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Washington Square has always been the somber, bizarro Rittenhouse. Last night the only people enjoying the place were weirdoes and lunatics. I’m not complaining, people screaming at ghosts in their heads are part of what make this city great, but I’ve always wondered why Washington Square wasn’t more like it’s fraternal twin up the street. I knew there were mass graves there, but not until I read up on a little of the history of the park did I realize how many bodies were in that park. Read up below.

On a side note, I’ve been kicking around the idea of having a barbecue over there on the 4th. Unfortunately I won’t be in town that day, but someone should do this. I mean, just bring a grill and some skewers and cook your meat up right on the eternal flame. What could possibly be more patriotic than that? I’m sure no one would mind. Happy Birthday USA!

From ushistory.org:

A History of the Square

Washington Square was one of Philadelphia’s five original squares as laid out in 1682 by William Penn’s surveyor, Thomas Holme. It was then called Southeast Square, as Quakers did not believe in naming places after people. Within 25 years of Penn’s arrival, however, the square was being used as a potter’s field and a burial yard for strangers in the city. it served in this capacity from 1704 to 1794, a period roughly (and curiously) paralleling the dates of Benjamin Franklin’s tenure on earth (1706-1790). Burials were generally done on the cheap: bodies bound in canvas — sans coffins.

For a cemetery, the Square was remarkably filled with life, however. Historian John Fanning Watson in his 1830 “Annals of Philadelphia” writes of two fish-filled creeks that flowed through the Square in the 1740s in addition to a pond that attracted wanton boys. “A creek once ran thru the Square and the aged Hayfield Conygnam, Esq., when he was young, caught a fish of six inches in length. Another aged person told me of his often walking up the brook, barefooted, in the water, and catching crayfish.” (Today the only water in the park is found in a fountain in the park’s center and in a horse watering trough when rainfall backs up.)

Rites similar to the Mexican “Day of the Dead” celebration were held in the park’s early years by the black community. Watson writes, “An aged lady, Mrs. H.S., had told me that she has often seen Guinea natives, in the days of her youth, going to the grave of their friends early in the morning, and there leaving them victuals and rum!”

In the years preceding the Revolutionary War, the Square was deemed a good pasture field — despite (or because of) nearly 60 years of burials! In 1766, Jasper Carpenter leased the field from the city toward that end. Erelong, Carpenter’s cows would have to make way for the corpses of American and British soldiers.

Beginning in 1776, fallen troops from Washington’s Army were buried in the Square. Pits 20 feet by 30 feet in length were dug along 7th and Walnut Streets which were then filled by coffins piled one atop another until space in the mass grave ran out. Long trenches the width of the Square were hastily dug on the Square’s south side — a permanent barracks for the martyrs of the War of Independence.

John Adams wrote a sad letter filled with lamentation to his wife Abigail on April 13, 1777. “I have spent an hour, this morning, in the congregation of the dead. I took a walk into the Potters Field, a burying ground…and I never in my whole life was affected with so much melancholy.”

When the British occupied Philadelphia in 1777, they used the Walnut Street Jail, which then faced the Square, to hold prisoners of war. Draconian conditions caused death in droves. This story is told on the next stop along the “virtual” tour, at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

More corpses followed in 1793. Those that spent their last days fighting off the chill haze of Yellow Fever, wound up in shrouds underneath the now pacific park.

After the Square was closed as a cemetery, the situation in the area did not initially improve. Historian Watson described the houses that surrounded the Square in 1805 being as “miserable and deformed a set of huts and sheds as could be well imagined.”

Improvement started in the form of a public walk in 1815. A tree-planting program began the next year and the Square to this day wears the fruit of a city plan in which over 60 varieties of trees were sown. A “really admirable city arboretum of rare trees,” was how America’s first landscape architect, Andrew Jackson Downing, described the Square. Walking on the Square 150 years after this beautification project, the historian John Francis Marion observed, “The trees in Washington Square are older, wider-spreading and taller than those in Independence Square, and the square itself has a more open spacious quality.”

The 6.4-acre Southeast Square was renamed Washington Square in 1825 to honor the great general and first President.