Laurel Hill Cemetery

A librarian buried his daughter in a waterlogged graveyard and decided Philadelphia could do better.

John Jay Smith was a librarian and editor with an interest in horticulture and real estate, and he was distressed by the way his dead daughter had been interred at the Arch Street Meeting House burial ground. He wrote that Philadelphia should have a rural cemetery on dry ground, where feelings should not be harrowed by viewing the bodies of beloved relatives plunged into mud and water. He joined with other prominent Philadelphians, among them Benjamin Wood Richards, William Strickland and Nathan Dunn, formed the Laurel Hill Cemetery Company, and in 1836 built one.

It was the second major rural cemetery in the United States, after Mount Auburn in Boston, and the cemetery's own account puts it in the context that matters: it offered families an alternative form of burial that reflected changing attitudes towards death.

John Notman designed it. It sits in East Falls overlooking the Schuylkill River, and it reached its present 74 acres through the purchase of four separate parcels between 1836 and 1861. Inside are over 11,000 family lots and more than 33,000 graves, many of them under grand marble and granite monuments, elaborately sculpted hillside tombs and mausoleums.

It is also a garden. Laurel Hill is an accredited arboretum holding over 6,000 trees and shrubs across some 700 species, with display gardens, notable specimens and a legacy tree programme. A rural cemetery was meant to be somewhere the living would want to walk.

It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977, and in 1998 became the first cemetery in the United States to be designated a National Historic Landmark. It is called Laurel Hill East now, to distinguish it from the affiliated West Laurel Hill across the river in Bala Cynwyd.