Our 2.4 acre property has a small burial ground. The following minute is from 1818 at the Valley Preparative Meeting, “Committee appointed to inspect Charlestown meetinghouse reports that they need to erect 6 sheds and enclose the north side of the grave yard with stone wall. The Meeting agrees and appoints a committee to see to it." The earliest recorded burial date we have is 1824. Over 10% of interments are children 13 or under.
It is well documented that "Phoenixville" was a major stop on the Underground Railroad. Elijah Funk Pennypacker is commonly referred to as Phoenixville. We know of 5 Abolitionists (and their families) in our burying ground and our community would have been united in the anti-slavery position. Elijah was known to have been shutdown at the Monthly Meeting for his strong belief. It was said, "he is to be tolerated".
The burial ground is broken down into 3 sections. Section A is on the west and has 10 rows of our Members. The last burial was 5 mo. 6, 1957. The only burial since then was on 9 mo 6, 2015. Section B is on the northeast and has 2 non-Members. 20 people have been memorialized in the section since 1995. Section C has 2 non Members and 3 (virtually) unmarked graves, natural stones flush with the ground. We have records of 8 individuals with no marker.
Most of row 3 and some of row 4 headstones are missing. Mary Jane Malin Moulton said we experienced vandalism in our burying ground during the 1940's and 1960's. We replaced headstones if we knew where they belonged and placed the remaining markers (and many loose fragments) along the rear foundation of the Meeting House. We have 219 markers, 114 are the remaining headstones. The other markers are foot stones and memorials .
Oral history states we have, "slaves" or "grave of a freed slave" in our burial ground.
In a Friends Journal article from 7 mo. 1, 1970 on pg. 398, Marjorie Penney-Paschkis says, "Slaves whose bodies could not rest in the Jim Crow Philadelphia cemeteries lie beneath the old oaks in our burying ground."
A 1982 burial ground survey overseen by Christopher Jones mentions, Near Stump ("slaves").
In a 2007 illustration of our property it has, "grave of a freed slave".
We believe there are 3 as we located 6 stones (3 head & 3 foot) flush with the ground under the "old oaks".
There is a more information in the video below.
Burial Ground Surveys
Multiple burial ground surveys of Schuylkill Friends Meeting were performed between 1931 (by PYM) - 2015 (by a Schuylkill Friend). These surveys defined rows differently, since the rows may not be straight or even appear to be random.
This file, combines burial ground data from over 10 sources - listed on the last page.
The rows in this file are defined in both (PDF) images and (SD MPEG-2) video derived into various formats by archive.org.
This survey has links to 25 (Row Definition) image files on archive.org.
This survey has links to 31 (Row Definition) video files on archive.org. Length of an individual video is 90 seconds or less unless specified.
Since changes are recorded, there is a change log at the end of this file.
View our current survey information
Note: If you select a definition link in this PDF, you will see the following prompt:
Redirecting you to https : //archive.org/download/BGDataofSchuylkillFriendsMeetingHouseImages/<filename> This is simply a security warning from our cloud drive provider.
archive.org has been experiencing performance issues since 9 mo. 2024. These links may take a long time to load.
21 minutes - 3 mo. 24, 2016
This is from a 2024 Thread Gathering on Burial Ground Maintenance at the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.