Book Release: "Abandoned and Forgotten Cemeteries of Philadelphia and its Environs"

My new book has just been released! Thank you to everyone who pre-ordered Abandoned and Forgotten Cemeteries of Philadelphia and its Environs – you should all have your copies in hand at this point. As always, I welcome feedback on the book. 

I did an in-person book launch presentation on July 24, 2025 at the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, a week after the book was released. Head House Books was in attendance selling copies that I signed. It was great speaking with people about so many aspects of abandoned cemeteries – thank you all for coming! I do have five additional events scheduled throughout the fall in the Philadelphia area, so if you are interested in attending a lecture presentation or would like to chat or get a book signed, I’ve listed these at the end.

Now for a little bit about the book itself – here are the topics I cover:

• Why and how are cemeteries abandoned?

• City versus rural cemeteries and the demise of Lafayette Cemetery

• The Watery Remains of Monument Cemetery

• Genealogical challenges

• The Surprise Below - 

        First Baptist Church and Weccacoe Playground/Burial Ground

• Mount Moriah Cemetery – A Resurrection

• The Cemetery business model, old and new

• Mount Vernon and Har Hasetim Cemeteries - 

        Teetering on the edge of oblivion

• Volunteerism and respect for the past

..............................

Were I to do it all over, I might subtitle my book, The Collapse of Eloquence. It’s a phrase from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Bluebeard. The actual title of my new book is Abandoned and Forgotten Cemeteries of Philadelphia and its Environs, and it was released into the wild in July, 2025 (America Through Time). The Collapse of Eloquence aptly describes the not uncommon result of people’s efforts to memorialize themselves, their story, only to find that their monuments to immortality did not stand the test of time. Maybe their descendants discovered this, if they even cared. Sometimes our best efforts to preserve a memory ends with the monument disintegrating. Sometimes nature washes it away (as happened in the central Texas flood in July, 2025), and sometimes even our progeny make those memories disappear.

Abandoned community mausoleum, Plains, PA.

Cemetery History

Philadelphia is no different from any other major American city. Its residents die, so we bury them in a churchyard. (Everyone dies, even Ozzy.) The city grows and the churchyard becomes full. The land becomes too valuable for graves as the city expands so the graves are either relocated or built upon. Large rural cemeteries are created. A hundred years later, they are no longer rural – these same cemeteries find themselves now in the middle of the larger city, just as the small church graveyards once found themselves in the way of “progress.” Some cemeteries survive this evolution, others do not. When the cemetery disappears, sometimes the burial records disappear too. Then memories collapse.

ChesLen Preserve Potters Field, Chester County, PA

As I wrote the book, there were many ideas I wanted to get across, topics I wanted to cover, e.g. the history of cemeteries in Philadelphia, why some have disappeared, why cemeteries are abandoned. I was interviewed by Linda Gould of the Cemetery Chronicles podcast in July and she asked me an interesting question – were there any themes or topics that arose while I wrote the book, that I hadn’t planned. And yes, there were. Volunteerism was one, i.e. how historic preservation is so greatly dependent on volunteers! Another was one she put into words quite eloquently - the fragility and relative impermanence of cemeteries. We think of cemeteries as rather staid entities, not very dynamic. We may assume that the most dramatic thing that happens is a few graves get dug each week.

Cemeteries, however, are quite dynamic! It is very possible that the cemetery you drive past each day may be on the verge of bankruptcy. High grass is a sign, for sure, of potential problems, e.g. with Har Jehuda Cemetery in Upper Darby, PA. Or, in the case of Mount Vernon Cemetery at Ridge and Lehigh Avenues in north Philly, the absence of tall weeds and grass may be an indication of quite the opposite. THAT cemetery was purchased in the spring of 2025, by an individual who is in the process of restoring it and turning it into an active “green burial” ground! It had been locked up with its trees and other foliage growing wild for decades.

Gardel Monument, Mount Vernon Cemetery, 2021

In the introduction to the book I wrote that I’d been working on it for twenty years, although I didn’t realize it all that time. I’d been documenting my cemetery travels (which began at the turn of the century - the twenty-first) since 2010 in my blog, The Cemetery Traveler. After photographing, exploring, volunteering in, researching and writing about hundreds of cemeteries across the United States, it occurred to me that the “abandoned” cemetery captivated my interest more than any other “type” of cemetery. When I would lecture about such places, people would invariably ask, how does a cemetery become ABANDONED? For many, this is incomprehensible. Hence, there is a chapter in the book exploring that phenomenon. Examples are given, e.g. Har Hasetim (est. 1890), the formerly abandoned Jewish cemetery in the woods of Gladwyne, PA (a Philadelphia suburb) and Mount Moriah Cemetery (est. 1855), a massive 200-acre property which was easily the nation’s largest abandoned cemetery when it was deserted in 2010. These also happen to be success stories, believe it or not – cemeteries that were saved from oblivion. Many Philadelphia cemeteries were not.

Mount Moriah Cemetery, Philadelphia, circa 2010

In Abandoned and Forgotten Cemeteries of Philadelphia and its Environs, I look at many cemeteries that have disappeared, or in some cases, just seem to have disappeared. Some have just been built over. Some, the bodies have been moved, others they have not. Monument Cemetery, the city’s second Victorian garden cemetery (est. 1837, after Laurel Hill, est. 1836) was destroyed in 1956 when Temple University acquired it to expand student parking. You can read about this travesty in my book, and see color photos of all the gravemarkers that were removed from the cemetery and dumped into the Delaware River under what is now the Betsy Ross Bridge. (The book is photograph-intensive, by the way, with 140 full-color images). Some large cemeteries like Monument and Lafayette Cemetery (which used to occupy the space that is now Capitolo Playground, near the cheese steak emporiums in south Philly) have barely left a trace. And where are the bodies? 47,000 from Lafayette and 28,000 from Monument? These are not pretty stories, but I cover them in the book.

Under the Betsy Ross Bridge

Many large cemeteries disappeared (sounds like someone just waved a magic wand, doesn’t it?), but scores of small ones did too. “Disappearing” could simply mean the graveyard was built over, like the Odd Fellows Cemetery under the playground of the William K. Dick Elementary School. It is fascinating to note that the Philadelphia Archeological Forum (PAF) has mapped out over 200 unmarked burial grounds throughout the city, with the intent that building developers take heed and do the right thing. Really, you cannot dig anywhere in Philadelphia without hitting a coffin, it seems. Temple found this out in March of 2025 when it tried to dig a foundation for a new building on the site of the old Monument Cemetery. Oops, they really DIDN’T move all the graves! And forget that “six feet under” idea. Burials were found eighteen inches under the blacktopped surface at Weccacoe Playground in Queen Village in 2014.

Weccacoe Playground, aka the Mother Bethel Burial Ground

Laws and Statutes

First Baptist Church plot at Mount Moriah Cemetery

Unfortunately, the laws that govern what happens when a backhoe accidentally crushes through buried wooden coffins are not well understood. They exist, but may not even be known to the parties involved. This is what happened at 218 Arch Street in 2017 when the foundation was being dug for a new condo complex. Legally, these thousands of full casket burials from the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia were on private property, so the developer had a certain responsibility. In Philadelphia, if human remains are found on private property, the landowner does not own any of the remains interred in that land. Under Pennsylvania law, such remains are under the control of next of kin/descendants and the courts. In this case, one would expect that the developer would have needed a court order to disturb these burials. He did allow about 500 burials to be excavated (and reburied at Mount Moriah Cemetery) but eventually the building went up - leaving an estimated 2,500 burials under the street. Apparently, this developer never saw the movie, Poltergeist.

Arch Street, where First Baptist remains were found to be not relocated to Mount Moriah

The PAF map was published in 2018, just after the Arch Street excavation, so this resource was not available for the developer to check for unmarked cemeteries before digging. The hope now is that developers WILL check the map first, then do the respectful thing. Or the legal thing. Hopefully both. Legally, in Philadelphia, if you do not “disturb” the human remains, you can build on, around, or over them. If you DO disturb the remains, then the Philadelphia Orphans Court has to get involved (along with the city coroner, police, archeologists, and so on) – but that’s only if the developer lets anyone know that human remains were discovered. 

(PAF) Philadelphia Historical Unmarked Burial Places Map

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

In Abandoned and Forgotten Cemeteries of Philadelphia and its Environs, I have tried to balance some good with the bad. Cemeteries that were saved, versus cemeteries that were destroyed, or just paved over like Bishops’ Burial Ground under Washington Avenue at 8th Street in South Philly. Or the previously unmarked Mother Bethel Burial Ground under the Weccacoe Playground in Queen Village, which is home to about 5,000 very quiet neighbors. After the accidental excavation of graves at Weccacoe in 2015, the Philadelphia Archaeological Forum (PAF) created its map of unmarked burial grounds. This fascinated me. I quickly looked at the area of the proposed Seventy-Sixers basketball arena in Chinatown to see if any unmarked graveyards would be disturbed … and yes there were two! The plan was abandoned though, so the arena is not being built. The burial grounds continue to rest quietly under the streets.

Southwark Community Garden, Queen Village (photo by Paul Wismar)

Back at the beginning of this piece, I said I’d been working on the book for the past twenty years. I didn’t realize it until last year when a publisher contacted me. When I was almost ready to upload the final edited manuscript in the fall of 2024, it occurred to me to look at the places I’d lived in Philadelphia to see if there were cemeteries in those areas. Eureka! The apartment building I used to live in on Queen Street was built over the Sixth Presbyterian Church Burial Ground! (Which could explain why one of the closets rained from time to time.) In addition, the community garden directly behind my apartment complex (shown in the photo above) was ALSO built over a different cemetery, the Ebenezer Church Burial Ground!! No wonder my neighbors’ vegetables are so plump and tasty, the flowers so vibrant. I find it amusing that they refer to their individual garden sections as plots.

That’s just one example of how new information bubbles to the surface and allows me to update the presentations I give from time to time. Here’s a link to that PAF map, if you’d like to see if you’re living on top of an old cemetery (or better yet, find out if a neighbor you dislike is living on top of one!): 

https://www.phillyarchaeology.net/wp-content/gismaps_maps/BurialMapV4/index.html#12/40.0102/-75.1089

I plan to do more speaking engagements this year, with book signings and so on. But these won’t be canned presentations. They will always be updated with current developments. People think cemeteries are fixed entities, unchanging pieces of property that simply get the grass cut every couple weeks. This is, oddly, not the case. Every time I lecture, there is new information, even if I’m discussing the same topic, the same cemetery. Consider the recent development where Temple University rediscovered graves under a parking lot excavation on April 12, 2025.

Temple's April 2025 excavation ends when they hit coffins six feet under.

Monument Cemetery, Gleason's Pictorial 1852

They were digging a foundation for a new building on the old Monument Cemetery site, whose graves were supposedly all moved in 1956. You can read about this “surprise” in the May 28, 2025 Philadelphia Inquirer article, “The discovery of human remains at Temple is a reminder of Philly’s history of careless cemetery removals.” Forget a collapse of eloquence, this is a collapse of respect. The article states, “We’ve long known about the careless, politically corrupt removal of cemeteries across the city from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries, including Monument Cemetery at the site of the university.” Maybe you didn’t know this. It is my belief that you should, which is one of the major points of my book. Owning up to our mistakes of the past and striving to do better in the future will make us better people. 

On a positive note, Laurel Hill Cemetery recently completed (in May, 2025) a massive year-long restoration project of its 1836 John Notman-designed gatehouse. For all its beauty and elegance, few people realize that Laurel Hill narrowly averted disaster in the 1970s. At that point, it was nearly full, its condition steadily declining since WWII. Its grandiose monuments were covered with graffiti; all the Tiffany stained-glass windows had been stolen from its mausoleums. The savior of the cemetery arrived in 1978 when the Friends of Laurel Hill volunteer organization was formed. Laurel Hill now thrives, its collapse of eloquence halted, its story continuing in grand tradition. Many memory gardens were not so lucky. Some, like Mount Vernon Cemetery (est. 1856) across Ridge Avenue from Laurel Hill, have been hanging on by a thread, locked up and neglected for decades. Since my book went to press, there has been an interesting development with that cemetery, as I mentioned earlier. After famously being advertised for sale on Zillow for a million dollars in 2024, it has been purchased with plans to care for the grounds and make it not only a walkable green space for the neighborhood, but to also make it a green burial site!

Mount Vernon Cemetery, 2013

Impermanence vs. Perpetual Care 

Rest in peace. Perpetual care. What do those phrases even mean in light of all this tumultuous activity? One thing it means is that some people are now demanding legal clauses in their burial contracts that say their remains will NEVER be disturbed. But who’s to say what will happen in a hundred years’ time? As we ponder all this and move toward a better, more respectful future, consider what Ben Franklin said: “Show me your cemeteries and I will tell you what kind of people you have.“ 

So my book, again, captures the fragility, the impermanence of these entities we assumed would last forever. Our cemeteries are part of our history, and whenever we lose one, we lose a chapter in our city's history. Historic sites depend greatly on the efforts of volunteers, so if you are so inclined, please consider volunteering your time to help out at your local cemetery. 

References and Calendar of Events:

Abandoned and Forgotten Cemeteries of Philadelphia and its Environs is available at the online retailers:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/abandoned-and-forgotten-cemeteries-of-philadelphia-and-its-environs-ed-snyder/1146630922

https://www.amazon.com/Abandoned-Forgotten-Cemeteries-Philadelphia-Environs/dp/1634995236

https://www.booksamillion.com/p/Abandoned-Forgotten-Cemeteries-Philadelphia-Its/Ed-Snyder/9781634995238

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I will have books at several events in the fall, if you would like me to sign one. The first two are public lectures and the last three are events where I will also be selling my books and fine art cemetery photography:

(Lecture presentations below require online registration)

Ludington Library (Lower Merion Library System), 5 South Bryn Mawr Avenue, Bryn Mawr, PA 19010

October 9th, 2025 (7 pm)

https://lmls.libcal.com/event/14489528

Wissahickon Valley Public Library - Ambler Branch

209 Race Street, Ambler PA  19002 Sept. 17, 2025, 6:30 pm.

https://www.wvpl.org/abandoned-and-forgotten-cemeteries-phila-and-its-environs

Market of the Macabre at Laurel Hill Cemetery – Saturday, Sept. 20, 2025

https://laurelhillphl.com/events/annual-events/market-of-the-macabre/

Darksome Art Market at Mount Moriah Cemetery – Saturday, Oct. 4, 2025

https://www.darksomecraftmarket.com/mountmoriah

Chestnut Hill Arts Festival – Sunday, Oct. 12, 2025

https://chestnuthillpa.com/events/fallforthearts-2025/

Delaware's "Distressed Cemetery Fund"

Delaware is known as “First State,” because it was the first of the thirteen original states to ratify the United States Constitution. This it did on December 7, 1787. In 2009, it became the first state to pass a law to help distressed cemeteries - actually an amendment to an existing law (Titles 16 and 29 of the Delaware Code relating to Delaware’s Department of Health and Social Services, Death Certificates, and Cemeteries) that established "The Distressed Cemetery Fund." 

Unless you’re in the cemetery business, you’re probably thinking, “Who cares?” However, as you will see, distressed cemeteries affect us all, in some way, shape, or form. (The photos I've included here are from cemeteries in other states, not Delaware.)

The most common fix an old cemetery can find itself in is that it is full, and can no longer accept burials. Therefore revenue comes to an end, as does the cemetery’s business. Except for one thing – the graves of those already interred need continual care. Even if the people who purchased the graves and PAID for continued upkeep, a cemetery may be hard-pressed to provide this long-term.

Forward-thinking cemeteries developed trust funds in which the interest may provide enough money to pay for “perpetual care” of the grave. Then again, it may not. If the annual cost of upkeep of a grave in 1866 cost $6.00 per year and the perpetual care fee was $50, would you expect the interest to continue to support the cost of upkeep through the year 2015? Hardly. Which is one reason so many historic cemeteries find themselves in difficult times.

Pennsylvania, for instance, has about 8500 cemeteries of various sizes. Only about 1000 of them are active, meaning they still accept burials. The other 7500 have to find other ways of paying for upkeep. With no income, a cemetery can fall on hard times. Maybe it gets overgrown and nasty-looking. Maybe it becomes a public nuisance, an eyesore, depressing nearby property values. Maybe it invites crime and eventually the city demolishes it. Perhaps the graves are moved to a larger, active cemetery, perhaps not.

The state of Delaware is the only state that I am aware of that has something called a Distressed Cemetery Fund. It’s purpose? Provide money to keep up the appearance and care of cemeteries in need. This is every bit as progressive as you would expect the “First State” to be. The fund  is generally used for making needed repairs and improvements, not for lawn maintenance expenses. (Click link to see application.)

So long as the cemetery is registered in the State of Delaware with the Division of Public Health of the Department of Health and Social Services, it can apply every two years for a grant of up to $10, 000. The Distressed Cemetery Fund is funded by adding $2.00 to the state fee for each copy of a certificate of death. Now get this for being progressive - A volunteer may register an abandoned cemetery! I know of two Friends groups that are associated with formerly abandoned Delaware cemeteries that have received the grant.

Unfortunately, most states do not have such a fund. Pennsylvania, where many of the photos in this article were taken, does not have such a fund. Why does Delaware bother? Why not just let the old cemeteries fall to pieces like just about every other state? In answer to that, let me quote from the State of Delaware’s official website:

"Cemeteries are essential elements of societies' collective history, providing fascinating insight into past burial customs, religious beliefs, cultural and ethnic influences, community origins and development, and landscape design principles. Although virtually every remnant from the beginnings of a town or city may be lost, cemeteries often remain as some of the last tangible links to the past.

In Delaware, many prominent historical cemeteries such as Dover's John Wesley Methodist Episcopal Cemetery and Wilmington's Riverview Cemetery (maintained respectively by the Dover Air Force Base and the Friends of Historic Riverview Cemetery) have been preserved due to the efforts of governmental agencies, private organizations, and individuals. Other historical cemeteries, unfortunately, are vulnerable to the threats of neglect, vandalism, and development." - Department of State - Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs

In all fairness to the state of New York, that state has a law providing for grants that can be applied for to correct acts of cemetery vandalism. New York enacted this in 1989, “The “Vandalism, Abandonment, and Monument Repair Fund," which is administered by the New York Department of State, Division of Cemeteries. (Click link for application.) The fund is supported by a $5 per-burial fee, paid by the cemetery. It seems as though the fund is more trouble than it is worth, however, as the state has on at least one occasion frozen distribution payments even though it continued to collect the $5 fee!

"CEMETERY RIPOFF IS GRAVE SITUATION - Vandalism funds go to ease state budget (NY Daily News):"

"A bureaucratic form of grave-robbing is dishonoring the dead whose final resting places have been defiled by vandals, say furious cemetery officials across the city."

Resting in Pieces Along the Delaware River

"When my earthly trials are over, cast my body in the deep blue sea;
Save all the undertaker bills, let the mermaids flirt with me."
- Mississippi John Hurt, 1966

With all this mid-winter rain we’re having, I think from time to time about Captain Babel Irons and his wife, Mary. Mary’s tombstone lies cast down at the waterline of the Delaware River in Philadelphia, under the Betsy Ross Bridge. How it got there is a long story, to which the reader is invited to relive through my past blogs on the subject (i.e. the destruction of Monument Cemetery, listed at the end of this article). No one knows the whereabouts of Captain Irons’ stone, or why Mary had a separate one.

Curiously, Captain Babel H. Irons does not swim with the fishes, even though his namesake schooner broke apart during a storm and sunk in the Delaware Bay. He died in 1872, Mary in 1917, and both were buried at Monument Cemetery. Mary ironically died of pneumonia – a disease that can produce fluid in the lungs – causing a person to effectively drown from the inside.

I entered the photograph you see above in an art competition and when the curator looked at it he said, “Perpetual Care?” Monument Cemetery, the initial resting place of Captain and Mrs. Irons, was condemned and bulldozed by the city of Philadelphia in 1956, to make room for a parking lot. Monument was the city’s second Victorian garden cemetery (after Laurel Hill in 1836), established in 1839. Its 28,000 bodies, including those of the Ironses, were supposedly relocated to Lawnview Cemetery in the Rockledge section of northeast Philadelphia. The monuments, headstones, and other grave markers were dumped into the river. So much for resting in peace.

The tide comes in and goes out twice a day on the shores of the Delaware, like twin slaps in society’s face for having so disrespectfully demolished a consecrated burial ground. This dumping ground is hardly as exotic as the “Neptune Memorial Reef,” the underwater cemetery off the coast of Miami, Florida. Philadelphia’s ragtag industrial Bridesburg section (where the tombstones reside), is a far cry from Miami Beach.

Tombstones at river's edge, lying against embankment

I used to joke with people that “Monument Cemetery is the only cemetery that demands you to consult the tide tables before you can visit.”  After publishing the blogs listed below, I received scores of emails and comments from descendants of those originally interred at Monument. What we’ve done to their memories is hardly a laughing matter. Many people need a burial spot, a headstone, some sort of tangible link to their past. Without that, they are rudderless, having nothing but ghost memories with no anchor to reality.

At high tide, the grimy water of the Delaware River is six feet above its low tide level. In the photo directly above, the water rises up to the tree roots. The dozens of headstones lying on the shore are covered at this time. Mary H. Irons’ stone is very close to the river’s edge at low tide, and is therefore one of the first to be covered when the tide comes in. It is as if the sea wants to touch her first.

On my last visit, I stood above the stone watching as the waves lapped around it, foaming the edges. The water rises surprisingly fast, if you have a marker like this by which to gauge its rise (one vertical foot per hour over a six-hour period). Reminding one of Captain Irons’ ship that sunk during a fierce storm in 1874, Mary’s stone stares at you like the final flare from a shipwreck.

Babel Irons may have been one of those sea captains who spent months at sea, but one thing is certain – he came home at least nine times while his wife was in her child-bearing years. They indeed had nine children! This, and the fact that Babel’s full name was Zorobabel (what a great name!), I learned from reading psychic Valerie Morrison’s website. Morrison and her staff have done considerable research into the lives of those people whose exposed headstones form the beach under the Betsy Ross Bridge. Her point is to show that all these people led actual lives, and should therefore be shown more respect. While Captain Irons fathered his youngest child, Sallie, at age 66, the more amazing thing is that Mary Irons gave birth to Sallie at age 45 – way past 40, considered even today (2013) as being advanced maternal age (meaning that women have difficulty becoming pregnant, and if they do, the pregnancy is more prone to complications).

Betsy Ross Bridge over Delaware River

Valerie Morrison, a Philadelphia area psychic, has taken on the task of raising public awareness to the plight of the headstones, and the memories, dumped under the Betsy Ross Bridge. She currently campaigns to have the exposed stones (of which there are about fifty) moved to a more respectful place. But the subject of her involvement (which was prompted by my photographs and research), will be covered in a future blog.



References and further Reading:

Ed Snyder's Monument Cemetery blog postings:

The Watery Remains of Monument Cemetery 

How Monument Cemetery was Destroyed

 Beachcombing in Hell – The Gravestones of Monument Cemetery

Valerie Morrison, Psychic Counselor and Medium website
CBS News: Final resting place - Cemeteries lack oversight
Philly.com: It's R.I.P. Tide Along the Delaware River

Beachcombing in Hell – The Gravestones of Monument Cemetery

Well this is a new experience for me – I just uploaded twenty-five names and dates to the website "FindAGrave.com" for Philadelphia’s defunct Monument Cemetery. I’ll add photos of the headstones this week. 

I recently found myself in a strange situation - well, stranger than usual. After publishing two blogs last year about the remains of Philadelphia’s aforementioned (demolished) 28,000-grave Victorian-era cemetery, I received an overwhelming number of comments and questions. These ranged from anger and indignation at the very idea of paving over a cemetery, to pleas from readers looking for traces of lost ancestors. 

I’m not going to dwell on the how’s and why’s of that situation for this blog - you can read about all that in my previous postings (The Watery Remains of Monument Cemetery [April  2011] and How Monument Cemetery was Destroyed [May 2011]). The short story is that in 1956, Monument Cemetery was condemned and leveled by the City of Philadelphia so that Temple University could build a parking lot. Thousands of monuments, tombstones, and other grave markers were dumped into the Delaware River, later used as part of the foundation for the Betsy Ross Bridge. The human remains were re-interred in mass graves at Lawnview Cemetery, in the northeast section of the city.

Comments on my postings ranged from intense moral outrage to defense of the project by Temple sympathizers. There were questions about how to access the cemetery records (as I had done) at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and there were people wondering if I photographed any of their ancestors’ headstones. Regardless of your position or interest level, this heap of marble and granite at the river’s edge tells a very human story.

From a memorial at Lawnview Cemetery, Rockledge, PA

When I received the following comment from a reader, I realized that people might be interested in the names and dates on the stones piled under the bridge:

“While their graves may never be found, their information would be of great interest to family, historians, and genealogists.”

Betsy Ross Bridge

At one point during the year, a Facebook friend of mine posted three of my photographs on the “Find A Grave” website (which boasts records of 77 million grave records worldwide). To my surprise, someone had already taken the time to log in 747 names of those buried in Monument Cemetery, but unlike those of most other entries, none of these included a photograph of the gravestone.

Frankford Creek enters Delaware River

Therefore, I decided to make another trip, for the sole purpose of recording names and dates, and uploading them to “Find A Grave.” Names and photographs are important to people, they are tangible links to the past. So at the beginning of March, 2012, I trekked out to the Bridesburg section of Philadelphia near the Tioga Marine Terminal on the Delaware River.

To be honest, my first visit to the water’s edge was to gawk at the piles of tombstones like they were some sideshow attraction. Many people have. I even received one email from people who had “reached it via jetski rather than by land” - an adventure outing.  For a good idea of what you must go through to reach this remote and squalid area of riverfront, check out this YouTube video: The Local Frontier: The Lost Cemetery. I’m sure you’ll agree with the narrator, that “Death remains the final frontier.”

So armed with some cameras, a weapon, and my friend Bob, I parked outside the gate labeled “Private Property” and cut into the woods through a break in the fence. It’s about a fifteen minute walk through the thicket along the muddy Frankford Creek, opposite the abandoned PECO power plant.  The homeless have set up an encampment here. About six tarp-tents lay in our path, with a few people sitting in front of them. “What do you want?” asked one of them as we walked through their midst. “Just passing through,” was Bob’s reply, and to me, it seemed as though we would indeed be passing through a number of peoples’ lives.

It’s a chancy undertaking, this short journey to the water. You never know what, or who, you may run into. But as author Neil Gaiman says in his novel, The Graveyard Book, "If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained. When you get to the Delaware River, you must negotiate your way down the twelve-foot embankment, which is literally a jumble of granite monuments sticking out of the ground. You throw yourself against the big tree whose roots have grown around Dr. Charles Ayer’s headstone. You step on the bluish granite Lunney family grave marker as you maneuver yourself down to the water’s edge.

Monuments in foreground

It’s low tide, so you can see more of the Witham monument that is typically underwater. As you walk along the shore, you can easily lose your footing on pieces of wet marble monuments, bricks, iron fencing, and glass. Climbing around the five-hundred pound granite monument chunks, you catch glimpses of names on stones sticking out of the mire. Bob called it “beachcombing in Hell” as he picked up fragments of tombstones and bits of old funerary ceramic.

I spent about two hours photographing the faces of as many whole tombstones and monuments as I could find. The list below consists of 25 names that appear on 17 separate stones:

Ayers, Charles A. , M.D. (1851 – 1913)

Classey, Robert (Died Jan. 16, 1855) and Jane Classey (Died Dec. 12, 1888)(“Father and Mother”); James W. Classey (Died Aug. 5, 1891) (“Son of the Above, Brother”)

Cousley, Andrew (Born April 15, 1861 – Died Dec. 28, 1895) “Husband” and Cousley, Margaret (1856 – 1934) “Wife”

Eppelscheimer, Amanda, Died 1918 and Eppelscheimer, (Name obscured) Died 1924
Green, Bartholomew (1853 – 1906)
Heilman, William Henry (1846 – 1909) (“Late Captain 15th U.S. Infantry, Born Philadelphia, Pennsylvania”)
Heilman, Magdalena (1818 – 1906)
Irons, Mary H. (1823 – 1917) (“Wife of Capt. Babel H. Irons”)
Leeman, Adelia Harriet (1854 - 1901)
Leeman, Mary Ann (1829 - 1894)
Lunney, James, “Died 1883, Aged 67 Years” (1816 – 1883) and Mary, “Wife of James Lunney, Died 1892”

Mortimoore, Charles (July 17, 1817 – May 2, 1873) and Catharine (Feb. 9, 1818 – Jan. 11, 1889); Phoebe  “Born Dec. 26, 1789, Died Jan. 19, 1861.”

Platt, Mary Leeman (1857 – 1893) and Charles C. (1853 – 1929)
Sagee, Mary F. (1853 - 1931) (“Daughter of Francis and Anne J. Sagee” )
Stark, James, “Departed This Life March 9, 1890, Aged 42 Years” (1848 - 1890)
Witham, (Name obscured) (1840 – 1909)
Wright, Harrison G. “Husband, Died May 3, 1881, Aged 36 Years, Rest in Peace” (1845 - 1881)

Alas, I found none of the names that descendants had asked me to look for. The odds, of course, were not in my favor – 25 names out of the original 28,000 people buried at Monument is a drop in the bucket. But hey, these 25 names may be beneficial to someone someday, since I’ve just added them to the list of people in the Monument Cemetery section of the “Find A Grave” site (see link at end of article), which now totals  772 entries. Doing so also gave me an appreciation for the tremendous amount of work other people have exerted inputting all this data.

Author on Tombstones

Low tide was at noon that day, and a couple hours later, Bob was surprised to see the tide obviously coming in. And when I say “tide,” I mean the filthy, oil-slicked sluice of this River Styx.  He'd thought I was joking when I told him that we needed to be here at noon. Rivulets of dark water snaked in over the twenty feet of muck that temporarily separated land from sea.  It was like watching time leak through from the past. Soon the broken bottles, rusting bits of metal, and low-lying headstones would be covered. All these people have had their lives - these people whose names appear in chiseled stone. The names would be obscured until the next low tide, but because of current public interest in what happened to Monument Cemetery, their memory lives on in ways they never could have expected.

References and Further Reading:

Ed Snyder's blogs on Monument Cemetery:
The Watery Remains of Monument Cemetery [April  2011]
How Monument Cemetery was Destroyed [May 2011]

The Local Frontier: The Lost Cemetery (YouTube video)

Find A Grave website:  Listings for burials at Monument Cemetery, Philadelphia, PA

The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman