It was almost dusk when I decided to jump the gate. Looking up and down the street I saw no one. This was going to be easier if I didn’t have to explain myself. The canopies of trees, lush in the June air, leaned over the surrounding walls like graceful fans slowly collapsing over the property. Securing a foot on the gate, I hoisted my other leg up, but the chain lock gave way, already broken, and the old wrought-iron gate, like a door to the afterlife, swung open. I had every reason to believe I was the first relative to enter our family burial ground in over 100 years.

One glance told me the property in West Oak Lane had been neglected in the most abject way. Syringes, sandwich wrappers, and condoms were strewn through the waist-high grass. Jagged bits of glass glinted with menace as the street lights came on. Vines as thick as your arm overgrew the shattered walls. I stumbled on a dead cat, hard as a cinder block. The headstones, many drowning in overgrowth, could be seen listing this way and that, as if for years they had been gasping for life in a losing battle with nature and time. Some had fallen over. I was rapt as I pulled away weeds to read the inscriptions of my family members from 200 years and more ago. The shallow chiseling of names and dates, faint with age, or entirely illegible, was thrilling to me. Alone in the burial ground, I felt the mystic touch that often comes from unexpected connections.

Also, I was puzzled. Why such squalor where my ancestors lay next to Broad Street, Philadelphia’s most famous thoroughfare? The neglect was so vile that it made me want to turn away and be grateful to exit the graveyard without injury. It was not at all what I had expected to find. I had travelled from my home in Boston to see the cemetery for myself, to see if this hidden place five miles north of the city’s center was indeed the little gem I had discovered from my research on the web. The old pictures I had found showed an intact, if slightly overgrown, burial ground. My sense of hopeful discovery quickly curdled to anger.

High on one stone wall was a plaque, not yet reached by the rioting green beneath it. It read: The deBenneville Family Burial Ground. Established 1758.

I hadn’t lived in Philadelphia since high school, and, yet, I knew immediately that I had to get to the bottom of this. What to call it? An affront? A desecration? Half a dozen rowhouses overlooked the cemetery. In my righteous dismay, I knocked on doors to see what I could learn. No one answered, although in one or two windows I could see wary faces peering out at this impatient stranger.

An Enlightened Ancestor

The idea for a family burial ground, along with a gift of $500 for its “perpetual” maintenance, came from Dr. George deBenneville, my 7th great-grandfather and the first preacher of Universalism in America. He was the first of my deBenneville ancestors to migrate to the Philadelphia area before purchasing 132 acres of farm land in the Oley Valley, some 50 miles northwest of the city. Later, he bought a farm in Branchtown, now part of the West Oak Lane section of Philadelphia, and allocated a half-acre for a burial ground. His instructions hinted at the strange immortality that attends cemeteries: AND WHEREAS I have set off from my said plantation on the Old York Road which I purchased from Joseph Spencer a small piece or strip of ground three perches wide and twenty perches in depth for the purpose of a graveyard or burial place for myself and family and have marked or fixed the boundaries thereof by three stones. Now my will and desire is that this strip or piece of ground shall not be sold by my executors but always exempted and reserved out of the sale of the plantation and be and remain the property of my family to and for a burial place forever and to and for no other use and purpose whatsoever.

deBenneville was born to an aristocratic family. Remarkably, his mother produced nine children in five years, four sets of twins, successively, and then died giving birth to the youngest, George, in 1703. To escape King Louis XIV’s movement of religious suppression, the deBennevilles, well-to-do Huguenot (Protestant) landowners, had fled to London shortly before George’s birth. His father soon died as well, and his godmother, Queen Anne, agreed to raise him in the Royal Court. Anne had recently ascended to the throne as Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland. She was married to Prince George of Denmark and had 17 known pregnancies. Her oldest child, Prince William, survived only for 11 years and died in 1700, so deBenneville may have been a stand-in for the sons she bore who never grew old. From early accounts, he was an unruly handful. Whatever sentiments the Queen may have had, young deBenneville wasn’t around for long. From his autobiography: When arrived at the age of twelve years, I was very wild, believing myself to be of a different mass from mankind in general. As it was designed that I should learn navigation, I was sent to sea in a vessel of war belonging to a little fleet bound to the coast of Barbary with presents, and to renew the peace with Algiers, Tunis, and Tripolis.

Thus dispatched, he was trained and worked at sea in the British maritime service, sailing the Barbary Coast of North Africa. The crew’s mission was to renew trading status with the most important territories still under Ottoman control in the early 18th century. After four years at sea, deBenneville returned to England in 1719. He fell into a year-long depression, which he described, But God who always seeks to convince and save his poor creatures, did not leave his poor wandering sheep; for some time after my return home, being present by invitation at a ball, and having over-heated myself. I ordered my servant to prepare linens for me to change, and as I was putting it on, I fell into a fainting fit, and had a vision of myself, burning as a firebrand in hell, and coming to myself; again, I cried out, ‘I am damned!

From his depression he was roused by a sudden epiphany, a mystical call from God, and he began preaching at the age of 17. The Calvinist Church in England roundly rejected him as a heretic. His sermons found no better reception when he tried his luck in France, where he was condemned to death for his unorthodox beliefs. King Louis XV’s last-minute pardon, citing deBenneville’s royal upbringing, reached the executioner’s scaffold in time to prevent his hanging. He decamped to Holland and then Germany, where he studied herbal remedies for several years and was certified as a doctor, even as he continued to preach radical ideas that routinely got him thrown out of churches.

I suspect all of this would be lost to time, but for what happened next. In Germany, he came down with a fever and was pronounced dead and placed in a coffin. Almost two days later, he revived, claiming to be possessed by a new vision, a gospel of “boundless love for the entire human race.” Over time, he pieced together the notion of universal forgiveness largely from other religions and his own beliefs, and emerged as the spiritual founder whose history the Universalists sought to preserve.

In addition to several historical monographs, his autobiography was translated from French posthumously, with the publisher’s introduction: “A true and remarkable account of the life and trance of Dr. George de Benneville, late of Germantown, (Pennsylvania) who departed this life in March, 1793, aged nearly ninety years. : Including what he saw and heard, during a trance of forty-two hours both in the regions of happiness and misery….”

deBenneville may have had a back-from-the-dead, fevered energy about him, but none of his new sermons on universalism (“Honor the ocean of love…”) were well received. With the means to continue pursuing the messages of his trance, he took his steamer trunk of beliefs and rejections to America, bearing an inchoate view of forgiveness, and arriving in Philadelphia in 1741. He married Jean Bertolet, from a similarly high Huguenot family. He befriended many Native Americans and learned their healing methods, which depended on local herbs and plants. Opening an apothecary in Philadelphia, he preached and continued to practice medicine. His marriage produced eight children, some of whom are buried with him in the family plot.

The Path of a Family Name 

The deBenneville name entered my family through my great-great-grandmother, Esther deBenneville Keim (1827-1889). My father, George Bell, was given deBenneville as his middle name and passed it down to me. He never mentioned the existence of a family burial ground. Nor did my grandfather, John C. Bell, Jr., who was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania for many years and the shortest-termed governor in state history, serving 19 days. Nor did his brother, my great-uncle, deBenneville “Bert” Bell, one of the first commissioners of the NFL and owner of the Philadelphia Eagles. The Maxwell Memorial Football Club still awards the Bert Bell Trophy annually to the NFL’s most outstanding player. These prominent men, along with other de Benneville relatives, were in and out of the city throughout their lives. Many went to the University of Pennsylvania, worked downtown, and likely passed by the family burial ground many times. All are gone now, each buried in their favored churchyards, a few miles from one another, with members of their own families. I’ve convinced myself that they knew nothing of the cemetery because I don’t want to believe that they turned their back on it. This sweet, hidden place.

On my visits I am drawn to the walls and the headstones of children. One in particular is low to the ground in a half-moon shape and marked only “Little Hettie.” The rocks in the walls and the gravestones age with puzzling variety. It’s like trying to understand time itself. The most recent stone was set 114 years ago, marking Anna deBenneville Michener. No deBenneville has been buried here since then. Concerned about the cemetery’s upkeep, she left $2,000 for its maintenance. In 1925, a deed records the sale of the western portion of the burial ground, although it’s not clear how much was paid for that land. That sum, and Michener’s gift, were the only additions to the initial $500 bequest that deBenneville had tendered at its inception over 150 years before Michener was buried there. Two deBenneville relatives who never knew each other, now separated by 20 yards, both silently bearing a family legacy forward. Since then, just the churn of time. The quiet of the most recent 114 years, the city growing louder and more populous around it as cars became more common, their emissions eating into the marble, though not the granite gravestones. The beautiful border walls of Wissahickon schist, bright with flecks of mica, have, in places, dulled to the color of dust. With my finger I scrape at the weakest parts and come away with a hunk of powdery stone. Many times, I imagine, my ancestors must have passed by the tallest border wall abutting North Broad Street by car and never looked up. In our family not a word was passed down. Not a mention of the burial ground at Thanksgiving, or on a weekend car ride, or when we attended services to bury other relatives in other places.

Nothing suggests their ignorance was willful in the way that forgetting needn’t be willful. Enveloped by the same silence we so revere at funerals, failing to be carried on in family stories, the burial ground simply stopped being discussed. It went mute, rarely visited, the tombstones mere relics from a forgotten age that disappeared under the weight of other things.

Taking Control of the Burial Ground 

I had never pondered the question of who owns cemeteries, but I became determined to take control of my own family burial ground. I learned surprising things. Hundreds of years ago, graveyards could fill up fast. Although families were large, life expectancy was short, with high child mortality rates. We have yet to find the deed to the burial ground, this quarter-acre that holds the remains of 124 deBennevilles, although George deBenneville’s will does exists. There is a market for cemetery mergers and acquisitions, with its own network of lawyers, surveyors, and tax specialists. For a time, it seemed, Laurel Hill Cemetery, the 265-acre national historic landmark, was interested in buying the deBenneville burial ground. By law, the cemetery is overseen by the court of Common Pleas, Orphans’ Court Division, because it is a private cemetery with no known heir serving as its trustee.

Two trusts govern the burial ground: Dr. George deBenneville’s and Anna deBenneville Michener’s. The first holds his land and his $500 gift. The second holds her $2,000 gift. I learned that Wells Fargo bank had inherited sole trusteeship of both trusts many years ago after a series of mergers. In my cemetery notebook, I recorded the shorthand of it: deBenneville invests his $500 bequest in Philadelphia city water bonds in 1758. A few generations later, no family member stands as trustee, and The Pennsylvania Company for Insurance on Lives and Granting Annuities is appointed as such. Bank mergers and name changes tumble forward through the next 150 years. More recently, the passing of authority reads like a corporate family tree: First Pennsylvania Bank, Core States, Wachovia, and First Union, in succession, all held the trustee roles for the two trusts. Today, 267 years later, Wells Fargo is the surviving trustee with authority over the burial ground.

So it was Wells Fargo I needed to contact, but what would I say if I could navigate my way to the relevant trust officer? Please cut the grass? I already knew I had my answer in the condition the cemetery had lapsed into. Wells Fargo had lost its interest in caretaking.

A picture from 39 years ago shows a fairly tidy burial ground with several benches for reflection, although the walls were overgrown with ivy and encroached upon by nearby trees. Given the dereliction of the grounds today, I assumed there was no money left in either trust. Yet, as with so much else related to this project, I underestimated the divergent power of time to grow and to destroy. It turns out, if a bank takes a fee for trust administration and another fee for investment oversight annually, and allows significant problems to go untended–trees, walls, fences–and can’t be bothered to cut the grass for years, then voila, you may find $300,000 slumbering comfortably in a line in a spreadsheet in a small corner of your banking empire. For Wells Fargo, this is a speck. No more than a nickel under the couch cushion. When I petitioned the Orphans’ Court to take over both trusts, the bank didn’t object. Especially when I volunteered to show them recent pictures of the cemetery. Out of stubbornness and not wanting to spend a dime of the assets on anything but cemetery improvements, I represented myself legally throughout the year it took to gain the trusteeships. By the time the accounts came under my control, the transferred sums were less. The bank’s lawyers and accountants took their piece, but there was enough to begin the substantial work of repairing and revitalizing the burial ground.

The story of the past ends there, giving way to the long work of restoration. Repairs will take several years. I am learning about insidious root systems, forensic gravestone experts, and how granite and marble headstones age differently from one another. I had the great luck of meeting David Rowland, the president of the Old York Road Historical Society who has been an invaluable partner in this journey. Based on researching birth and death certificates, the Society has amassed the only comprehensive list of those entombed in the burial ground. My cousin Baker Bell, who bears the same relationship to deBenneville as I do, has been enlisted for his wisdom and for the fact that he is one of my last remaining relatives in Philadelphia. For 30 years Shirley and Ed Parks have lived across the street from the cemetery in one of the rowhouses on Green Lane. On a subsequent visit to the burial ground, Rowland and I knocked on their door. “Damn,” Ed said, “You mean someone’s finally going to care about this?” His family had enjoyed the view and lamented the decline of the stones and the crumbling walls. He said the grass used to be cut regularly, but in the last few years no one had shown up to do anything.

The gravestones are oddly distributed. At the east end of the property lay all the deBenneville stones, gathered haphazardly as a clan might if they stood together informally, leaning this way and that, reminding me of the way families depend on one another. deBenneville’s is a large, flat slab flush with the ground. The middle of the cemetery is given to open space, and then, to the west, lie two graves that differ from all the others. Here are the resting places of General James Tanner Agnew, one of only four British Generals from the Revolutionary War period buried on American soil, and Lieutenant Colonel John Bird, also felled in the Battle of Germantown on October 4, 1777. The two soldiers were first interred in Germantown’s Lower Burying Ground, but a year later, British General Sir William Howe, fearing the desecration of their graves after the British withdrew from Philadelphia, secured a secret agreement with deBenneville to move the bodies to the family burial ground. It was known that deBenneville cared for the wounded on both sides, true to his belief about universal love and forgiveness. “Deeds, not creeds,” he had often preached.

Today, a day care center and an auto repair shop share the northern border of the cemetery. It is a dreary landscape of chain-link fences and barbed wire, and despite some early improvements, the cemetery contributes to the melancholy. I think to myself, we have a long way to go to bring it back to what my 7th great-grandfather envisioned. Of all the things that might occupy this spot, a historical cemetery must be among the most unlikely. Yet, it has survived hundreds of winters, the blight of the industrial age, and the exhaust from the traffic that runs ceaselessly along North Broad Street on its eastern border. It occurs to me that it’s done so by turning its back on everything but its own dignity and existence. It speaks to me of patience even as I wonder how to preserve it structurally, legally, and spiritually for another 267 years. I hadn’t expected to gain much from simply wanting the cemetery to look less lousy. Yet, already, it has given me a greater capacity for forgiveness and a reminder of the twin forces of silence and time. There is still time to make it right, I remind myself whenever I visit. There’s still time.

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