Monument Cemetery: Beyond the Wall

Hurrying down Broad Street, have you noticed the unassuming stone wall that surrounds the parking lot, Geasey Field complex, and the tennis courts? It just happens to be one of the oldest parts of Temple University’s campus.

Origins

Behind this wall used to be the 20-acre Monument Cemetery, the final resting place for up 28,000 people – including Temple’s founder Russell Conwell and 700 fellow Civil War veterans. First designed in 1836, forty-eight years before Temple University's founding, the cemetery was a place of quiet, remembrance, and contemplation. The main feature of the cemetery was a towering monument designed by John Sartain honoring George Washington and Marquis de Lafayette. With its landscaping topiaries, lush trimmings, maze-like paths, and commemorative monuments, it was intended to be a community space on the outskirts of Philadelphia.

Campus Culture

A century later the cemetery developed into a different kind of community space as part of the growing Temple University campus. A student editor at Temple News described it, “almost as much an integral part of the University campus as Mitten Hall.” Over the 1930s-40s, the cemetery fell into disrepair with headstones eroded and overturned by weather, discouraging visitation. By 1953, coinciding with rapid social changes in the neighborhood and Temple expansion plans in this decade, Temple’s Recreation Chairman described the cemetery as a “moral and social drawback” and “breeding ground for loitering, robbery, prostitution, and gambling.” However, this waywardness offered possibilities for students to escape the hierarchies of university life: Inside the cemetery wall college girls searched refuge from unsuitable dormitories, it shielded a popular location for secret rendezvous, and anti-war protest slogans were painted on the stone walls.

Expansion and Growth

After World War II, as its student body grew to include returning veterans on the GI Bill, Temple’s plans for campus expansion found new urgency. Following some debate, the Monument Cemetery was ultimately sold in 1956 to Temple and the Board of Education. Some families of the deceased claimed and relocated the remains, but the majority of the dead were reburied in a mass grave at Lawnview Cemetery in Montgomery County. Conwell and his wife, Sarah, were reinterred on Temple’s main campus. The gravestones of the unclaimed were ultimately used as riprap on the shoreline near the Betsy Ross Bridge to halt erosion.

Preservation and Renewal in a Changing City

The decision to dismantle Monument Cemetery for a parking lot and student pavilion places Temple University squarely within a conversation about the nature of preservation and urban renewal. What might today’s student body have gained from a restoration project of the site? The decision to keep certain aspects of historic architecture partially intact, such as the wall of Monument Cemetery, speaks to the historic aesthetics sought by Temple. As a 1963 Temple Bulletin describes “Temple campus [is] an adroit combination of old and new.”

Today, amidst the metropolis, Temple’s students, faculty, and surrounding Philadelphians will be challenged to remember the cemetery and how they decide to interact with it, if at all, as its walls now stand closed off by fences, unidentified by signage.