Fair Hill Burial Ground

Fair Hill is the burial ground where the reformers lie in rows of identical stones. The land was William Penn's grant to George Fox — the founder of Quakerism — who left it to the Friends in 1691 for a meetinghouse, a burying ground, and a place for children to play. The first meetinghouse went up in 1703 on Germantown Avenue — the old Lenape trade route — and the burials began within years. The ground was one of Philadelphia's first racially integrated cemeteries, which is why the abolitionists chose it.

The roster reads like the movement's roll call: Lucretia Mott, founder of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society; Robert Purvis, called the President of the Underground Railroad, and his wife Harriet Forten Purvis; Thomas and Mary Ann M'Clintock, who drafted the Declaration of Sentiments; Ann Preston, the first woman dean of an American medical school; a congressman, a reformist mayor, the first president of Swarthmore. The Quaker rules kept every stone the same size — eighteen inches wide, ten inches above ground — the equality in death that the people beneath them had demanded in life.

The neighborhood changed around it — factories came and went, the Quakers sold the burial ground in 1985, and it declined until neighbors called the Friends back in 1992. The community bought it back, restored it, and made it what Fox had intended: a green space, a community garden, a peace-making ground where the children of Fairhill play over the graves of the people who fought slavery and won.

Fair Hill is the archive's equality file — the Quaker ground where the stones are identical by rule and the dead are the abolitionists and suffragists who made that rule the country's argument.