Leavitt's funeral was held at the Chapel of the First Congregational Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, two days after her death.
Two days after her death, on December 14, 1921, Henrietta Swan Leavitt's funeral service was held at the Chapel of the First Congregational Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Given her family's deep roots in Congregationalist ministry—her father George Roswell Leavitt had himself been a Congregationalist minister—the choice of venue reflected the strong religious tradition in which she had been raised in Lancaster, Massachusetts.
The modest scale of her funeral, largely attended by family, colleagues from the Harvard College Observatory, and members of the local community, belied the immense scientific significance of the discoveries she left behind. At the time of her death, few outside the small community of professional astronomers fully appreciated that her period-luminosity relationship, published in 1912, would soon become the foundation for measuring the true scale of the universe.
Leavitt was buried in the family plot at the Cambridge Cemetery in Massachusetts, near other members of the Leavitt family. Her grave would later become a site of pilgrimage for historians of science and admirers of her pioneering work, as recognition of her contributions to astronomy grew substantially throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, culminating in numerous honors including a lunar crater and an asteroid named in her memory.