Invisible Architects Walking Tour—Washington Square

Stop 7: Washington Square, enter at 6^th and Walnut Streets

One of five parks within William Penn’s “Greene Countrie Towne,” Washington Square was originally known as Southeast Square. By the 18th century, it had become a burial ground for poor Philadelphians; American and British soldiers during the British occupation of Philadelphia (1777-78); and victims of yellow fever. The square served the living as well; enslaved and free African Americans socialized here, and the city later landscaped the grounds as a public park. In 1825, the square was renamed in honor of George Washington.

Burial Ground
William Penn patented this square in 1706 as a Potter’s Field, or a public graveyard for the poor. Free and enslaved Africans were interred here alongside suicide victims, those unaffiliated with a church, and strangers to the city. More than 60 Native Americans who died from smallpox were buried here in 1763. During the Revolutionary War, Potter’s Field served as a military cemetery for British and American soldiers. Victims of the yellow fever epidemic, numbering more than 1300, filled the remaining space in the burial ground in 1793. The city closed Potter’s Field to burials in 1794.
A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, 1793

Gathering Place
This square served not only as a burial ground for the dead, but also as a gathering place for the living. Free and enslaved Africans socialized here prior to the American Revolution, sometimes gathering to protect the remains of their loved ones from being exhumed for dissection in Dr. William Shippen’s anatomy lectures. After 1815, the square began to resemble an urban park with public walks, drawing scores of Philadelphians through the years to stroll above the unseen remains of 18 century residents.
Petition to Pennsylvania by Six Free Black People – April 2, 1782

FIND: “Sorrow and Joy” and “Congregation of the Dead” Waysides, diagonal path between 6^th and Walnut and the fountain in the center of the Square
“Sorrow and Joy” text: “Philadelphia supported a thriving African American community that celebrated its rich heritage in festivities in Washington Square. Until the 19th century, this was often a sorrowful place. Many people knew it as a potters field, a “publick burying place for all strangers,” for soldiers, sailors, convicts, and the “destitute whose remains are walked over.” A lonely Acadian refugee found eternal rest here, along with epidemic victims, Catholics and African Americans. Only free and enslaved African Americans brought a measure of mirth to this square which, according to oral tradition, they called “Congo Square.” One 19th century historian recorded that during fairs and holidays perhaps as many as a thousand Black Philadelphians came here to dance “after the manner of their several nations in Africa, speaking and singing in their native dialects over the sleeping dust below.” He also wrote of those from Guinea (a term once used to encompass several African areas) “going to the graves of their friends early in the morning, and there leaving them victuals and rum.”

“Congregation of the Dead” text: “In 1957 the city dedicated this memorial to the unknown soldiers of the American Revolution. It includes the remains of a soldier discovered in a nearby grave in 1956. On January 27, 1777, Deborah Norris wrote to her friend Sally Wister of a “shocking sight.” “Large pits are dug in the Negroes burying ground [Washington Square], and forty or fifty [soldiers’] coffins are put in the same hole.” Throughout that winter, disease thinned the ranks of the American Army. John Adams, a member of the Continental Congress meeting in Independence Hall, visited the Square in April 1777. He spent an hour “in congregation of the dead.” The graves of the soldiers, perhaps two thousand he had been told, “are enough to make the heart of stone melt away.” During the British occupation later that year, American captives did every day, their bodies wee dragged into carts, hauled here and dumped into the earth. Only after yellow fever ravaged in Philadelphia in 1793 did burials in the Square stop. Some believed that graves emitted miasma, vapors suspected as sources of epidemics.”