Finally! A Visit to St. Stephen’s latest cemetery purchased in 1866
Tomb of Rev. Dr. William Rudder, Laurel Hill Cemetery
On a gorgeous, brilliant winter day last week, with temps just below freezing, I drove to Laurel Hill Cemetery to seek the burial site of St. Stephen’s third rector, The Rev. Dr. William Rudder, in the church’s plot there. Why then? To honor him on the date of his death in 1880. This was, I blush to confess, the first time (thanks to help at the office) I’d been able to find the property, which turns out to be embarrassingly accessible, near the main entrance: a spit of flat land across the inner cemetery road at the bottom of Section L that otherwise snakes up the familiar hill. It’s a spacious site (over 4,000 sq. ft.), whose urban setting, fronting busy Ridge Avenue, echoes that of the church itself.
Fig. 2 Portrait of Dr. Rudder
Commanding center stage, apparently the “rector’s domain,” Dr. Rudder’s tomb monument is by far the most elaborate of three (others for an associate rector, The Rev. Frederick B. Kearle, who died in 1921; and for celebrated healing minister, Dr. Alfred Price, who died, long retired, in 1992). It’ll take another trip, with a pen that doesn’t freeze, to read and transcribe the eroded or moss-covered inscriptions on Dr. Rudder’s monument.
Dr. Rudder died prematurely at fifty-seven after sixteen years as rector, following several as assistant, when he effectively led the church as well, with Dr. Ducachet’s shift, in his final years, to serving as chaplain for the new Burd Orphan Asylum in West Philadelphia administered by St. Stephen’s.
Much happened under Dr. Rudder’s leadership. In his first year as rector (1865-6), the church bought the property at Laurel Hill Cemetery, where they transferred remains from its 13th Street cemetery that it had outgrown, then sold (yes, we told archaeologist Doug Mooney!). Soon after the church bought and repurposed buildings to the east as its new Community House, centralizing congregation activities as never before.
In 1870, Rev. Rudder led a citywide campaign, with congregant Dr. Wilson Cary Swann, which funded and built public water fountains throughout the city to provide safe drinking water for laborers and working horses. Those additions radically reduced the summer epidemics that still decimated humans and horses in Philadelphia within the first year. In 1878, pressed for space for its burgeoning congregation and activities, thanks to Dr. Rudder, the church hired Frank Furness to design and build a transept and vestry room over the original cemetery to the north.
Dr. Rudder died shortly after Furness’ addition was completed. The large plaque on the church’s south wall commissioned as a memorial to him is elegant and sophisticated, a brass tablet with polychrome patination and emblematic decoration that recalls some Gospel covers. The whole deserves study. Come see and share your thoughts.
Fig. 3 North wall and transept designed by Frank Furness
Fig. 4 Dr. Rudder’s brass memorial plaque
It’s hard to see, in the impassive expression of Dr. Rudder’s formal rector’s portrait shown in Fig. 2, the charismatic leader and preacher who so affected the congregation and citizens beyond. He was characterized then as a compelling orator with firm opinions and beliefs backed by hefty intellectual authority. Consider the vestry’s eulogy for him in their minutes of February 2, 1880, which portrays him as “endowed with lofty, intellectual power, an inimitable fluency of expression and faculty of cogent reasoning, with all the oratorical attributes, and an impressiveness of manner once observed, never forgotten. . . . “ He was, the eulogy continued, “conservative in his instincts, rigid in his view of Church polity, and with the courage of his opinions, strict in construction of Law . . . fearless in debate. . . . “
A formidable force indeed. . . .
—Suzanne Glover Lindsay, St. Stephen’s historian