Conceived as a burial ground to rival Laurel Hill, Monument Cemetery was established in 1837. Hoping to draw an upper class clientele, its owner commissioned John Sartain—engraver and publisher of Edgar Allan Poe’s final poems—to design a 70-foot obelisk for the cemetery. While the monument attracted many customers, the cemetery lost more than half its acreage between 1872 and 1903 to municipal road expansion. In 1956, the remainder was appropriated by Temple University and transformed into a parking lot and track. According to newspaper accounts, only a small percentage of the cemetery’s 28,000 bodies were claimed by survivors. The rest of the bodies, it was said, were transferred to Lawnview Cemetery, and their gravestones used as riprap for the Betsy Ross Bridge. After an investigation into the history of the Monument Cemetery, I will attempt to determine what actually happened to the bodies and gravestones.
About the presenterPatricia M. Radecki
Patricia Radecki is Professor of English at Nassau College, SUNY, where she teaches composition, applied linguistics, and folklore—as well as helps coordinate ESL curriculum. In addition to the topic of death in American culture, her research interests include Old Regular Baptist hymnody and the Bible as literature.