Mount Vernon Cemetery in Allegheny West will celebrate its 170th birthday, and potentially its rebirth, in 2026. A plan is now in place to transfer the historic burial ground along Lehigh Avenue to the Steelmantown Cemetery Company, a Marshallville, New Jersey-based outfit specializing in green burials that owns numerous cemeteries across the country. A Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas judge signed off Monday morning on a tentative agreement that would see Steelmantown take possession of the property from a careholder organization and potentially end a multi-year legal saga to control the fate of the forlorn burial ground.

First founded in 1856, the cemetery was once a final destination for well-to-do Philadelphians, including several actors from the Barrymore family. Yet, over the last half century, it has flirted with dereliction as the cemetery’s most recent owner failed to maintain the property. Its various monuments still tell the tale of a prosperous past–one is a 25-foot high decorative pyramid carved by Belgian sculptor G. Geef in 1864–but the wild foliage and overgrown pathways that surround them are emblematic of its more recent history.

The cemetery’s downward trajectory led a collection of preservationists and concerned citizens to launch a successful effort to use Pennsylvania’s Act 135 to gain control of the property in 2020. Under that statute, a judge can appoint a conservator organization to work to find a new buyer of a derelict property against the owner’s wishes, as long as there is a coherent plan to restore and reuse the property in a beneficial way.

Those knowledgeable of the situation say over the past year just such a plan was formed to bring in Steelmantown as a new owner and rejuvenate the cemetery. In recent months, court hearings on the matter were delayed as the conservator organization, the Philadelphia Community Development Coalition (PCDC), worked out the final details. However, on March 31 the PCDC filed legal documents asserting they had signed off on the plan. Following a court hearing on Friday, Common Pleas judge Ann M. Butchart authorized a sale to Steelmantown to move forward.

In an interview, Steelmantown founder and owner Edward Bixby said he was excited about Mount Vernon’s future. While legal and logistical hurdles remain, Bixby envisions a significant transformation of the property by the end of 2026, with a fully realized vision coming to fruition over the course of the next decade. Ultimately, he plans a Mount Vernon where existing markers and plots are restored in a traditional manner for the benefit of visiting kin of the deceased, but also where a significant portion of the property is transformed into a more natural setting akin to a park. “It’s like you’re owning an art museum in the middle of a garden setting. It’s mindblowing,” Bixby said. “What we want to be able to do is give access to the people, to be able to walk through there, to be able to enjoy the property, a recreational jog, whatever. Go have a walk and learn about the history of Philadelphia.”

The Resting Place of Tens of Thousands

Thaddeus Squire, a philanthropic management professional with a special interest in historic preservation, said Mount Vernon was originally founded in the 1850s to compete with the adjacent Laurel Hill Cemetery. The cemetery is currently believed to contain the remains of about 33,000 people, its main historical clientele wealthy German-Americans, a customer case that proved to be particularly important following the Black Tuesday stock market crash of 1929.

With the cemetery’s finances on the ropes, the families of the interred turned to Joseph Murphy, counsel to a large brewery supply company in Philadelphia. Murphy became involved in the cemetery’s operations, and, as board members and shareholders began to pass away, consolidated stakes until he became the outright owner. Eventually, Murphy passed on the property to its most recent owner, his son, Joseph Dinsmore Murphy.

For a time, Squire said the younger Murphy believed himself a responsible caretaker of the cemetery. Yet, to those who cared about the cemetery locally, Murphy, a lawyer based in Washington, D.C., was an absentee owner under whose watch Mount Vernon fell into disrepair. In a 2021 Philadelphia Inquirer article, a woman named Regina Miller retold a journey that began with her contacting Murphy simply to gain access to the cemetery to visit her grandparents’ graves. Murphy in turn asked Miller for help sifting through records. After becoming involved, she wound up with the unexpected delivery of cremation ashes for two people on her doorstep. Turns out they were individuals with burial rights in the cemetery, but that operations were too defunct to follow through.

“He told me to hang on to them,” Miller said of Murphy. According to Squire, Murphy at one point made contact with the late University of Pennsylvania professor and historic preservationist Aaron Wunsch, admitting he no longer felt capable of running the cemetery and wanting to hand it off. Squire said both groups retained attorneys to hash out the paperwork and were close to settling several times, but that Murphy “dithered and dallied,” leading their group to lose pro bono legal representation. “After we lost our second counsel, I had kind of had it at that point,” Squire explained. “That’s when I said, ‘We need to 135 this.’”

Squire said he, Wunsch, and other interested parties worked to convince the Philadelphia Community Development Coalition, a nonprofit focused on remediating blight, to act as conservator and initiate legal proceedings. After the court recognized PCDC as conservator in 2021, the organization spent $200,000 stabilizing the cemetery’s gatehouse and employed workers to provide for some care of the property. However, much of the regular maintenance of the grounds has fallen to the Friends of Mount Vernon Cemetery, an all-volunteer group led by coordinator Brandon Zimmerman.

Squire and others stood up their own nonprofit in an effort to eventually take ownership of the cemetery, but ran into fundraising difficulties. The property settled into a new limbo until Bixby arrived.

Still, there are loose ends to be sewn up both before and after Bixby takes possession, currently scheduled for 35 days from the judge’s order. At Friday’s hearing, Judge Butchart asked PCDC and Bixby to produce financial records indicating that his company has financial capacity to restore the cemetery. She also asked for further documentation to ensure that the roof of the cemetery’s gatehouse was to be properly restored. Neither Bixby nor PCDC objected.

Also raised at the hearing were some concerns over historic documents belonging to the cemetery. While PCDC said the vast majority are being temporarily housed at the University of Pennsylvania and would become property of Bixby’s company, missing from the archives is a master ledger book useful in establishing who has been buried in the cemetery and where. Zimmerman and PCDC alleged they believed the book to be in possession of Regina Miller, something they said she denies.

Regardless, Zimmerman said he anticipates the Friends group transitioning from primarily landscaping activities to research, record-keeping, and grant writing. He said some 30,000 index cards exist that can be tediously reviewed to recompile an understanding of who is buried in the cemetery, although they do not include records from the first 20 years of the cemetery’s operation.

Butchart said regardless of sale, the court will continue to hold regular hearings on the cemetery to ensure a successful transition.

Bringing the Green

Bixby, a former South Jersey real estate developer, came into the cemetery business by accident. His family has roots in the state dating back centuries and in the 1700s started a family burial ground in Steelmantown, a small rural neighborhood in Cape May County. The property was eventually passed into the hands of Upper Township, then a private funeral company which opened up the cemetery for public interrment.

Yet, when Bixby went to visit his brother’s grave there in 2007, he found the cemetery in a state of disrepair with trash strewn about the property. When he complained to the 87-year-old proprietor, the man asked Bixby if he wanted to buy the cemetery for $1. Bixby said yes and had an instinct to do something different.

“We are located adjacent to Belleplain State Forest, which is beautiful. I said to my family, all of the history of the township lies within this cemetery, but nobody knows it’s there,” Bixby said. “So I put in about a mile walking trail so people could come out and enjoy the property.”

That launched a second career in which Bixby has come to own 15 different cemeteries across the country. He said he typically works to identify down-and-out properties like Mount Vernon that he feels can be restored to glory. Along the way, he also fell into a green burial niche after reading a story about it in the Press of Atlantic City. In its simplest form, a green burial just means burying an individual in a basic wooden box without the use of embalming fluid or other chemicals. Historically in the United States, Bixby said that was viewed as an ignoble end for those without means or loved ones. Now, it is surging in popularity, including more deluxe options that can bury an individual at the base of a tree or shrub.

Bixby said his first order of business is to secure the property against vandalism and trespass. He has already installed a network of security cameras to help keep a watchful eye on the place. After that, he anticipates needing about a year to do the heavy lifting of removing the worst of the overgrowth from the cemetery. Ultimately, he envisions a “hybrid” cemetery that includes traditional, landscaped areas, while leaving a significant portion as a more park-like setting for the enjoyment of the greater community.

While there is some question as to how much space is left in the cemetery for burials, Bixby said he doesn’t view that as a major risk. In some cemeteries he has taken over there was believed to be very little room left. Yet, after transforming the properties and removing roads and other obstacles, he was able to free up much more space to make it pencil out. He also anticipates offering cremation and other services to support his bottom line.

Bixby speaks in glowing terms of Mount Vernon, which he said represents a unique opportunity nationally to combine public art, history and nature in a major urban setting. “You know, 99.9 percent of anyone in my business would have looked at Mount Vernon and said, ‘You’re insane,'” said Bixby. “But I thought this could be something magnificent, something for the ages. As ridiculous as it may sound, I really mean that.”

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