Cemetery Tour Part 1
- samguzzie
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
Since 2023, I have traveled the US visiting memorial sites dating back to the 1600’s. The first tour was centered around the evolution of cemeteries, grave sites and memorials alongside the professionalization of the funerary business in the United States. As well as, observing the implications, then and now, of segregation laws, in relation to these historic burial sites.
The professionalization of the funerary business began to take shape in the US following the civil war, when so many bodies were simply not returning home. There was a, rather urgent, need for proper care and burial of the many unidentified and displaced bodies of wartime. With this, came a rise in physical memorials and monuments as a mark of remembrance and a place to grieve loved ones who never came home. As the resulting industry continued to grow, the process of preparing the body was removed from the home entirely. Families were again wanting a physical place to grieve their loved ones, leading to the evolution of the single grave and headstone cemeteries we know today.
In Old City Philadelphia, I visited the historic Christ Church burial ground (pictured above), and Arch Street Meeting House (Quaker) burial ground. Notably, the final resting place of Benjamin Franklin and other signers of the Declaration of Independence. What’s most interesting is that Christ Church houses an estimated 4,000-6,000 bodies, with only 1,400 grave markers, and as many as 20,000 bodies buried at the Arch Street Meeting House (1).
Burials began on these grounds as early as the 1600’s, prior to the industrialization of the funerary business. The earliest markers at Christ Church, from the 1700’s, were monuments to notable members, like Ben Franklin, or high ranking military officials, like the monument pictured above. Quakers were discouraged from using headstones or grave markers at all, with little to no grave markers on the grounds until the late 1800’s, after the civil war.
There are believed to be plots which house as many as ten bodies in one. Arch Street Meeting house was considered almost full in 1793, with burial plots already 2-3 bodies deep when a yellow fever epidemic hit the city (1). These burial grounds were initially just that, a final place for the dead. As burial practices evolved, so did these grounds, with the majority of the grave markers visible today placed in the late 1800’s, and at Christ Church, into the mid-1900’s, spanning nearly three centuries of burials.
Image (1)
The Arch Street Meeting House burial ground was always integrated, and not reserved to just Quakers, with records noting “Quakers… buried here alongside ‘Indians, Blacks, and Strangers’ [even] prior to [William] Penn’s deed [in 1701]” (1). Christ Church Burial Ground however, was segregated by design, reserved for prominent, white members of the church. While Philadelphia hosted the largest free Black community in the country at the time, Black members of the church were still likely buried in the segregated Potter’s Field or “Congo Square,” now Washington Square at 6th and Walnut Street (2). A notable distinction between belief systems and religious practices.
References:
The second and third references detail a petition to the Governor of Pennsylvania from 6 free black men in 1782, for a fence at the Potter’s Field burial grounds, in a bid for protection against grave robbers and body snatchers, kept on record by Christ Church.
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