Was your house built over a cemetery? Is your local park a former graveyard? Philadelphia Cemeteries is a project to map all past and present burial grounds in the City of Philadelphia to answer these questions.
With the expansion of Philadelphia over the last 300 years has come the repeated reclamation of cemeteries as the population nearby grew and those buried were slowly forgotten. From the potter’s fields where blacks and catholics buried in what is now Washington Square in the 1700s, to the grand Monument Cemetery that was demolished by Temple University in the 1950s, this map shows many stories in the history and development of Philadelphia.