Sinner & Scandals of Laurel Hill Cemetery

About this event

William Jeanes Community Room. Founded in 1836, Laurel Hill Cemetery (East) was Philadelphia’s first rural cemetery, its serene beauty representing a cosmic shift in how Americans viewed death. It quickly became the place to spend eternity in Philadelphia. Today, Laurel Hill’s 75,000 inhabitants include many of the Quaker City’s Great and Good, including Gettysburg victor General George Gordon Meade; “Mary Had a Little Lamb” author Sarah Josepha Hale; and beloved Phillies sportscaster Harry Kalas. But Laurel Hill has a shadier, secretive side as well. Among its more controversial residents are: Henry Beck Hirst, the absinthe-addicted poet who ended his days in an insane asylum, convinced that his former friend Edgar Allan Poe had plagiarized his poem, “The Raven.” Mabel Tinley, the demure Philadelphia maiden who became one of the biggest grifters in Gay Nineties New York; Henry Morris Naglee, the Civil War general denounced in the press as “a slayer of innocence and a robber of chastity”; Martha Drinnan, spinster daughter of the cemetery superintendent, whose grisly death remains one of Laurel Hill’s enduring mysteries. Veteran Laurel Hill guide Thomas H. Keels tells the spellbinding stories of thirteen unforgettable men and women in Sinners and Scandals of Laurel Hill Cemetery. He offers insights into the history of this nineteenth-century necropolis, and its special place in Philadelphia history over the past 190 years. THOMAS H. KEELS is a Philadelphia author and lecturer who has been giving tours at Laurel Hill for thirty years. He is the author of eight books on local history, including Sesqui! Greed, Graft, and the Forgotten World’s Fair of 1926, Philadelphia Graveyards and Cemeteries, and Wicked Philadelphia: Sin in the City of Brotherly Love.

Description from jeaneslibrary.libcal.com