Some Laurel Hill Founders: The First 20 Years

2025-12-01

All Bones Considered: Laurel Hill Stories #081 for December 1, 2025 Laurel Hill Cemetery was founded in 1835 and opened in 1836 by four men with strikingly different backgrounds, but with a common cause - to give the people of Philadelphia a final resting place worthy of the "Athens of America." John Jay Smith was a polymath librarian / horticulturalist who had a rather unpleasant experience in seeking the grave of a recently deceased daughter and vowed to change the way people commemorated t...

All Bones Considered: Laurel Hill Stories #081 for December 1, 2025

Laurel Hill Cemetery was founded in 1835 and opened in 1836 by four men with strikingly different backgrounds, but with a common cause - to give the people of Philadelphia a final resting place worthy of the "Athens of America."

John Jay Smith was a polymath librarian / horticulturalist who had a rather unpleasant experience in seeking the grave of a recently deceased daughter and vowed to change the way people commemorated their dead.

Nathan Dunn was initially a failed merchant who regained his fortunes in the Chinese trade and became the financial backing for the cemetery corporation.

Benjamin Richards was ex-mayor and a business partner of Smith's who on a trip to Europe was inspired by the revolutionary Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris to provide something similar in Philadelphia.

Along the way you will also learn about Sir Walter Scott, varying splinter sects of Christianity like the Swedenborgians, what the Opium Wars were really about, the history and significance of The Library Company of Philadelphia, with a brief look at Chinese male-male love as commemorated in the legend of the Cut Sleeve.

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