The vaults displayed here form part of St. Stephen’s original churchyard built soon after the church was founded in 1823. Judging by the epitaphs and church records, burials spanned the entire churchyard into the late 1870s.

Those interred in the Furness Burial Cloister include a mixed community of founding congregants and newcomers, strangers and extended families, prominent citizens and the church sexton—and residents from beyond Philadelphia who chose to be buried here.

Map of the Furness Burial Cloister Vaults

Click on a vault below to learn more about who is buried there.

Griffith

(Vault 01)

Robert Eglesfeld Griffith bought the ground for their vault, as mentioned above, from Levi Ellmaker in 1830. He too was a founding vestryman of St. Stephen’s, an English-born shipping merchant who was long involved in the Society of St. George, a group that aided needy English individuals and families in the new United States. He and his wife Maria Thong had at least two children. One, his father’s namesake, became an eminent physician, botanist, and conchologist. Their daughter Anne married Pennsylvania senator and businessman Edward Coleman here in 1831. Widowed in 1841, Anne Griffith Coleman donated the window with figures identified as St. Stephen and St. Paul on the northwest wall of the transept soon after it was built in 1878, in memory of her parents. It is possible that she was compensating for the loss to view of her parents’ vault lid when Furness carpeted the transept aisles. This quietly pointed gesture is one of two currently known (the other concerning the Watson vaults, nos. 06-07) that suggest the reaction to the new addition of the families of those buried in the churchyard.

Powell

(Vault 2)

We still know little about the three Powells identified as buried in this vault. There are many by this name or variants (Powel) in the history of Philadelphia and the region who are apparently not related, despite identical first and last names, or who were involved with this congregation.  So we offer what we know in the hopes of more in the future.

Though William and John are not among the recorded early “proprietors” of the church, William appears among the first to be buried here, within the churchyard’s first year. We know because in 1825 his brother John asked the vestry if he could place a head- and footstone over William’s grave (apparently unmarked?), a request that was tabled. The date of the alternative family vault is not known.

John and Catherine’s seven adult children were baptized here in 1846, the year after their father’s death and burial here in 1845.

Though his name was not added to the epitaph, Henry C. Morlish (or Morlich, Morlische)—apparently not a congregant of St. Stephen’s--was buried in the vault on November 27, 1860, according to a sheet added to the Parish Register.

Cragg

(Vault 03)

This impressive multi-hipped tomb, with its lid shaped like a basilica, its gable spanned by the crucifix, is the most elaborate of the nine revealed vaults in the Furness Burial Cloister. It is a tribute by the congregation to the individual lying within, William Cragg, St. Stephen’s sexton since the church officially opened in 1823. In turn, his career traces the history of the congregation. Two baby daughters, among ultimately seven children with wife Hannah, were baptized a month after consecration, providing the first entries in the Parish Register (March 23, 1823). The family was deeply attached to the church and Diocese. Two of their sons were named after the Bishop of Pennsylvania who consecrated the church, The Right Rev. William White, and St. Stephen’s founding rector, The Rev. James Montgomery. The epitaph praising William Cragg’s virtues is the most extensive of any in this section of the churchyard. The sarcophagus, significantly, is for him alone. With the exception of one son who died early in infancy (buried in a female congregant’s vault), his large family, including his wife, is buried elsewhere.

Brown

(Vault 04)

The epitaph for James and Ann Brown, who retired to Philadelphia in 1829 (shortly before both died), emphasizes their lives in the American South during the formation of the United States. James led a varied career as a lawyer and public official in the new territories, states and nation, from Secretary of State for Kentucky to Minister to France just before he retired. He and his wife (known as “Nancy”, daughter of Revolutionary War veteran and influential settler of Kentucky, Col. Thomas Hart) moved to New Orleans in 1805 with Brown’s appointment to successive positions in Louisiana, first as a US territory and then as a new state (1812). He was one of its first senators to Congress, serving twice through 1823 when he was appointed US minister plenipotentiary (ambassador) to France through 1829. Upon first moving to New Orleans the Browns bought a plantation on the nearby German coast, becoming prosperous sugar planters and slave owners in that strategic area. Three of their slaves, Quamana, Kook and Robaine, played key roles in a large but unsuccessful slave uprising in the area in 1811. The couple continued to own part of the sugar plantation and its slaves, their major source of income, until they died. The epitaph highlights James Brown’s home as Louisiana. Yet when the couple first arrived here, urged by Ohio Quakers, James Brown purchased, with Stephen Duncan, a major slaveholding Mississippi planter from Pennsylvania, 400 acres in Ontario, Canada, for settlement by free American blacks fleeing discrimination in Cincinnati, Ohio. The resulting short-lived community, the Wilberforce Colony, prefigured others such as the Elgin settlement.

The Browns’ residence in Philadelphia was unexpected and reluctant. Their plan to overwinter here in 1829-30 on their return to Kentucky from France, where his diplomatic mission had ended, collapsed with worsening health and financial troubles. Nancy’s death in late 1830 devastated James. He spent his remaining years in Philadelphia, ailing and in straitened circumstances, trying (unsuccessfully) to settle their estates for their heirs, her family, since their children had died early. It is not clear if they became congregants of St. Stephen’s. His recorded funeral and burial here, and the vault inscribed to both, nonetheless challenges a report that they were buried at Christ Church despite their absence from that parish’s records.

The sequence of their mention on the epitaph is noteworthy. James, who died after Ann, is identified first and most elaborately. Whether composed by him or his executor, the epitaph may have been engraved after both died or the dates were added upon their demise regardless of chronology.

Ellmaker

(Vault 05)

Levi Ellmaker was a founding vestryman of St. Stephen’s, an influential international shipping merchant and arts patron in Philadelphia who died in February 1835 at age 46 in a carriage accident.  He is perhaps the most visible burial-exchanger. After being granted one of the plots in the “lender” parcel in 1824, in 1830 he sold a second burial ground, immediately to the east of the current vault, to the Griffiths, who now rest there. The vestry’s complaints about Mrs. Ellmaker’s “arrangement” of “her” vault months after her husband died suggest it was built at his untimely death. Thirty years later, his family moved his remains to family plots in Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill Cemetery when Mrs. Ellmaker died in November 1866. It is not clear who, if anyone, succeeded him or currently lies within the vault.

Watson

(Vaults 06-07)

Two nearly adjacent burial vaults harbor three generations of the extended Watson family, ranging from children who died young to elderly members. The family had deep roots around Burlington, NJ and married into families from that region who similarly had business in Philadelphia and were congregants at St. Stephen’s (the Pauls and Edward Shippens).

One vault contains the remains of a founding member of the congregation, the family matriarch Hannah Paul Watson, who purchased it in 1828. She is identified in the epitaph as the “relict” [widow] of John Watson, who died in 1811 and is not buried here. She is interred with her daughter Mary Ann Watson, the first in this family to die and be buried at St. Stephen’s. Mary Ann allegedly died in 1827, soon after the church was founded and cemetery opened. Hannah’s husband John Watson owned the Chestnut Street Wharf that served the shipping trade on the Delaware well into the nineteenth century.

The other vault, just to the north, houses the family of one of their sons, William Inman Watson, including his son-in-law, James Aborn Farnum, a “commission” merchant to shippers. Farnum is the last of this family to enter the family vault.

With the construction of the transept, the family also contributed a large bronze plaque honoring the generations whose vaults now below the floor were no longer longer visible. It is a privilege to return them to view and closer physical access, accompanied by the plaque that marks their disappearance. 

Duval

(Vault 08)

Very little is currently known about Lewis Duval, an original member of the congregation. He was a Philadelphia businessman of the first decades of the 19th century from a family in Germantown, a German settlement incorporated in Philadelphia shortly after he died in 1851. Many know Duval for his marriage, in 1821, to Adeline Maria Peacock, the older sister of the celebrated Cornelia Peacock Connelly, now on the Vatican’s formal quest for sainthood.

Together with a tomb in the Parish House vestibule for another relative (Isabella Montgomery Bowen) and markers for box pews held by the Duval and Peacock families, this inscribed vault bears witness to the extended Peacock family’s tenure at St. Stephen’s during the church’s first years. A family with shifting religious affiliations over the decades, they may have been attracted to this new church by relatives in authority there: its founding rector, Rev. James Montgomery, and his brother Austin, who married Adeline and Cornelia’s half sister Isabella. The Duvals were baptized at St. Stephen’s after their children--as adults, with other Duval family members, Cornelia, and sister Mary Cecilia in 1831.

Duval interred his earliest known children (whose names, if any, are not recorded) in St. Stephen’s churchyard soon after it opened, in a parish common vault which he then bought as an exclusive family repository in December 1825. It is not clear whether they are children with Adeline Maria (by that date they had three) or from a prior marriage, since the church waived burial fees for his “wife” that year too, when Adeline Maria was still very much alive.

The Duvals’ last recorded ritual activity at the church was in 1837, the funeral for their infant twin sons. Though speculative, for all its family connections, St. Stephen’s, then a high-church congregation, might be considered a preliminary doctrinal step in this extended family’s move towards Roman Catholicism. The Duvals move to Cincinnati, Ohio, in the late 1830s, where they both converted to Roman Catholicism in the 1840s. Lewis reportedly died, as mentioned, in 1851; Adeline, in August 1855.

Where they are buried is not yet known.

Levis

(Vault 09)

Hosea Johns Levis was yet another founding vestryman of St. Stephen’s, in office through 1840. He was also a high-level officer, Cashier and eventually President, of the Schuylkill Bank. Amidst the international financial crisis of the 1830s and 1840s (the so-called Panic of 1837), Levis became embroiled in a sensational fraud case that took years to resolve. He and the bank were accused of interstate bank fraud in 1839. In 1840 he resigned his job and fled to France under an alias until he returned in 1842 to testify, with protection against prosecution. In the 1850s until the year before his reported death in 1868, he was listed in the Philadelphia Business Directory as a gentleman residing at various addresses in the city.  His widow Hannah and at least one daughter also continued to reside here.

The epitaph proposes a close family in a vault established during his lifetime. His relationship with the first listed on the epitaph, Rachel Harland and her infant son John, is not clear, however. Her death and burial took place at St. Stephen’s in 1848, not 1818 (as the epitaph reads); her son’s funeral nine months later occurred in 1849, not 1819. The names and life dates on the slab for Levis, his wife Hester, son James Ash (one of their several children), and daughter-in-law Rebecca Flickwir suggest they are buried within, though parish records do not include funerals for any of them here. If buried here at her death, Rebecca Flickwir’s death date marks her as one of the last to be interred in this section of the churchyard before Furness’ transept covered it.

As it is appears here now, this lidded vault only hints at its condition when we found the slab, stored broken in the basement, and the vault in poor condition. To judge by the epitaph, the vault survived the burial of the troubled family father. What happened?