new plantings.
The parish hopes to make use of the front, undeveloped half acre for cremated remains, likely by splitting the plot between burial space and a columbarium, as currently the cemetery has no designated above-ground space for urns.
Rev. Nestor says beautifying the cemetery will better allow it to act as a reflection of the parish. “You want to show respect for the dead and the sorrow of the people who are surviving,” he said. “It’s a good and holy thing to do, so we want to be in line with that.”