The Woodlands

The story

Before it became a cemetery, this land was the private country seat of William Hamilton, whose family held the property dating back to 1735. Hamilton built a Federal-style mansion here around 1770 and spent decades filling the grounds with exotic flora. But by 1840, as rural cemetery design swept North America, the 54-acre estate was converted into a park-like burial ground—wrapping thousands of Victorian graves around Hamilton's grand mansion and turning the private estate into a permanent city of the dead.

Walk the gravel paths today and you'll bump into Philadelphia royalty: painter Thomas Eakins, portraitist Rembrandt Peale, and several Civil War generals. But nothing dominates the skyline quite like the 150-foot obelisk marking the grave of Dr. Thomas W. Evans. Evans was a Philadelphia-born dentist who became court dentist to Napoleon III in Paris (and famously helped Empress Eugénie escape France during the 1870 revolution). His monument isn't just ostentatious—it is officially the tallest gravestone in the United States.

Look down at the base of the main house and you'll spot the entrance to a cryptoporticus—a subterranean service passage constructed beneath the mansion so servants could lug coal, supplies, and food without disrupting the views of wealthy guests above. Today, the whole complex functions as an improbable hybrid: a working cemetery, a National Historic Landmark, and West Philadelphia's largest neighborhood backyard.