Of Prisoners and Potter’s Fields

by Jonathan Hoppe

“When I was a boy, more than seventy years ago,” noted mineralogist William W. Jefferis wrote in 1900, “[when] a prisoner in jail died or committed suicide, and as he was an outlaw he was to be buried in the ‘prison graveyard,’ near the forks of the road above Taylor’s Mill.” Indeed, the site was well-known by locals, though the mists of time had softened the details of its origin, and many thought it to either be haunted or a burial ground of the Lenape people. But the little burial ground also offered more physical reminders of its presence. After Pottstown Pike had been regraded in the 1880s, skulls, bones, and the occasional coffin would erode out of the high, sloped bank and fall into the road in a macabre spectacle for travelers on the old turnpike.

Thompson’s Burial Ground, as it was known, was established by the county around the time the County Seat was moved to West Chester in 1786. There, a suitable distance away from the borough limits, those who died in prison, or of infectious diseases, or who were poor, were interred at County expense. It was a relic of 18th-century thinking, and with the formation of the Republic and new emergent ideas about the treatment of the poor, infirm and imprisoned, it was quickly supplanted in its use.

In 1800, the Chester County Alms House was established in West Bradford Township to care for the county’s poor, aged, and infirm who had no other means of support under the tutelage of county officials and a superintendent. Poignantly, its first resident was Hannah Freeman, the last of the Lenni-Lenape people in Chester County; when she died there in 1802, she was buried in a small potter’s field near the almshouse that overlooked the Brandywine that had once been her homeland.

Throughout the 19th century the Almshouse continued to support those in need. After the Civil War its name was changed to the Chester County Home, to better reflect its goals of providing a house of refuge for the poor. The potter’s field, meanwhile, continued to be used for the poor and the unwanted; one noted burial after the War was the Civil War veteran of the famed 54th Massachusetts Regiment and murderer George Grant, who was hanged in 1873 for the murder of West Chester restauranteur and hotelier James Spence’s mother in 1871.

In the latter half of the 19th Century, the Alms House’s name was changed to The Chester County Home, to better reflect its expanded mission and scope and goals of providing a stewardship for those without means of support which had, over time, morphed into a custodial role for those that society had no way — or desire — to care for. And so, as part of its evolving place in social fabric, the county constructed a new asylum on the property as the Chester County Hospital for the Insane.

As construction progressed on the Insane Asylum in 1899, the expansion plans necessitated the removal of the original cemetery where Hannah Freeman was buried. One article from the West Chester Morning Republican from February 18, 1899 noted that,

The Chester County Home is this year to have a new cemetery on its 365-acre farm and plans for the same are being gotten out now in the office of County Surveyor Walter MacDonald. The old cemetery was near the site of the present insane asylum, and the fact of its being filled up necessitated the laying out of a new burial place for those persons who have to be interred at the expense of the county.

The new cemetery is to be located west of the old one and will contain sufficient area in which to inter the bodies of one hundred and eighty-nine persons. At least that is the size of the place that is now being laid out, although this much more space is being set aside for purposes to be used when the area now being surveyed shall have become filled up.

The new grounds were at the end of a gravel farm road at the edge of the property and township lines. Many old burials were moved from the original site, and plots there were simply marked by a number: one through 69, inscribed in stone.

In September 1909, a stone was placed by the Chester County Historical Society to on the site of the old graveyard to honor Hannah Freeman; it was said a skeleton was discovered in the process of preparing the site. They would find many more. From the October 3rd, 1910 edition of the Daily Local News:

In digging a trench for a water main leading from the new pumping station on the Brandywine to the reservoir at the Chester County Home, on Saturday the skeletons of four adult persons were discovered. The bones will be reinterred in the burial plot of the Home. The bodies were found within a couple yards of the grave of “Indian Hannah,” west of the Chester County Insane Hospital, and close beside the walk, beside which they lay yesterday.

It is believed the bones are those of bodies which had been buried many years ago in the old burying found which once occupied the site and had been overlooked when a large number were moved, a long time ago, to the new ground of the Home, some distance west of the buildings and at the edge of a woods.

And again, in October 1916, per the Daily Local News:

In completing the trench for a pipeline from the pumping station, on the Brandywine to the new reservoir at the Chester County Home, quite a number of portions of skeletons were discovered. The bones, with those found recently, will be taken to the cemetery connected with the institution and there given proper burial. The bones were originally interred in the cemetery which at one time occupied the ground now surrounding the Chester County Insane Hospital.

In 1908, the County purchased the neighboring 189-acre farm of John Hoopes. As the number of residents at the institution had grown, so did its needs for food and water; the Hoopes farm — with arable land, pasturage, house, barn, and outbuildings — spanned both sides of the Brandywine, would permit the County to not just construct a pumping station, but provide for crop storage and direct access to the railroad for a siding. Immediately after the purchase, a flood bridge was constructed over the West Branch of the Brandywine to access the land; it still stands today and is used as a main entrance to the ChesLen Preserve. On one corner of the property the county a third burial ground was established. Marked by four large pines at its corners, this cemetery which visitors to the Preserve are most familiar.

After the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania took over management of the County Home in 1941, the cemetery fell out of use as the facility became the Embreeville State Hospital.  The last burials there are thought to have occurred in the late 1940s. After using Bradford Cemetery for many years to house its unclaimed dead, the County today inters its unclaimed and unknown dead at Philadelphia Memorial Park.

In the 1980s, first lady of Pennsylvania Ginny Thornburgh asked that both the 1908 cemetery and the older one in West Bradford be cleaned up and marked with signs which still stands today; she had made that request for many sites across the state, including Pennhurst Center. Visitors to the Preserve and to the future West Bradford Township open space can see the signs today that mark two centuries of stewardship by Chester County:

“KNOWN BUT TO GOD, RESPECTED BY US.”

Jonathan Hoppe is a librarian at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.