Mount Hope was established in 1852 as a private cemetery, and was acquired by the city five years later.

[1] In May 2020, the remains of fifty victims of infectious diseases, including smallpox, typhus, yellow fever, syphilis, and other diseases, were removed from the cemetery on Gallops Island in Boston Harbor where they were threatened by storm damage and reinterred in the Graceland section of Mount Hope.

Their identities are unknown; they died between 1871 and 1902 and the fifty include people of African, Asian, and European origin.

[4] In October 2021, a new memorial headstone for African American Civil War nurse Susie King Taylor was dedicated in a ceremony sponsored by the Massachusetts Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War and attended by Boston mayor Kim Janey.

[5] Originally, the grave marker only contained her second husband's name, Russell Taylor (1854-1901); cemetery records indicate that she was buried with him in 1912.