Laurel Hill Cemetery

Laurel Hill exists because a father couldn't find his daughter's grave. In 1835, Quaker librarian John Jay Smith visited the Friends' burial ground on Cherry Street — 20,000 bodies in less than half a block — and couldn't designate her resting place. His diary recorded the resolution: 'a suitable, neat and orderly location for a rural cemetery.' Within a year he and his partners had bought the Laurel Hill estate on the Schuylkill — 32 acres on a bluff a hundred feet over the river, four miles outside the city — and Philadelphia had America's second rural cemetery, after Mount Auburn.

The cemetery became the city's sculpture garden and its prototype park — John Notman's landscape, Strickland and Walter's designs rejected and absorbed, monuments by the era's best sculptors, the 'Old Mortality' group at the 1836 gatehouse. Philadelphia's elite made it their burying ground — Civil War generals, Titanic victims, six signers of the Declaration eventually counted among the dead — and the winding sections above the river showed the city what a designed landscape could be. Fairmount Park grew from the argument it made.

It remains a working cemetery and an outdoor museum — 74 acres, 51 sections, the monuments legible as a century of American taste: Roman and Egyptian for the new republic, Victorian eclecticism, Art Nouveau restraint. The cemetery that began as a father's search became the model for how America would bury its urban dead.

Laurel Hill Cemetery is the archive's rural-cemetery file — America's second garden cemetery, founded 1836 when John Jay Smith couldn't find his daughter's grave, on the Schuylkill bluff that became Philadelphia's prototype park.