Ivy Hill Cemetery is known as the final resting place of professional athletes, Grammy-nominated soul singers, and a Kennedy Center honoree. It also holds the remains of Philadelphia natives whose stories inform current events, including the controversy over Confederate memorial statues, corporate malfeasance, recognition of Negro League players, urban sprawl, and the role of art in documenting and preserving history.

Notable occupants include boxers Joe Frazier and Matthew Saad Muhammad, Major League third baseman Bill Gray and pitcher Ed Lafitte, Negro League pitcher Bill Byrd and infielder Mahlon Duckett, Philadelphia-born soul singers Harold Melvin, Fayette Pinkney, and Joni Sledge, Kennedy Center Honoree Marion Williams, and James R. Ludlow Wray, the Philadelphia Eagles’ first head coach and co-owner.

Under the leadership of Ivy Hill’s secretary-treasurer David Drysdale, Jr., notoriety doesn’t necessarily merit special treatment. “My father always said, ‘Everybody buried here is a dignitary to their own family,’” Drysdale explained. “Everybody gets treated the same.”

Drysdale has been working at Ivy Hill Cemetery and Crematory since 1973, starting part-time as a teenager, then full-time after college. He followed his father, David Drysdale, Sr., the previous secretary-treasurer, with 42 years of service, and maternal grandfather, Watson Moody, who attended to Ivy Hill families for 56 years. His son David Drysdale III is a groundskeeper, and his 16-year old grandson, Brayden, joins the team this summer as a weed cutter.

Opened as the Germantown and Chestnut Hill Cemetery in 1867, the 87-acre facility located on Easton Road in Cedarbrook was renamed Ivy Hill Cemetery in 1871. The non-sectarian cemetery and crematory was chartered as a nonprofit organization. It provides in-ground, crypt, and niche burial, cremation, and a chapel for funerals and memorial services.

Lesser-known occupants of Ivy Hill include the union-busting railroad executive who died in a hotel room under mysterious circumstances, the Civil War veteran who was captured at Gettysburg, a family of artists that lived in a stone mansion built on the site of a Revolutionary War battleground, and the last living member of the Philadelphia Stars baseball team. However their lives ended, their stories have relevance today.

The Civil War Veteran

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Germantown native Melville Freas (1841-1920) enlisted in the Union Army, Company A, 150th Pennsylvania Volunteers, known as the Bucktails. Taken prisoner at the battle of Battle of Gettysburg on July 1, 1863, along with four friends from Germantown, he was held at the Confederate prisoner of war camp at Belle Isle near Richmond, Virginia.

Freas was paroled on March 23, 1864—the only one of the five neighborhood friends to survive Belle Isle—and eventually returned to Germantown to work as a letter carrier and auctioneer. In 1909, Freas publicly opposed plans to erect a monument to Henry Wirz, who had been convicted and hanged in 1865 for crimes he committed as the commandant of the Confederacy’s infamous Andersonville Prison.

As the number of statues dedicated to Confederate Army figures around the country peaked, in 1914 Freas commissioned John M. Gessler & Sons of West Philadelphia to make a granite statue of himself in uniform for placement on his lot at Ivy Hill. His headstone honors the four comrades who were among the almost 1,000 Union prisoners who died at Belle Isle: Louis Vogle, Philip Hammer, Charles Grant, and George Shingle.

The Union Buster

By the afternoon of December 14, 1889, James Wormley, the owner and manager of the Wormley Hotel on H Street NW in Washington, D.C., was worried enough about one of his guests to call the police. The man in room 57 hadn’t been seen since the night before and wasn’t answering his locked door. Accompanied by a police officer and hotel staff, Wormley used a stepladder to reach the transom and peer into the room.

He saw the body of the man who was checked-in to room 57 lying on his back, arms at his side, and a pistol on the floor near his right hand, apparently the result of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. The coroner didn’t examine the body at the scene, but, relying on statements by Wormley and a Pinkerton detective, ruled the death a suicide. The deputy coroner, a senior Washington Police Department official, and a doctor who resided in the hotel publicly disagreed. They suspected murder.

Franklin Benjamin Gowen was born in the Mt. Airy section of Philadelphia on February 9, 1836 to a Pennsylvania German mother and an Irish Protestant father. By the age of 30 he was doing legal work for the Philadelphia and Reading Rail Road (P&R). “In January 1870 [he] was elected president of that company at a crucial moment in the history of the coal region,” wrote historian Jake Wynn on his website.

Established in the 1830s to carry anthracite coal from Schuylkill County to Philadelphia, under Gowen the P&R continued its expansion by acquiring smaller rail lines and building new facilities. As miners were organizing to protest low wages and dangerous working conditions, Gowen embarked on a plan to control the supply of coal, even though his company’s charter prohibited it. “Throughout the 1870s, Gowen used legal and extra legal maneuvering that led the P&R into the anthracite coal business,” noted Wynn. “The railroad became the largest owner of coal lands in Schuylkill County.”

This put Gowen at odds with the Workingman’s Benevolent Association (WBA), which represented the miners. In 1875, an unsuccessful strike to protest wage cuts made the WBA all but irrelevant and led to the rise of the more clandestine and radical Molly Maguires. “The Mollies were a secret society based among the Irish coal miners in the anthracite fields of northern Pennsylvania in the 1860s and 1870s,” according to historian John Kearns.

On the night of July 23, 1877, unrest by striking railroad engineers led to mob violence and vandalism in Reading, Pennsylvania. Railroad officials called in a unit of the Pennsylvania Militia, ostensibly to protect P&R property. Caught in the 7th Street Cut—a narrow ravine with high walls—and ambushed from above with rocks and bricks, the soldiers fired on the crowd, killing at least 10 and wounding many more in what was to become known as the Reading Railroad Massacre.

Meanwhile, Gowen hired Pinkerton detectives to infiltrate the Molly Maguires and sought to bar them from the coal mines, while publicly disparaging them as communists linked to radicals in Europe. “It was probably inevitable that Gowen, being who he was and the miners, being who they were, would clash,” reported Frank Whelan for Allentown television station WFMZ. “Northern Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics had a historical record of conflict at least as far back as the 1690s.”

That clash culminated in a series of arrests and trials that resulted in the conviction and execution of 20 Mollies between 1877 and 1879. In some cases Gowen acted as special prosecutor. “The Molly Maguire trials were a surrender of state sovereignty,” Kearns concluded. “A private corporation initiated the investigation through a private detective agency. A private police force arrested the alleged defenders, and private attorneys for the coal companies prosecuted them. The state provided only the courtroom and the gallows. 20 men were convicted and hanged on the basis of very dubious evidence.”

Gowen was eventually ousted as president of the P&R and went back into private practice, which brought him to Washington, D.C. in December 1889. A 2002 book by Patrick Campbell, descendant of one of the Mollies, reignited unanswered questions about evidence connected with Gowen’s death. These include the position of the body, angle of the wound, blood on the handle of the gun, an overturned light and chair, removal of potential evidence by Wormley, and failure to conduct an autopsy.

“Since I had a very personal interest in the Gowen story because he was involved in the execution of my grand uncle, I wondered if my relatives in Pennsylvania had anything to do with Gowen’s death,” Campbell wrote in Who Killed Franklin Gowen? “Was he murdered by some of my Molly Maguire relatives from Pennsylvania, or did he really commit suicide?”

The Last Philadelphia Star

Mahlon Duckett (1922–2015) joined the Philadelphia Stars of the Negro National League at the age of 17. The Overbrook High School graduate was voted the League’s Rookie of the Year in 1940 and went on to play nine seasons with the Stars, covering third base, second base, or shortstop. His final season was with Homestead Grays in 1950. Founded in 1933, the Stars played in the Negro National League from 1934 to 1948 and the Negro American League from 1949 to 1952.

Described by the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum as a “light-hitting, smooth-fielding, versatile infielder,” Duckett played with or against Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, and Jackie Robinson, to name a few Negro League luminaries. His fondest baseball memory was the time he went up against Paige in an exhibition game in Yankee Stadium. “When you faced him you were just trying to get a base hit,” he told radio station WBUR at an event honoring Negro League players in 2010.

“You know, Satchel didn’t give up too many hits, and he threw me a pitch and I just swung and hit it. And I hit it to right field and it went into the stands and I was just as shocked, I guess, as Satchel and the other people because there wasn’t too many home runs hit off of Satchel.”

Duckett and Stars catcher Stanley ‘Doc’ Glenn told WBUR’s Jeremy Bernfeld what it was like playing in the Negro Leagues in the 1940s. “In just about all of the southern towns and cities we was (sic) unwelcome,” Duckett said. “A lot of the whites came out because they wanted to see what Negro League baseball was like, but, as far as the conditions, it was horrible, terrible. They called us names and we had no place to eat, as a rule. A lot of times we didn’t have any place to sleep.” Glenn added, “All of the hotels in every city, North or South, were prejudiced and we weren’t allowed. They simply wouldn’t rent you rooms, but that’s the way it was all over.”

After his year with the Grays, Duckett worked as a letter carrier for the United States Postal Service, retiring in 1988. “Duckett spent his years after baseball working as an ambassador for the game,” noted Patrick Gordon, in his Philadelphia Baseball Review obituary for Duckett. “He spoke to audiences, including children, about life in the Negro Leagues and the legends he shared the field with. As the last surviving member of any Philadelphia-based Negro team, the Phillies honored Duckett several times over the past few years at Citizens Bank Park. Philadelphia lost a significant connection to its storied baseball past with the passing of Negro Leaguer Mahlon Duckett.”

The Family of Artists

For much of the 19th century, Philadelphia nurtured a family of commercially and critically successful artists who celebrated the area’s natural landscapes and flora in their paintings and drawings. Russell and Mary Smith, along with their children Xanthus and Mary, routinely exhibited at the annual shows of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) and sold their works through local galleries.

Russell Smith (1812-1896) was a native of Glasgow, Scotland. His parents moved the family to Western Pennsylvania in 1819. “The Smith children were educated at home, and Russell showed an early interest in art,” according to the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. “Around 1827, Smith began painting backdrops for theaters and within six years had achieved a national reputation for his theatrical painting.”

After Smith moved to Philadelphia in 1835 to paint large canvas drop curtains for the Walnut Street Theater, he began earning commissions to paint for theaters along the East Coast. “Even while engaged in theatrical work, Smith continued to paint landscapes which were exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Artists’ Fund Society of Philadelphia,” most years between 1834 and 1889.

In 1838, Smith married Mary Priscilla Wilson (1819-1874), a native of Milestown, Philadelphia County, painter of flowers, and teacher of French, Latin, and drawing. She had works on display in the 1838 and 1940 Artists’ Fund Society shows and the 1860 and 1869 PAFA shows. “Mary Priscilla, although not a well-known painter, did beautiful flower studies and was an unusually educated woman for her day, educating both of her children at home,” wrote Charlottle Ridpath in the 1943 edition of the Old York Road Historical Society Bulletin.

Xanthus Smith (1839-1929) was born in the family home on Locust Street. A year later, seeking undeveloped open space outside of the city, elder Smith moved the family to Philadelphia County. The house, known as Rock Hill, was located between Branchtown and Milestown near Mary’s family and the current intersection of Old York Road and Chelten Avenue. “From a painting of the home, we see a cozy white house nestled among beautiful large trees with a brook running through the meadow,” Ridpath wrote in 1943.  

Born at Rock Hill, Mary Russell Smith (1842-1878) showed early interests in nature and painting, both of which her parents encouraged. Starting in 1859, she exhibited at PAFA 15 times, the last two posthumously. “In contrast to her father and brother, who had learned the rudiments of art by copying drawings or engravings from books, she sketched directly from nature,” Robert Torchia wrote in the catalog produced for a series of exhibitions staged by the Old York Road Historical Society in 1998. Frequent subjects were chickens that she raised, along with wild squirrels, rabbits, and birds. “Her paintings of chickens were popular with Philadelphia art collectors and sought after in England,” according to the Archives of American Art. Ridpath noted that “her pictures were admired and purchased as fast as she could produce them.”

Returning from a family tour of Europe in 1852, the Smiths found a growing city creeping north toward their tranquil homestead. Desiring a place in the countryside that offered privacy and expansive natural views, they settled on a tract of land sitting atop Edge Hill, west of Jenkintown, Montgomery County, the site of a series of Revolutionary War skirmishes, sometimes generously known as The Battle of Edge Hill.

“On the summit of Edge Hill overlooking [the village of] Weldon stands the residence of Russell Smith; being of tower-like design, it has formed a conspicuous feature from the time of its erection in 1854,” wrote Samuel Fitch Hotchkin in The York Road, Old and New. “Square, of stone, and upward of fifty feet in height, with stone cornice, flat roof, and no projecting woodwork, it resembles many towers in different parts of Europe, and for years after its construction it formed a feature of interest the country over, being visible for from five to ten miles in every direction.” As children, the property provided Xanthus and Mary with a natural playground complete with Revolutionary War artifacts. As adults, along with their parents, it provided inspiration and subject matter for their paintings and drawings.

Xanthus started painting seriously after the family trip to Europe and move to Edge Hill, first exhibiting at PAFA in 1856 while still a teenager. He joined the United States Navy at the start of the Civil War, and, as clerk to the captain of the flagship of the South Atlantic Squadron, made detailed drawings of the ships he saw. These were to serve as the factual basis for paintings he would create after the war. He did not witness any battles, but undertook extensive research to ensure accuracy. “He referred freely to his former acquaintances for details of action [and] position of ships, and many of his preliminary paintings were checked and corrected by the officers in charge of the ships involved,” noted Ridpath.

“In the absence of extended photography, it is probable that his paintings represent some of the most authentic records of the [naval] actions of the Civil War.” His skill, along with great interest in Civil War subjects leading up to the 1876 Centennial earned him lucrative commissions and recognition as one of the most important maritime artists of his time.

Paintings and sketches by Russell and Xanthus still serve as permanent records of bygone natural landscapes and historic residences as they existed in the second half of the 19th century. These include, to name a few, A Scene on the Wissahickon, Schuylkill Above Manayunk, Edge Hill Road, The Great Elm on the Lime Kiln Road, Chartiar’s Creek, and Lt. Ingersoll’s House, were all created by Russell. Xanthus’ works include View of Weldon, Residence of Wm. C. Kent- Jenkintown Station, Morton Hedge-Branchtown, On the Tacony, Pennypack Scene, and Mather’s Cottage-Cheltenham.

Russell, Mary P., Mary, and Xanthus, along with his wife Mary B. and their daughter Pollie, lived out the remainder of their lives on Edge Hill. Locally known as “The Castle,” the Smith family home was sold in the 1950s. Still standing and privately owned, the property currently houses the studio of sculptor Christopher Collins.

A Nice Life

Easy-going and affable, Drysdale spoke warmly about the public response since authorities publicly identified Joseph Augustus Zarelli as the so-called “boy in the box” last year for the first time since his body was discovered in 1957. A new headstone marks his gravesite, alongside older ones dedicated to “America’s Unknown Child” and the “Unknown Boy.” “People from around the country visit the site. People from all over the world send cards and toys,” Drysdale said.

Like the 1918 influenza pandemic before it, in 2020, COVID-19 pushed Ivy Hill’s human and physical resources to its limits. “The worst thing I saw in all the years I’ve been here was COVID,” said Drysdale. “It was terrible.” Normally, Ivy Hill performs 600 cremations per month, referred by funeral homes in the greater Philadelphia area. “We had 175 bodies over a two day stretch.” It got to the point where Drysdale had to cap the number of daily cremations. To protect family members and workers, he closed the chapel and limited attendance at graveside burials to 10 people. “Some family members had to watch from parked cars. It was sad.”

Reflecting on his more than 50 years at Ivy Hill, Drysdale focused on the family members who had loved ones buried there. “It’s a nice life, it’s interesting. Some days it’s tough. Everyday you watch people cry. You never get hardened to it unless you’re a hard person. Every funeral is different. Every family is different. We think about the family. If we can give them a little bit of peace, then that’s the best thing we can do.”

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