The portrait statue memorializing ten-year-old Maud Munn, who died on New Year's Day 1892, is uniquely poignant and has long been a favorite with visitors to historic Mt. Pleasant Cemetery. The daughter of banker and amateur thespian Albert Courtlandt Munn and his wife, the former Mary Sanford, little Maud Harrison Munn's forbears were among the earliest settlers of the Newark area. Encouraged by her theatre-loving parents, she delighted in her classes at a Newark dancing school, and had just appeared in a Christmas recital before being fatally stricken with scarlet fever. She died just eight days before her 11th birthday. Her life-sized likeness, symbolically seated on a tree stump representing life cut short, was subsequently commissioned by her father. With her long hair arranged in flowing curls, Maud is depicted in the dancing slippers and dress she had worn for the holiday recital, and seems ready to slip down from her pedestal and pirouette up the nearby path. The verse inscribed on the base of her monument reads:
A SHORT PATH OF HAPPY LIFE
HER LITTLE FEET HAD TROD
ERE A GLORIOUS PLACE WAS GIVEN HER
BEFORE THE THRONE OF GOD
A SHORT PATH OF HAPPY LIFE
HER LITTLE FEET HAD TROD
ERE A GLORIOUS PLACE WAS GIVEN HER
BEFORE THE THRONE OF GOD
The portrait statue memorializing ten-year-old Maud Munn, who died on New Year's Day 1892, is uniquely poignant and has long been a favorite with visitors to historic Mt. Pleasant Cemetery. The daughter of banker and amateur thespian Albert Courtlandt Munn and his wife, the former Mary Sanford, little Maud Harrison Munn's forbears were among the earliest settlers of the Newark area. Encouraged by her theatre-loving parents, she delighted in her classes at a Newark dancing school, and had just appeared in a Christmas recital before being fatally stricken with scarlet fever. She died just eight days before her 11th birthday. Her life-sized likeness, symbolically seated on a tree stump representing life cut short, was subsequently commissioned by her father. With her long hair arranged in flowing curls, Maud is depicted in the dancing slippers and dress she had worn for the holiday recital, and seems ready to slip down from her pedestal and pirouette up the nearby path. The verse inscribed on the base of her monument reads:
A SHORT PATH OF HAPPY LIFE
HER LITTLE FEET HAD TROD
ERE A GLORIOUS PLACE WAS GIVEN HER
BEFORE THE THRONE OF GOD
A SHORT PATH OF HAPPY LIFE
HER LITTLE FEET HAD TROD
ERE A GLORIOUS PLACE WAS GIVEN HER
BEFORE THE THRONE OF GOD
Bio by: Nikita Barlow
Inscription
MAUD H. MUNN
DIED
NEW YEAR'S DAY 1892
(Epitaph verse in bio section)
Gravesite Details
Life-sized marble portrait statue of 10-year-old Maud Munn atop a cylindrical base. Seated on a tree stump, symbolic of life cut short, she bears a floral wreath on her forearm, and significantly wears the dancing slippers of her fateful recital.
