Marple in the 1850s: Part Eight — Cemeteries
By Sam Pickard
This is the eighth and final of a series on Marple Township in the 1850s.
Part Seven focuses on Churches in Marple during the 1850s.
This final installment on Marple in the 1850s relates to the final resting place for the township’s residents: cemeteries. Cemeteries have been discussed before in various posts on this blog, and as such, this post will only give a brief overview of practices and general information.
When a Marple resident died in the 1850s, the family or household of the deceased would have been the ones who oversaw their burial. The family would have washed and dressed the body and in many cases, the funeral may have been conducted from their house. Printed or written notices might be sent to friends and loved ones, though it would not have been uncommon for a death notice to appear in a local newspaper (such as those of Media or Chester).[1]
While some residents may have been interred in a small family cemetery located on their family’s farm, it was far more common for Marple residents to be buried in a churchyard adjoining their religious congregation. Nearly every church and meeting house mentioned in the previous post—Protestant and Roman Catholic—was adjoined by a small churchyard or graveyard. In his book, The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History, David Charles Sloane noted that across the eastern seaboard, these churchyards “were remarkably similar in their layout, monuments, and management.” These churchyards “appeared torn up from new burials and were rarely larger than a few acres. Graves were not carefully plotted, so lines of them often weaved across the grounds.”[2]
The two cemeteries in Marple during this era—those of the Marple Presbyterian Church and the African Union Church (Hayti Cemetery)—likely fit the description above. A notable difference between the two was in location and likely the predominant marker material. While the Presbyterian cemetery was located near the crossroads that would become Broomall on flat land, the African Union Cemetery was on a steep hillside in the southeastern corner of the township—land that would likely be hard to cultivate. Additionally, it seems likely from the surviving markers that many graves in the Presbyterian cemetery would have been marked by carved marble stones, while field stones or wood markers predominated in the African Union cemetery.[3]
The Marple Presbyterian churchyard in the 1850s is notable for being the site of the only recorded bodysnatching in Marple.[4] While the November 1859 incident is covered in its own post (Body-Snatchers in Broomall!), 20th century Marple historian Clarissa Smith wrote in her research notes that a receiving vault built under the church’s sessions room to store coffins when the ground was too frozen to dig a grave may have been related to this incident. Smith wrote that “It was generally understood that the robbery of a grave in cemetery [sic] aroused indignation of community so [a] receiving vault” was constructed.[5]
While churchyards still dominated in more rural areas like Marple, in larger towns and cities, the rural cemetery movement had been going strong for at least two decades by the 1850s. Epitomized by grand cemeteries like Laurel Hill or Mount Moriah in Philadelphia (or even smaller examples like Glenwood Cemetery), rural cemeteries were privately incorporated and featured naturalistic designs and winding paths that combined gardens and cemeteries.[6]
The closest thing in Delaware County to a rural cemetery in the 1850s would have been Media Cemetery, which was founded in 1855 on an eight-acre tract outside of the county seat. While the cemetery was incorporated as a private company, the relatively small cemetery appears to have been laid out in a grid pattern and likely could not be considered a rural cemetery. Despite this, Daniel McClintock—a marble carver who took over as superintendent in 1858—reportedly created a beautiful setting through landscape gardening and the monuments he created.[7]
[1] David Charles Sloane, The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 13-14, 17, 25-27; Papers
[2] Sloane, Last Great Necessity, 20.
[3] Sloane, Last Great Necessity, 78.
[4] Sam Pickard, “Body-Snatching in Broomall!,” Marple History, 28 October 2021, https://marplehistory.com/grave-robbing/.
[5] “Our History,” Marple Presbyterian Church, 2022, https://www.marplepres.org/ourhistory; Clarissa Smith, “Marple Church, Presbyterian,” notes in the collection of the Marple Historical Society, Broomall, Pennsylvania.
[6] Sloane, Last Great Necessity, 46-48, 55-56.
[7] Henry Graham Ashmead, History of Delaware County, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: L. H. Everts & Co., 1884), 606; G. M. Hopkins, Atlas of Delaware County, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: G. M. Hopkins, 1870), 47.
Amazing