Laurel Hill Cemetery

Perched above the Schuylkill River just northwest of Philadelphia, Laurel Hill Cemetery opened in eighteen thirty-six as one of the first rural-style garden cemeteries in the United States. Before Laurel Hill, the urban dead were buried in crowded churchyards. Inspired by Paris's Pere Lachaise, designer John Notman laid out winding paths, sculpted terraces, and specimen trees across a bluff, so that strolling among the graves became a civic pleasure.

Philadelphia families rode out by carriage on Sundays. The grounds became so popular as a park that the city eventually had to build public recreation spaces to match the demand. Today Laurel Hill is a National Historic Landmark, still an active cemetery, and its thousands of monuments read like a who's who of nineteenth-century Philadelphia industry and reform.