Founded in 1836 in what was then a rural area, Laurel Hill became Philadelphia's first garden cemetery. Over the generations it has provided sites for a magnificent variety of tombs and monuments, many with elaborate sculptural ornamentation. The works listed here are only a small sample of the cemetery's sculptural riches.

Because the cemetery covers 95 acres and its roads and paths are complicated, visitors should consult the map posted at the office door—or step into the office for a copy of the map and brochures.

Selected Works at Laurel Hill Cemetery

Old Mortality (c. 1836)
James Thom (1802–1850)

The title character of Sir Walter Scott's novel Old Mortality is an aged peasant who travels from one churchyard to another to perform the pious act of recutting the faded names of Scottish Covenanters on their tombstones. In James Thom's sculptural group at Laurel Hill Cemetery, Sir Walter is shown sitting on a grave marker to talk with the old man, who has interrupted his work on the tomb beneath him. Between the two figures stands Old Mortality's weary pony. As many decades passed, the aged tomb restorer himself came to need retouching. This was accomplished in 1986, when the Old Mortality figure was restored in connection with Laurel Hill's 150th anniversary.

William Mullen Tomb (c. 1880)
Attributed to D. Kornbau

William Mullen (1805–1882) was a jeweler, dentist, and philanthropist who became known as "The Prisoner's Friend." A false accusation in his boyhood, resulting in a close brush with jail, left him with a lifelong sympathy for people who were wrongfully or unnecessarily incarcerated. By his mid-thirties he began to intervene on behalf of prisoners, and he went on to found a multitude of societies and relief agencies to help the imprisoned and the impoverished. In 1854 the state office of Prison Agent was created especially for him, and he served in this post until his death, helping to free (by his own estimate) over 50,000 people. Toward the end of his life he became passionately concerned, in the words of a contemporary account, "to rescue his name from oblivion."

Beside the standing figure of Mullen is a representation of the Moyamensing Prison, with an open gate from which a woman prisoner has just emerged, freed by Mullen's efforts. She sits on the step before the gate. On top of the prison stands a winged figure with a horn, presumably the angel Gabriel. Above the prison gate a head of Christ is carved in relief. The meaning of these elements may be allegorical as well as biographical: the female figure can be interpreted as the soul, released from its earthly prison through the intervention of Christ.

William Warner Tomb (1889)
Alexander Milne Calder (1846–1923)

William Warner made a fortune in the coal business and bequeathed a good deal of it to charitable causes. His handsome tomb was carved by the first of the famous Calder family of sculptors, Alexander Milne Calder, who by that time had nearly completed his massive sculptural program at City Hall. Unlike the Mullen tomb, Warner's is reticent about the man's life and accomplishments. It offers instead an elegantly simple form of religious symbolism: a draped female form opens the sarcophagus to allow the soul—partially seen as a face and wings—to escape in the midst of a swirling cloud.

Henry Charles Lea Tomb (1911)
Alexander Stirling Calder (1870–1945), sculptor
Zantzinger and Borie, architects

A well-respected historian and political activist, Henry Charles Lea (1825–1909) rests below a monument adorned with the figure of Clio, the muse of history. The bronze figure is the work of the second of the Calders, Alexander Stirling Calder, who throughout a long career contributed enormously to Philadelphia's public sculpture. The tomb's granite backdrop, over seven feet high, forms part of a retaining wall on a picturesque hillside above Kelly Drive. This classical stone structure, which provides an austere setting for Calder's sculpture, was designed by the firm of C. C. Zantzinger and C. Louis Borie, Jr., who later collaborated on the Fidelity Mutual Building and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Adapted from Public Art in Philadelphia by Penny Balkin Bach (Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1992).