Founded in 1743, the APS was an extension of Franklin’s intellectual club the Junto and an answer to London’s Royal Society. Marking a departure from British science, the founding document of the APS asserted that because the American colonies had matured, intellectuals could employ insights from their North American experience to promote human knowledge. Franklin and Bartram designated Philadelphia as the most logical headquarters because of its location, its easy access by sea, and the vibrant bookish culture fostered by the Library Company of Philadelphia, the lending library Franklin founded in 1731. Philadelphia also had the benefit of Bartram’s unparalleled botanical knowledge, as he collected and identified species of plants found only in North America.

Franklin and Bartram organized the APS to promote advancement in all fields of science. They proposed that there should be no fewer than seven members: a physician, botanist, mathematician, chemist, mechanic, geographer, and natural philosopher, in addition to a president, treasurer, and secretary. Members would meet once a month to conduct experiments in brewing, navigation, and agriculture among other subjects. Yearly membership dues (a Spanish piece of eight) funded the cost of experiments and the publication of the society’s findings, both for distribution among society members and abroad.

The APS quickly became much more collaborative than independent as it became an important international link in the exchange of scientific information. Members such as Bartram maintained ties with their British counterparts and sent specimens overseas, even during the Revolutionary War. From its earliest days, the APS made scientific inquiry a matter of international diplomacy as it elected members from around the world. The first international member of the society, elected in 1768, was the French naturalist and cosmologist Georges-Louis Leclerc (1707-88), followed a year later by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707-78). As its first female member, inducted in 1789, the APS chose the president of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, Princess Yekaterina Dashkova (1743-1810).

Building a Reputation

In 1769, a merger with another scholarly society in Philadelphia, the American Society for Promoting Useful Knowledge, gave the APS new vigor and initiated a series of scientific activities that solidified its mission. A crucial first step in establishing the APS as a reputable scientific authority occurred in the same year when David Rittenhouse (1732-96) observed by telescope the transit of Venus. His findings, with other observations around the globe, helped to determine the distance of Earth from the sun. Rittenhouse’s results were published in the APS’s Transactions of 1771 and distributed by Franklin across Europe, putting Rittenhouse’s findings on par with those of the Royal Society in London. In 1770, gifts from Thomas Penn (1702-75), members, and from scientific societies in Dublin and London established the APS Library.

In 1783, the APS sought to further secure its future by voting to build a headquarters, a task completed in 1789. Through a combination of members’ donations and a loan from Franklin, Philosophical Hall was constructed on Fifth Street adjacent to the Pennsylvania State House (later Independence Hall) under the direction of Samuel Vaughan (1720-1802), a friend of Franklin. Vaughan’s sense of style was also responsible at the time for gardens around Philadelphia, including that of the State House, and he designed the garden of another member of the APS: George Washington (1732-99) at Mount Vernon. With its new building, the APS also became a resource for public access to the sciences. Member Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) housed his Philadelphia Museum at the APS from 1794 to 1811, and the University of Pennsylvania also used its space for five years beginning in 1789.

During and following the 1790s, when Philadelphia served as capital of the United States, the APS played a significant role in scientific activities and innovations of the early nation. As U.S. president, APS member Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) sent Meriwether Lewis (1774-1809) and William Clark (1770-1838) to Philadelphia to study with other APS members, including Dr. Benjamin Rush (1746-1813), to prepare for their cross-country expedition in 1804. The APS helped to sponsor the mission, and in return the explorers contributed a huge bank of new scientific knowledge on botany, zoology, geography, and ethnology from their travels. Just as their founder Franklin was a leading statesman as well as a scientist, and especially after the success of the Lewis and Clark expedition, APS members tied their research to the service of the state and the expansion of American power. For instance, Commander Matthew Fountaine Maury (1806-73), the “Pathfinder of the Seas,” played a key role in charting the geography of the sea to support an expanding American Navy. In 1862, however, Maury was expelled from the APS for joining the Confederate Navy.

The impact of the APS extended as its members of the APS consulted on the founding of other American scientific and cultural institutions, including the National Academy of Sciences, the Franklin Institute, and the Smithsonian Institution. Ophthalmologist Isaac Hays (1796-1879), a leading member of the APS who advanced a theory of natural selection before Darwin published it in The Origin of Species (1859), was among the founders of the American Medical Association in 1847. APS membership in the nineteenth century included such prominent scientists as Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), Charles Darwin (1809-82), the Swiss-born Louis Agassiz (1807-73) and his wife American-born Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz (1822-1907), Louis Pasteur (1822-95), and Thomas Edison (1847-1931). The scope of the APS also expanded to an additional field of scholarship in 1884 when, inspired by the creation of the American Historical Association, the society began to elect leading historians into its ranks and created a Committee on Historical Manuscripts to promote access to its own rich history.

Isaac Minis Mays, Secretary and Librarian

The work of producing manuscript catalogues and calendars of historical documents, as well as editing the Proceedings and Transactions of the APS was taken up by Hays’s son, Isaac Minis Hays (1848-1925), who served as secretary and librarian from 1897 to 1922. An energetic leader, Hays ushered the society into the twentieth century. He improved the quality of the APS library, expanded access to the library for researchers and the public, accomplished a fifteen-year project to bind and catalog the papers of Benjamin Franklin, and created the Franklin Medal to recognize excellence in both science and public service.

The APS continued its transition to a multidisciplinary scholarly organization under the leadership of biologist Edwin Grant Conklin (1863-1952), who served in a variety of APS offices leading to two terms as president in 1942-45 and 1948-52. In addition to members such as Margaret Mead (1901-78) and Albert Einstein (1879-1955), in the twentieth century the society expanded its membership from the humanities: poet Robert Frost (1874-1963), philosopher Isaiah Berlin (1909-97), poet Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), and historian Natalie Zemon Davis (b. 1928). By the early twentieth century, in a departure from the society’s early history of collaboration with the United States military and government, members included scholars whose research questioned institutional power over the individual and reflected on access to justice. They included a philosopher of ethics and human rights, Martha Nussbaum (b. 1947), queer theorists Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950-2009) and Judith Butler (b. 1956), and post-colonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (b. 1942).

These APS members and many others extended and elevated Philadelphia’s vibrancy, which initially made the city fit to host the society, to a truly international stage. In the second half of the twentieth century, the society also increased its physical presence in its home city. In 1959, across Fifth Street from Philosophical Hall, the APS opened Library Hall, a reproduction of an eighteenth-century structure that originally housed the Library Company of Philadelphia. In 1984 and 2000, the APS campus expanded to include two adjacent former bank buildings on Chestnut Street. Through its rich library and manuscript collection, research grants, and such prestigious prizes as the Magellanic Premium in navigation and astronomy, established in 1786, and the Barzun Prize in history the American Philosophical Society continued its mission of promoting useful knowledge. As affirmed by a mission statement adopted in 2008, the society’s activities sought to “reflect the founder’s spirit of inquiry, provide a forum for the free exchange of ideas, and convey the conviction of its members that intellectual inquiry and critical thought are inherently in the public interest.”

Brooke Sylvia Palmieri is a Philadelphia native living in London, working toward a Ph.D. at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at University College London. Her dissertation details the reading, writing, and publication habits of Quakers at the end of the seventeenth century and how they circulated their ideas from London to the British colonies in the West Indies and North America. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Arboretums have much in common with botanical gardens, but are defined by their emphasis on woody plants, including trees, shrubs, and vines. Both botanic gardens and arboretums, however, are distinguished by an educational or scientific purpose along with aesthetic and recreational functions.

A complex network of Quaker botanists and dendrologists (those who study wooded plants) were at the heart of early arboretums in the Philadelphia area. In 1773, Humphry Marshall (1722-1801) established the first arboretum in the United States on his Marshallton, Pennsylvania, estate. A Quaker stonemason by trade, he was cousin to fellow Quaker John Bartram (1699-1777), founder of the first botanical garden in America. While Marshall’s arboretum showcased both native and European plants, his focus was on North American flora. In 1785, Marshall published Arbustrum  Americanum, the first treatise on woody plants published in the United States. Some scholarship suggests this early and persistent Quaker affinity for native flora over transplanted exotics can be traced to religious beliefs about stewardship over God’s creation.

Quaker Arboretums, a Family Affair

A surprising number of these early Quaker arboretums were family affairs. In 1798, Quaker twins Joshua and Samuel Pierce began an arboretum known as Pierce Park. This arboretum was notable for how it epitomized early arboretums as scientific collections; the trees were laid out in straight rows by taxonomy. Humphry Marshall advised the brothers in their collecting. Some Pierce trees survived into the twentieth century at Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, through the intervention of Pierre S. du Pont, who purchased the property in 1906 to save it from timber companies. In 1825, two more Quaker brothers founded what would become the Tyler Arboretum: Jacob (b. 1814) and Minshall Painter (b. 1801). The two brothers, networking with Marshall, Bartram, and other Quaker dendrophiles, quickly gathered more than a thousand tree types. By the early twenty-first century the arboretum, the oldest extant arboretum on the East Coast, still held twenty original “Painter” trees, including the largest giant sequoia in Pennsylvania. In 1944, descendant Laura Tyler bequeathed Painter Arboretum to a board of directors and the property became the nonprofit Tyler Aboretum.

In the mid-nineteenth century, as the United States suffered anxiety over its cultural relationship with Europe, English garden designers became viewed as necessary to validate the aesthetic and scientific worth of an arboretum. No wonder, then, that the English gardener William Carvill was hired to design the (Quaker) Haverford College Arboretum in 1834. He incorporated sweeping vistas, while also expressing Quaker values of community and individuality within his English-style designs. The arboretum boasts a descendant of the American elm under which, by tradition, William Penn signed a treaty with the Native Americans. Likewise, the English-trained William Saunders (1822-1900) consulted on the master plans of Awbury Arboretum in the 1870s, before going on to design Gettysburg Cemetery and the Capitol grounds in Washington, D.C. Awbury also shared Quaker roots with Haverford’s arboretum; Quaker businessman Henry Cope, inspired by visiting the Woodlands estate in West Philadelphia, founded Awbury in 1852 in Germantown. After housing eight generations of Copes, Awbury became a formal public arboretum in 1916 and turned nonprofit in 1984.

Distinct from the Philadelphian lineage of Quaker botanists, another slightly later thread of arboriculture focused on international collections and global diversity. Closely following Humphry Marshall’s seminal publication on local fauna, William Hamilton (1749-1813) began planting trees at the Woodlands in 1786. Hamilton was an aristocratic Anglophile in his tastes and arboricultural practices. He introduced the Norway maple to North America, gave John Bartram a ginkgo sapling that became the oldest ginkgo on the continent, and voraciously collected globally diverse trees. He also shared a Quaker passion for North American plants, successfully petitioning for seeds from the Lewis and Clark expedition, although he displayed them in English naturalistic-style landscapes, with sweeping vistas punctuated by clusters of trees. In 1840, the Woodlands became a public cemetery to preserve his arboricultural legacy.

This non-Quaker strain of international dendrology was revived and brought to prominence in the 1876 Centennial Arboretum, still standing in Fairmount Park in the early twenty-first century. The Centennial Arboretum picked up where the international collector William Hamilton left off, showcasing trees from all over the globe, to much acclaim and imitation. Shofosu, the Japanese teahouse and garden at the Centennial Arboretum, influenced Western arboretum design and collections, arguably up to the addition of two Japanese gardens to Haverford College Arboretum in 1990 and 2004.

Barnes Foundation Arboretum

International collecting also became the focus of the Barnes Foundation Arboretum, initially developed by Captain Joseph Lapsley Wilson (1844-1928) beginning in 1880. Purchased by the Barnes Foundation in 1922, the arboretum boasts over 3,000 varieties of woody plants, including katsura trees, European beeches, Japanese raisin trees, and ginkgos. Also influenced by the Centennial Arboretum, in 1887 Quaker siblings John and Lydia Morris broke with the dominant Quaker precedent and began planting exotic trees. Their Compton estate grew in 1912 with the addition of “English Park,” made up almost exclusively of Chinese specimens, and a “Japanese Overlook” rock garden installed following the “Japanese Hill and Water Garden” addition of 1905. Known as Morris Arboretum since the University of Pennsylvania purchased it in 1932, the siblings’ estate became the official arboretum of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

More recent arboretums, informed by restoration ecology, have renewed emphases on native plants. The Jenkins Arboretum, founded in 1976 in Devon, took the southeastern Pennsylvania hardwood forest as its starting palette and specializes in eastern North American trees together with thousands of azaleas and rhododendrons. Similarly, the Lewis W. Barton Arboretum and Nature Preserve at Medford Leas, founded in 1981 in Medford, New Jersey, features New Jersey flood plain natives as well as global specimens. Tellingly, Medford Leas is a Quaker senior living community and receives guidance from the Quaker-founded Morris Arboretum. The Quaker strain of native gardening never died; even at the height of the exoticism craze in 1929, the Scott Arboretum of the Quaker Swarthmore College was designed to emphasize Eastern Pennsylvanian climate and ecology.

The roots of Greater Philadelphia’s arboretums run deep. In the region, arboretums display the influence of Quaker reverence toward nature, late nineteenth-century Anglophilia, Centennial celebrations of international collections, and an ever-growing focus on public education.

Anastasia Day is a Ph.D.-track fellow in the Hagley Program in the History of Industrialization at the University of Delaware. Her research interests include gender, consumption, technology, and environmental history. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Rural or small-town art colonies arose in large part because of the increasing availability of old farmhouses and disused industrial properties. One such example was New Hope, a mill town on the Delaware River in Bucks County, north of Philadelphia, which became an important incubator of impressionist painting in Pennsylvania. The colony’s genesis is generally traced to the painter William Langson Lathrop (1859–1938), who in 1898 took up residence on the property of the abandoned Phillips’ Mill, owned by his childhood friend George Morley Marshall (1858–1935). Judging it a beautiful, accommodating home, Lathrop purchased part of the mill site from Marshall the following year and moved his family there from Ohio. Around the same time that Lathrop was discovering the area, painter Edward Willis Redfield (1869–1965) took on ownership of a family property just north of New Hope and likewise came there to work.

With the two artists becoming increasingly visible on a national level, numerous other professional artists moved to Bucks County throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, aided by the magnetic, community-oriented personality of William’s wife, Annie Lathrop (née Burt, 1865–1935), and the 1907 arrival of the prominent painter and educator Daniel Garber (1880–1958). Notable artists including Morgan Colt (1876–1926), M. Elizabeth Price (1877–1965), Charles Rosen (1878–1950), George Sotter (1879–1953), Robert Spencer (1879–1931), Rae Sloan Bredin (1880–1933), and John  F. Folinsbee (1892–1972) all contributed to the distinctive artistic culture of New Hope and the well-regarded Pennsylvania Impressionism school. The colony drew attention for its residents’ successes at exhibitions in Philadelphia, New York, and as far afield as the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915.

Graphic Artists and Craftspeople Gather

Although painters dominated the New Hope colony, graphic artists were also forming communities around Greater Philadelphia. Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, southwest of Philadelphia in the Brandywine River Valley, is perhaps most famous as the home of the Wyeth family of artists, but it was host to a colony associated with the “Brandywine School” of illustrators, centered on the influential artist and educator Howard Pyle (1853–1911). Dissatisfied with Philadelphia’s institutions of higher education, in 1898 Pyle began teaching students during the summers at Turner’s Mill in Chadds Ford. Beginning in 1900 he held more formal, extremely popular classes at his home and studio in Wilmington, Delaware, drawing another community of illustrators to that city. His strong presence continued to be felt even after his death among the artists living, working, and teaching upriver in Chadds Ford, carrying on the Brandywine School style as well as Pyle’s legacy as an educator and advocate for the illustration profession.

From the late nineteenth century, the Philadelphia area was also home to colonies associated with the Arts and Crafts movement. Unlike the New Hope artists, who placed particular emphasis on the rural landscape as a means of fostering an artist’s triumphant individuality, Arts and Crafts advocates saw the agrarian character and vernacular architecture of the area around Philadelphia as important components of their romantic, community-driven notion of life as art. Frequently active in socialist politics, they stressed communal spirit, honest labor, and the value of handicrafts such as ceramics, metalwork, and furniture-building, and their utopian colonies were designed to foster a holistic sense of artistic activity.

The best known of these, Rose Valley, was, like New Hope, built in and around an abandoned mill. Founded near Moylan, Pennsylvania, in 1901 by Philadelphia architect William Lightfoot Price (1861–1916), Rose Valley and its Delaware counterpart Arden—founded outside Wilmington in 1900 by Price and sculptor Frank Stephens (1859–1935)—included workshops for furniture, metalwork, ceramics, and bookmaking, as well as communal guildhalls and a number of cottages and larger houses for artists and their families. Selling work through periodical advertisements and shops in Philadelphia proper, and, in the case of the Rose Valley Association, publishing The Artsman journal from its city press, these communities and their residents made important contributions to the dissemination of Arts and Crafts ideals in the United States.

By 1910, the Rose Valley shops had been shuttered for financial reasons, but the community continued to be considered a desirable, “artistic” suburb. Arden and several imitator communities near Wilmington maintained their radical attempts at communal ownership, modeled after economist Henry George’s “single-tax” theories.

Remnants Survive

Although many art colonies eventually disbanded as coherent communities, the physical environments and traces of their organizational structures survived into the later twentieth century and beyond. For example, the Phillips’ Mill Community Association, established by New Hope–area artists in 1929, continues to exhibit art in the old mill building. Furthermore, these communities provided important precedent for the postwar studio craft movement, notably the Peters Valley colony, a community founded in a former farming village near Layton, New Jersey, in 1970 and later organized as a school of craft. Just as early twentieth-century artists tied their artistic practices to the bucolic settings and historic buildings surrounding Philadelphia, many artists and craftspeople of subsequent generations have continued to find inspiration in this landscape. The communities of New Hope, Chadds Ford, Rose Valley, and Arden, along with educational institutions like the James A. Michener Art Museum and the Brandywine River Museum of Art, carry on the artistic legacy of Greater Philadelphia and the stewardship of its important history.

Colin Fanning is Curatorial Fellow in the Department of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He holds an M.A. in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture from the Bard Graduate Center. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Originally part of a thousand-acre tract of land in Kingsessing Township first settled by the Swedish in the mid-seventeenth century, Bartram’s Garden began in 1728 when John Bartram purchased a 102-acre tract for his family farm. Bartram was a self-taught naturalist who sought out the company of other like-minded individuals, both at home and abroad. Bartram’s friendships with Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) and James Logan (1674–1751) led to his introduction to London and Royal Society Fellow Peter Collinson (1694–1768), with whom he began a correspondence in 1731. Bartram and Collinson soon began to exchange plants along with botanical notes on experiments and other discoveries. By 1750, Bartram was sending regular shipments of North American seeds to a wide variety of European collectors, including Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753) and Carl Linnaeus (1707–78), and advertising his seeds for sale in London periodicals. Bartram expanded his garden to keep up with his growing plant trade business and performed experiments on the lychnis dioica that corroborated Logan’s experiments on Indian corn. As Bartram’s fame grew, so did his garden. He traveled farther and farther afield to collect new plants and seeds, and he recreated their environments at home by constructing ponds and swamps for aquatic plants, areas of forest and grassland, as well as sections for nursery seeds and greenhouses for more tropical specimens. By the turn of the century, Bartram’s Garden boasted the most varied collection of North American plants in the world.

When John Bartram died in 1777, his sons, John Bartram Jr. (1743–1812) and William Bartram (1739–1823), continued the business. They expanded the grounds as well as the garden’s reputation in national and international circles through their commercial and educational activities. William Bartram’s growing renown as a botanical illustrator and plant collector attracted botanical enthusiasts from near and far who came to exchange both plants and knowledge. French botanist André Michaux (1746–1802) visited Bartram’s Garden during his North American sojourn, as did botanists from closer to home, such as Benjamin Smith Barton (1766–1815), Thomas Say (1787–1834), Thomas Nuttall (1786–1859), and Frederick Pursh (1774–1820).

Both George Washington (1732–99) and Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) visited and purchased plants from Bartram’s Garden for their own estates in Virginia, and near neighbor William Hamilton (1745–1813) exchanged many plants with the Bartrams, even sending William Bartram one of the three ginkgo trees he introduced to America from England in 1785. Bartram’s Garden’s reputation as a destination grew, especially among the delegates to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. In 1784, the congress ended a session early to allow several delegates to indulge their curiosity about Bartram’s Garden and venture across the Schuylkill River for an afternoon visit with the family in their garden.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Bartram’s Garden expanded again under the third generation of Bartrams. Ann Bartram Carr (1779–1858) and her husband, Colonel Robert Carr (1778–1866), took over the business from Ann’s father, John Bartram Jr., and expanded both the commercial business and the garden itself. At its largest, Bartram’s Garden comprised twelve acres of gardens and ten greenhouses filled with over fourteen hundred native plant species and as many as one thousand varieties of more far-flung exotics. In 1844 and 1845, the Carrs added another dimension to Bartram’s Garden when they opened the grounds as a summer pleasure garden, selling ice cream and other refreshments to visitors and offering steamboat trips three days a week from the Delaware River wharves.

By midcentury, however, increasing financial difficulties forced the Carrs to sell Bartram’s Garden. Railroad magnate and industrialist Andrew Eastwick (1811–79) purchased the house and grounds in 1850. Eastwick planned to construct a villa near the original Bartram house. Recognizing the historic significance and aesthetic appeal of the site, he preserved the original house and grounds as part of his private estate and even lived in the Bartram house during construction of his villa, “Bartram Hall.”

After Eastwick’s death, Bartram’s Garden fell into neglect until Eastwick’s former gardener, Thomas Meehan (1826–1901), aided by Boston botanist and head of the Arnold Arboretum Charles S. Sargent (1841–1927), conceived a plan to purchase the acres of Bartram’s Garden for the city as part of Meehan’s campaign to create parks in Philadelphia. After a prolonged campaign by Meehan, who was a member of Philadelphia’s Common Council, and others, in 1888 the city added a portion of the original Bartram’s Garden to the city plan and marked it for preservation. Bartram’s Garden finally came under the control of the City of Philadelphia in 1891.

Two years later, in 1893, descendants of John Bartram organized the John Bartram Association and reasserted their influence over the direction of the garden. With the aid of University of Pennsylvania botany professor and director of the university’s botanic garden John Muirhead Macfarlane (1855–1943), the association established a library and archives relating to the Bartram family and their botanic activities at Bartram’s Garden. In 1923, the Fairmount Park Commission assumed control of the property and worked to preserve and restore the gardens and buildings while continuing to operate the garden as a city park.

In October 1960, the secretary of the Interior designated Bartram’s Garden a National Historic Landmark in acknowledgement of the importance of the garden to John Bartram’s career as a botanist and to the history of American botany. Through restoration and interpretation of the site, The John Bartram Association continued to preserve the historical and contemporary gardens for visitors into the twenty-first century, including the original ginkgo tree (1785), a yellowwood tree sent by Michaux (1784), the Franklinia alatamaha from which all current examples descend, and the Bartram oak. Since the third decade of the eighteenth century, Bartram’s Garden served as a repository of North American plants of national and international importance, bringing together the commercial, public, and educational aspects of Philadelphia’s botanical legacy.

Sarah Chesney is a historical archaeologist who earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from the College of William and Mary in 2014. She has worked on several landscape archaeology projects in Philadelphia, exploring the intersection of archaeology, landscape, and early modern science. Her publications include “The Root of the Matter: Searching for William Hamilton’s Greenhouse at The Woodlands Estate, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,” in Historical Archaeology of the Delaware Valley, 1600–1850, edited by Richard F. Veit and David G. Orr (University of Tennessee Press, 2014). (Author information current at time of publication.)

Philadelphia’s Boathouse Row is a National Historic Landmark that reflects the city’s fusion of sport, culture, and history. The boathouses, built in the second half of the nineteenth-century, line the eastern bank of the Schuylkill River just north of the Fairmount Waterworks. Lit at night with thousands of glowing bulbs, they form a welcoming beacon to travelers entering Philadelphia along the Schuylkill River on Interstate 76.

The circumstances that led to the distinctive row of boathouses on the Schuylkill date to the early nineteenth century when Philadelphia, a commercial and cultural center of the early American Republic, became one of most historically rich and lively rowing cities in the United States. In 1821, the construction of the Fairmount Waterworks’ dam created favorable conditions for rowing on the Schuylkill and set an aesthetic that helped determine the style of the earliest boathouses. Temporary boathouse structures probably existed as the popularity of rowing grew, but construction of more permanent boathouses began in the 1850s under the auspices of the Schuylkill Navy of Philadelphia and later with increasing involvement from the Fairmount Park Commission (formed in 1867). The Schuylkill Navy, founded in 1858, served as a membership organization for the city’s amateur rowing clubs and oversaw activity on the river. Surviving into the twenty-first century, it became one of the nation’s oldest amateur sports associations.

The first small boathouse built by the Undine Barge Club was little more than a shack, but the original structure was renovated in the 1880s by the prominent architectural firm of Furness & Evans. The boathouse architecture of from the 1870s onward reflected the impulse of the Fairmount Park Commission to impose order on the riverfront landscape by requiring stone construction. When additional boathouses were built in the 1890s and early twentieth century, architectural design aesthetics had changed, and architects incorporated brick and other materials in their designs. However, each structure still reflected the utilitarian goals of protecting and storing rowing shells as well as providing a gathering place for participants.

Boating as Art

The Schuylkill’s boating history was captured on canvas by the well-known late-nineteenth-century American painter Thomas Eakins (1844-1916). A rower himself, Eakins found inspiration in the bodies of oarsmen as they glided along the river near the boathouses. Unfortunately, rowing’s popularity declined in the first half of the twentieth century as membership in rowing clubs dropped during the two world wars and the Great Depression; by the second half of the twentieth century many of the boathouses fell into disrepair. To celebrate the Bicentennial in 1976 and revive the boathouses, lights were hung outlining the frames of each structure, and after several repairs, in 2005 the lights were replaced with LEDs.

A recent addition, Lloyd Hall, built in 1999, is the only public structure among the boathouses. After demolition of the former public boathouse, Plaisted Hall, the new construction created controversy because its many amenities did not include room for storing or launching rowing shells. In 2002, St. Joseph’s University and St. Joseph’s Prep built a boathouse upriver, near the Strawberry Mansion bridge, but this modern structure along with the now condemned East Park Canoe House, the former home to Temple University’s team, are not traditionally considered part of Boathouse Row. Temple University also proposed construction of a new, multimillion-dollar boathouse but withdrew its proposal in 2013 because an Open Lands Protection ordinance enacted in 2011 required such projects to be offset by the purchase or transfer of comparable park land.

Despite these controversies, the twenty-first-century Boathouse Row serves as a landmark and gathering place for athletes from around the country, from novices to Olympic-caliber rowers.  Many of the associations that built the first boathouses survive and continue to support thriving club programs while also serving as venues for high school and collegiate rowers. One of the most celebrated races every spring, the Dad Vail Regatta, welcomes oarsmen and women from collegiate programs and features a novice race for corporate sponsors, a fund-raising tool that fuses Philadelphia’s rich history of rowing with its future.

Brenna O’Rourke Holland earned her Ph.D. in history at Temple University.  Her dissertation, “Free Market Family: Gender, Capitalism, and the Life of Stephen Girard,” is a cultural biography of Philadelphia merchant-turned-banker Stephen Girard that interrogates the transition to capitalism in the early American Republic. As an undergraduate at Colgate University, she was a coxswain for the Men’s Varsity Rowing team, and she enjoys cheering on her alma mater at races along the Schuylkill. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Philadelphia’s selection in 1790 as the temporary national capital followed the drafting of the new federal Constitution, which authorized Congress to enact legislation for the establishment of a permanent seat of government. After departing Philadelphia in 1783, Congress convened in cities as varied Princeton, New Jersey; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; and Baltimore, Maryland, before settling in New York in 1785. As a candidate for the permanent capital, Philadelphia’s size, wealth, and central location weighed in its favor, yet congressmen from both New England and the Southern states considered

Philadelphia too urban, as well as hot and prone to outbreaks of disease. By and large, sectional conflicts and whether or not the capital should be a commercial city animated the debate and guided Congress’ efforts to find a location “consistent with convenience to the navigation of the Atlantic Ocean, and having due regard to the particular situation of the Western Country.”

Western Contenders

Indeed, the perceived need to secure the ever-expanding western frontier against foreign foes and indigenous independence movements keenly influenced the location of the permanent federal capital. Whereas in 1783 all proposed sites hugged tidewater or lay slightly inland, by 1787 most contenders were farther west, including Lancaster; Carlisle, Pennsylvania; and Fredericksburg, Virginia, as well as a tract of land on the Potomac jointly offered by Maryland and Virginia. Western expansion similarly informed the contest between North and South to secure the capital, as each region adopted a different geographic calculus to advance its case. While Northern advocates focused on current population centers, placing the city east of Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River, Southern promoters emphasized future growth and the implicit and unstated elevation of the agrarian, slave-based economy from minority to majority status. Notably, both sides assumed a natural alliance between Southern and Western political interests, a crucial consideration given the capital’s potential to enhance the power and leverage of the region in which it was located.

By 1790, two dozen sites, located on or near the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers, the Susquehanna, the Chesapeake, and the Potomac, had been proposed publicly as candidates for the capital city. The Philadelphia region figured prominently in several proposals, which alternately incorporated portions of Southwark, Northern Liberties, Byberry, and Germantown. Several prominent Philadelphians, including Tench Coxe (1755-1824), Robert Morris (1734-1806), and Dr. Benjamin Rush (1746-1813), lobbied on the city’s behalf, with Morris going so far as to offer his mansion on High Street as the presidential residence. For their part, Philadelphia’s citizens flooded Congress with petitions and the City Council pledged money for both remodeled federal housing and public buildings, including a new city hall and a courthouse built on the same square as the existing Pennsylvania State House.

Ultimately, the issue of assumption, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton’s (1757-1804) plan for the federal government to assume the states’ war debts, determined the capital’s permanent location. Facing resistance from states like Virginia that had already resolved their debts, Hamilton wedded the questions of assumption and the federal capital together in hopes of striking a political bargain that advanced his cause. While Robert Morris negotiated with Hamilton to establish the capital in Germantown or at the Falls of the Delaware, a deal never came to fruition. Instead, wary of Virginia’s opposition to the assumption plan, Hamilton struck a deal with Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) that provided enough Northern votes for a federal capital on the Potomac. In exchange for the Pennsylvania delegation’s support, Coxe and Morris negotiated a plan to relocate the capital from New York to Philadelphia for ten years. The final compromise, the Residence Act of 1790, passed both houses of Congress in July 1790.

Skepticism Over a Capital on the Potomac

As New Yorkers decried the loss of the capital, Philadelphians embraced the city’s status as the temporary capital and hoped that, once the federal government settled in Philadelphia, inertia would keep it there permanently. While the Potomac seemed best situated to strengthen and preserve the connection between the North, South, and West, many were skeptical that a new capital constructed out of so-called “wilderness” was preferable to the nation’s largest city. As one Baltimore newspaper argued, the “idea of fixing their Residence in the Woods, can only be agreeable to a Congress of hermits.” A Connecticut humorist similarly proposed a constitutional amendment banning Congress from establishing itself “in an Indian wigwam …[or] in the howling wilderness.” Nonetheless, under the leadership of President George Washington (1732-99), plans for a Potomac capital continued apace as Congress reconvened in Philadelphia.

In December 1790, Philadelphia stretched approximately nine blocks north and south along the Delaware River. Per the first federal census, the population of the city and its adjacent districts was 42,520 inhabitants. While the United States Supreme Court occupied City Hall, the House of Representatives and Senate convened in what became known as Congress Hall, a Philadelphia County courthouse recently erected just west of the State House. Over the ensuing decade, these walls bore witness to several key events in the nation’s formative period, including the ratification of the Bill of Rights and Jay’s Treaty, President John Adams’ inauguration, and the passage of both the federal Fugitive Slave Act and the Alien and Sedition Acts. Congress also passed legislation to establish the First Bank of the United States, the U.S. Mint, and the federal tariff, thereby enacting Secretary Hamilton’s plan to create the nation’s first financial center and spur maritime commerce and commercial growth.

As the federal capital, Philadelphia boasted a diverse population that included foreign dignitaries, representatives of many Indian peoples, and a significant free Black community, all of whom animated its political culture and enhanced the city’s reputation as the most cosmopolitan city in the new republic. The concentration of government activity around Sixth and Chestnut Streets notably afforded constituents easy, daily access to their representatives and increased Philadelphians’ political participation to levels unmatched over the next century. Between 1790 and 1800, Philadelphia’s elections were watched for signs of national political developments, most critically Federalists’ declining support and the rise of a two-party system. The growth of partisan politics was likewise evident in the city’s print culture, especially newspapers like the Aurora and Gazette of the United States that increasingly aligned with either the Federalist or Jeffersonian factions. As the federal government prepared to depart Philadelphia in 1800, change was on the horizon for both the nation and the city, whose loss of the federal capital arguably marked the end of its role as the preeminent American metropolis. Nonetheless, the legacy of Philadelphia’s tenure as the national capital endures in the national institutions that first took root in Philadelphia and whose physical presence provides a boon for historical tourism and a trademark of civic identity.

 Hillary S. Kativa received her B.A. in History and English from Dickinson College (2005) and her M.A. in History from Villanova University (2008). Her research interests include American political history and presidential campaigns, public history, and digital humanities. (Author information current at time of publication)

In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the majority of public libraries were subscription libraries, which required membership fees to gain library privileges. This led to only wealthier members of society having access to books. Carnegie, who had little formal education and could not afford the fee for a subscription library, gained access to books for self-study and developed a love for literature because a local philanthropist in Pittsburgh opened his library to young working men. Carnegie agreed with the prominent belief of the time period: that reading good books would lead to good behavior and that public libraries would contribute to progress and social order. This belief, his own learning through reading, and his conviction that no man should have excess wealth, led him to create a program through which communities could request funds for libraries. Eventually 1,689 of these libraries, referred to as Carnegie Libraries, were founded throughout the United States and other English-speaking countries.

The program began in 1886, when Carnegie donated funds for a library building and community center to Allegheny, near Pittsburgh. Towns and cities applying for a library grant were required to demonstrate the need for a library, provide a building site, and promise to provide ongoing support for books, upkeep, and staff with taxes equal to no less than 10 percent of the library grant. While some criticized Carnegie for not providing endowments or books to the libraries, this ensured that the community supported the library and fostered a sense of ownership and responsibility.

In 1903, the librarian of the Free Library of Philadelphia applied to Carnegie for funding to create thirty branch libraries with an estimated cost of $20,000 to $30,000 for each branch. The Free Library had opened in 1894, and by 1898 the library system had 160 employees, fourteen branches, and 250,000 volumes. However, none of the system’s libraries had a purpose-built library building, and many operated in poor conditions without enough space.

Carnegie agreed to provide $50,000 for each of the Free Library’s branches, more than requested, based on his experience funding branch libraries in Pittsburgh and New York City. In 1904, the City Council accepted Carnegie’s offer, but only twenty-five libraries were built, due to rising costs of building construction over the decades it took to erect the branches. Each branch was designed to be suitable to each neighborhood in outward appearance, and under the direction of Carnegie’s secretary James Bertram (1872-1934) the branch libraries in Philadelphia had a significant impact on the layout of other Carnegie library buildings. Many were T-shaped with an open plan, contained flexible spaces for public lectures or events, and had open stacks that allowed patrons to browse books, which was uncommon in the early twentieth century.

Although the Midwest received the largest portion of libraries funded by Carnegie, the program funded fifty-nine library buildings in Pennsylvania and thirty-six in New Jersey (Delaware is one of two states that received no funding). In Philadelphia and the surrounding region, many agreed with Carnegie’s belief that libraries would allow for self-improvement, but others complained about the struggle to find an appropriate building sites or the ongoing costs related to the libraries. Others complained about lack of specific genres, such as a nine-year-old girl from New Jersey who wanted more fairy tales.

Many of the libraries funded by Carnegie in the Philadelphia region continued to operate in the twenty-first century, including fifteen of the original Free Library of Philadelphia branch locations. Some — notably the Camden Free Public Library built in 1905 — deteriorated to ruin, while others found new uses. In Philadelphia, the Germantown branch became a senior citizens center, and the Manayunk building became a nursing home.

Carnegie Libraries greatly impacted the Philadelphia region by providing the much-needed funding for library buildings, which allowed for the creation of new library systems as well as the expansion of the Free Library of Philadelphia.

Cassie Brand is Curator of Rare Books at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research focuses on the history of the book as a physical and cultural object, collecting history, and library history. (Author information current at time of publication.)

A cathedral is the bishop’s church, where he presides, teaches, and conducts worship for the Christian community of his area of ecclesial jurisdiction. Basilicas, according to the 1989 Vatican document Domus Ecclesiae, “stand out as a center of active and pastoral liturgy.” They indicate a special bond of communion with the pope, his concern for the faithful of all nations, and the strengthening of ties between the local and the universal Church.

Philadelphia’s new cathedral acquired its site on Logan Square when Marc Anthony Frenaye (1783-1873), the diocese’s financier and a refugee from the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), purchased the plot from the Farmers’ Life and Trust Co. of New York. Frenaye also purchased the four-story house that originally stood on the site, which subsequently became the cathedral rectory. Philadelphia architect Napoleon LeBrun (1821-1901), whose major work included St. Patrick’s on Rittenhouse Square (1839) and later the Academy of Music (1857), executed initial designs for the Roman-Baroque style church modeled on Rome’s San Carlo al Corso. Scottish-born Philadelphia architect John Notman (1810-65), who later built St. Clement’s (1856-59), contributed its Italian Renaissance Palladian façade.

Cornerstone Laid in 1846

Construction on the imposing sandstone structure was slow, given the challenges of meeting the spiritual, pastoral, and social needs of Philadelphia’s expanding Catholic population and organizing the Philadelphia diocese. During the era of increasing Irish-Catholic immigration and diocesan expansion in the mid to late 1840s, Kenrick juggled lack of funds, debt, and initial opposition from priests and laypeople to the idea of building a new cathedral. Already suffering a shortage of priests and churches, they were concerned about maintaining their own parishes and the cost of rebuilding churches destroyed during the nativist riots that took place in Philadelphia in 1844. Leading up to 1845, some objected that Catholicism’s growth in Philadelphia did not yet warrant building a church exceeding any other church in the city in both cost and physical proportion. Some also considered the proposed site to be too far west from the city center and the bishop’s then-cathedral, St. John the Evangelist on South Thirteenth Street. Nonetheless, eight thousand people witnessed Kenrick lay the cornerstone on September 6, 1846. Laying the cornerstone for a new Catholic church is an elaborate ritual, in which the bishop explains its ecclesial and theological significance while also soliciting the faithful’s financial support. Catholics organized a system of block collections by parish to raise the requisite funds.

After Kenrick became Archbishop of Baltimore in 1851, construction of the church continued under Bishop John Neumann (1811-60) and Archbishop James Frederick Wood (1813-83). It proceeded through most of the Civil War, even while Philadelphia’s industrial importance in the conflict and continuing financial difficulty meant that church officials struggled to retain workers. The interior remained largely unembellished while details filled in slowly. Italian-born “artist of the United States Capitol,” Constantino Brumidi (1805-80), known for his mural The Apotheosis of George Washington (1865), executed five oil paintings for the ceiling dome in 1863: The Assumption of the Virgin into Heaven, and four of the evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were in place for the Cathedral’s dedication—and opening for services—on November 20, 1864. Philadelphian Edwin F. Durang (1829-1911) designed a marble high altar, placed in 1883-84 before the church’s consecration in 1890. By the mid-twentieth century, it boasted interior and exterior renovation work by Philadelphia’s Henry Dandurand Dagit (1865-1929), and the firms of Daprato (Chicago) and Eggers and Higgins (New York), among others.

During the building’s construction, the Friends of the Cathedral society saw its potential for evangelization in the surrounding neighborhood, which was becoming both Protestant and wealthy. The cathedral became the base of operations for several Catholic civic organizations, such as the Total Abstinence Society, the Ladies’ Society, and Cadet Societies for boys and girls. During the early twentieth century, construction of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway placed the Cathedral amid a developing museum district. The building merited placement on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971 on the basis of the architectural significance of the work by LeBrun, Notman, and Brumidi and the religious/philosophical significance of its roles as “the center of Catholic life of Philadelphia” and longtime church of St. John Neumann—the first canonized U.S. bishop, whose cause for canonization was underway at the time.

The cathedral has continued to play an active role in the lives of Philadelphia’s Catholics. In the summer of 1976, Philadelphia’s celebration of the American Revolution’s bicentennial coincided with the Forty-First International Eucharistic Congress (August 1-8) held in the city. Following the congress, at the request of then-archbishop John Cardinal Krol (1910-96), Pope Paul VI (1897-1978) designated the Cathedral of SS. Peter and Paul a basilica, solidifying its role as the meeting ground between the Philadelphia archdiocese and the universal Church that Bishop Kenrick had originally intended: during a papal visit in 1979, Pope John Paul II (1920-2005) prayed in the cathedral and celebrated Mass in Logan Circle; in 2015, Pope Francis (b. 1936) publicly celebrated Mass at the cathedral and on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway during the World Meeting of Families. The Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul has remained an architectural focal point for Philadelphia and a major site of worship, devotion, and Catholic identity.

Wendy Wong Schirmer, a historian of Early America and U.S. foreign relations, received her Ph.D. from Temple University. She is working on a book project that examines the relationship between print culture, neutrality in the Early Republic, and the politics of slavery. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Prior to Philadelphia’s inception in 1682, Swedish colonists settled along the Delaware River roughly from New Castle, Delaware, north to the future site of Penn’s Landing. At Fort Christina just east of Wilmington, Delaware, they erected a burial yard in 1642, believed to be the area’s first of European design. The first European church cemetery opened in 1646 on Tinicum Island southwest of the future site of Philadelphia International Airport; floodwaters from the Delaware River submerged the site within a decade. Determined to prevent future damage to their grave sites, the Swedes in 1677 erected the Gloria Dei (“Old Swedes”) Church at present-day Christian Street and Columbus Boulevard. The burial ground in its adjacent yard is Greater Philadelphia’s oldest surviving cemetery. In 1698, Wilmington’s Holy Trinity Church was erected next to the former Fort Christina burial ground. Prior to its closing, Holy Trinity’s cemetery contained 15,000 burials, including members of the prominent Bayard, Montgomery, and Du Pont families.

During the colonial and early national periods, one’s burial place denoted religious affiliation and class distinction. When Quaker families arrived in the 1670s and 1680s, they established plain, unadorned burial yards next to their meetinghouses. In towns such as Cape May Court House, Camden, Trenton, Salem, and Burlington, these emerged as South Jersey’s earliest formal cemeteries. When William Penn (1644-1718) and surveyor Thomas Holme (1624-1695) devised the Philadelphia grid system, their plan included four squares for public use, yet no officially designated cemeteries. Their omission stemmed from the belief that burial grounds were sectarian responsibilities.

Quaker Graves Were Simple

Penn’s Quaker faithful interred their dead behind the Arch Street Meetinghouse without official ceremony or elaborate markers. Conversely, Philadelphia’s Anglicans, who opened cemeteries at Christ Church (est. 1695, Second and Market Streets) and St. Peter’s Church (est. 1761, Third and Pine Streets), fashioned headstones and markers of considerable ornamentation. In 1719, Christ Church’s leaders purchased a tract at Fifth and Arch Streets (then the city’s outskirts) to accommodate more interments. Over time, Christ Church’s graveyard became the city’s most elite, containing the remains of Franklin, Francis Hopkinson, Benjamin Rush, and several prominent Philadelphians. Other Protestant sects, including Lutherans, Methodists, and Moravians, also established cemeteries next to their houses of worship. Wilmington’s first Methodist cemetery, located next to Old Asbury Church, opened in 1789, while the city’s Presbyterian Church contained a graveyard dating to the 1740s.

During the 1700s and early 1800s, increasing numbers of Jews, Catholics, and people of African descent arrived, bringing with them funeral rites and burial practices. Due to religious and/or racial differences, these groups established their own churches and cemeteries or, if lacking financial means or accessibility, were interred in one of the area’s potter’s fields. In 1740 after the death of his son, Philadelphia merchant Nathan Levy (1704-1753) petitioned proprietary governor Thomas Penn for a private burial site. With his request granted, Levy established Mikveh Israel, the city’s first Jewish cemetery, on Spruce Street between Eighth and Ninth Streets. Levy himself was interred there in 1753. In 1733, Philadelphia Catholics erected St. Joseph’s Church on Willings Alley between Third and Fourth Streets; until 1759, its burial yard was the only Catholic cemetery in the city. In New Jersey, Catholics established churches with adjacent burial grounds in Trenton and Camden between 1801 and 1814.

Due to growing class differences, racial intolerance, and the existence of human bondage, many Philadelphians were interred in the city’s public squares that also functioned as potter’s fields. Southeast Square (renamed Washington Square in 1825) served as a “Strangers Burial Ground” for Catholics, the indebted poor, prisoners, free and enslaved Black persons, soldiers from the Revolutionary War, and victims of the 1793 yellow fever epidemic. Northwest Square (later renamed Logan Square) was used as a potter’s field until the late 1830s. For several decades, Philadelphia’s cemeteries would not accept Black interments. In 1810, Mother Bethel AME Church, the nation’s oldest African American church, purchased a plot in present-day Queen Village as a private burial ground, which remained in use until 1864. In 1910, the Philadelphia Department of Recreation turned the dilapidated site into the Weccacoe Playground, and in 2014 hearings were held by the city over concerns about the playground being above a historic cemetery. Of the more than 150 cemeteries created in the region during the colonial period, fewer than twenty survive in the present day.

“Garden” Cemetery Concept Arrives

Following the American Revolution and Philadelphia’s tenure as the national capital (1790-1800), the “rural” or “garden” cemetery concept arrived from Europe. Modeled on Paris’ Père-Lachaise (est. 1804), which was designed to relieve the overcrowding of existing cemeteries, this new design essentially beautified death through picturesque landscapes and ostentatious monuments. As many Western metropolises weathered disease epidemics in the late 1700s and early 1800s, it also was thought that removing the dead beyond the city would prevent the spread of miasmas and plagues of malaria, yellow fever, or cholera. Mt. Auburn Cemetery (est. 1831) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was the United States’ first rural cemetery, incorporating Arcadian aesthetics and imposing statuary with notions of privacy and reflection.

Determined to bring such refinement to Philadelphia, in 1836 real estate investor and horticulturalist John Jay Smith (1798-1881) and his partners created Laurel Hill Cemetery. Inspired by Père-Lachaise and Mt. Auburn, Laurel Hill rested in a riverside setting on the city’s northwest edge, was devoid of religious affiliation, and provided the dead and their mourners with privacy and tranquility. Privately hired gardeners and landscape architects maintained the grounds while Smith insisted only lot-holders could ride carriages during weekday hours. Laurel Hill increasingly became a major attraction; more than 30,000 people visited in 1846, and by 1860 the annual total reached 140,000.

Philadelphia’s other premier rural cemetery, the Woodlands, originated in 1734 as a small burial ground and later was moved to Andrew Hamilton’s gardens on the west bank of the Schuylkill River. New Jersey and Delaware also experienced the rural cemetery trend. Trenton’s Riverview Cemetery and Camden’s Harleigh Cemetery opened in 1858 and 1885, respectively, with the former growing out of a Quaker burial yard from the 1730s. In 1872, the first half of Wilmington’s Riverview Cemetery was dedicated, with landscaping by architect Hermann J. Schwarzmann (1846-1891), who designed many of the buildings for Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exhibition. Smaller towns replicated the rural cemetery in miniature, including grandly arched entrances, mausoleums for the local gentry, and, starting in the 1860s, memorials to the Civil War.

Civil War’s Influence

The Civil War produced unprecedented numbers of casualties. During and after the conflict, the need arose to properly memorialize the dead and commemorate battlefield heroism. The result was the creation of national cemeteries, many of which expanded in later decades. These included Mt. Moriah in southwest Philadelphia, which began as a rural cemetery in 1855; Philadelphia National Cemetery, opened in 1862 in the city’s West Oak Lane neighborhood; Beverly National Cemetery in Burlington County, New Jersey, established in 1864; and Finns Point in Salem, New Jersey. While Finns Point was not dedicated until 1875, its first interments included captured Confederate soldiers from Gettysburg.

Following the Civil War, as the region urbanized and increased in population, factories, office buildings, and transit infrastructure obliterated many colonial and antebellum cemeteries. Those that survived often fell prey to neglect or vandalism. Moreover, the process of death became highly professionalized as families adopted cremation practices or hired funeral directors to prepare the deceased and conduct ceremonial rituals. In response, cemeteries increased in size in suburban and rural areas of Greater Philadelphia. Laurel Hill, confined by urban growth, expanded in 1869 to include West Laurel Hill Cemetery on the other side of the Schuylkill River. Wilmington’s Cathedral Cemetery (est. 1876) and Silverbrook Cemetery (est. 1898) appeared on the city’s southwest edge to serve the city’s growing Catholic and Jewish populations. Its Riverview Cemetery expanded in 1916 when the Wilmington Free Library acquired the Presbyterian Church’s grounds for a new building. In 1902, Eden Cemetery opened in Collingdale, Delaware County, becoming the area’s first Black cemetery outside the Philadelphia city limits.

After the turn of the twentieth century, memorial parks heralded a new age of cemetery design. With Los Angeles’ Forest Lawn Memorial Park (est. 1917) as inspiration, cemeteries such as Lakeview (est. 1924) in Cinnaminson, New Jersey,  anticipated the patterns of suburbanization that drastically transformed the region. After World War II and with increasing automobile use and suburban sprawl, grounds such as Memorial Park (est. 1954) in Woodbury, New Jersey; Wilmington’s All Saints (1958); and S.S. Peter and Paul (1958) in Springfield, Delaware County, Pennsylvania, mirrored the flight of families, commerce, and institutions from urban centers. Concurrently, many older cemeteries, including Mt. Moriah, Old Camden, and Greenwood/Knights of Pythias in the Frankford section of Philadelphia, suffered from abandonment and vandalism.

Cemeteries also were relocated or removed for urban development projects. In 1953, Temple University acquired the 114-year-old Monument Cemetery. Needing the fifteen-acre parcel for additional parking, Temple requested the site be condemned and, in 1954, more than 20,000 graves, many in wooden coffins, were reinterred in Fox Chase’s Lawnview Memorial Park. In the early 2000s, campaigns sought to save Mt. Moriah and Greenwood. While in 2005 Mt. Moriah was deemed endangered by the Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia, new ownership assumed responsibility for Greenwood and in 2012 spent more than $1 million removing garbage and discarded appliances from the grounds.

Despite periods of geographic expansion, advances in technology, ethnic and religious diversity, and the repurposing of urban spaces, greater Philadelphia’s extinct and surviving cemeteries illustrate the metropolitan area’s centuries of social and economic development.

Stephen Nepa is an urban-environmental historian. He is contributing author to A Greene Country Town (Penn State University Press, due 2015) and The Women of James Bond (Columbia Univ. Press, due 2015), and has written for Environmental History, Buildings and Landscapes, New York History, and other publications. He received his M.A. from the University of Nevada and his Ph.D. from Temple University. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The massive masonry structure owes much to the consolidation of city and county in 1854. In doubling the city’s population to 565,000 people, consolidation required the expansion of services that outstripped the capacity of the two-story building at Fifth and Chestnut Streets, designated in 1791 as the city’s second city hall. As early as 1838 the Pennsylvania legislature recognized the need for new municipal offices, but disagreements focusing largely on the location of the new structure prevented action until the 1870s. In 1871 the question of location was put to popular vote, with the result favoring Penn Square to the west, where the city was expanding, over Washington Square at the heart of the city’s early commercial center.

The grand scale of the new structure reflected the city’s aspirations—futile in the end—to reassert its position at the top of the American urban hierarchy. Seeking to attract a leading architect for the project, the city sponsored several competitions, ultimately awarding the commission to 39-year-old Scottish-born John McArthur (1823-90), whose buildings in the city had included the Wagner Free Institute of Science (1859) and the Public Ledger (1866). It did not hurt that he received coaching from Thomas U. Walter (1804-1887), architect of the U.S. Capitol from 1851 until 1865, with whom McArthur had trained. Walter subsequently served as a paid consultant to the project.

Second Empire Style

Cast in the fashionable French Second Empire style—the same style simultaneously embraced for the structure later known as the Old Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C.—City Hall mixed thick masonry construction, up to 22 feet in some places, with elaborate ornamentation inside and out. Intended to be the highest building in the world, with its bell tower topping at 548 feet, by the time the building was completed in 1901, it had been surpassed by the Washington Monument and the Eiffel Tower. Still, it could claim to be the world’s largest occupied structure until it was surpassed by New York City’s Mutual Life building in 1909. By gentlemen’s agreement, no other building role above City Hall in Philadelphia until 1987 with construction of One Liberty Place.

In line with the city’s ambition, no expense was spared in the building’s construction. Most striking was the statue of William Penn placed atop the clock tower. Cast by Alexander Milne Calder (1846-1923), Penn’s likeness was accompanied by 250 additional relief and free-standing Calder sculptures throughout the building, many of them conveying high-minded allegories about the nation and the city.

Patronage

There were other, less commendable reasons for the expense, however.  The public buildings commission formed to oversee construction proved a major source of patronage for an increasingly entrenched Republican political machine. A primary force behind the effort was a previously obscure politician, William Stokley (1823-1902), who after his role in the City Hall site selection dominated local politics for nearly than a decade as mayor from 1872 to 1881. In addition to directing contracts for marble and brick to political allies, Stokley’s role in securing a decision to build a single structure at the intersection of the four quadrants that constituted Penn Square at Broad and Market streets solidified relationships with street rail magnates investing in the Union Line. They used the building commission’s decision to force the rival West Philadelphia Company to share its lucrative right away along Market Street in return for permission to lay its tracks around the new structure.

By the time City Hall was complete, its architecture was already considered out of fashion and thus became the object of some ridicule. Objecting to the building’s disruption of traffic as well as its style, city government explored the possibility of demolition in the mid-1950s. When cost estimates came in equal to those for construction and when members of the American Institute of Architects objected to the building’s loss, the city relented. Recent efforts to restore the building have well exceeded the projected cost of its demolition, but the building’s listing on the National Register of Historic Places and its inclusion in a national survey as among the 150 most important buildings in the United States assures its place in Philadelphia for a long time to come.

Howard Gillette is Professor Emeritus of History at Rutgers University-Camden and co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. (Author information current at time of publication.)