Honoring the dead this week, from Monday’s Halloween to Thursday’s All Souls’ Day, directed me to a special zone at St. Stephen’s with a question honed by troubled visitors: Why, in recently creating the Furness Burial Cloister,* did we include our dead within a space for the living? 

Some visitors shunned the Cloister out of fear, they admitted. Another protested that we’d deprived the dead of their deserved “rest in peace” by featuring them as displays. I hope this answer helps.

Other Episcopal churches include burials, some with elaborate monuments for their clergy or bishops near altars and more with simple tombs for just “us” amidst worshippers. Philadelphia’s Christ Church, for instance, offers several in the aisles, as originally intended, with engraved slabs that meet our gaze and feet. 

St. Stephen’s is different. In our effort to honor the wishes of those buried in the visible vaults, we had to confront radical change to their intended setting. 

These vaults originally formed part of St. Stephen’s adjoining churchyard that was added soon after the church’s consecration in 1823. Bordered by three streets, this intimate space was visible on three sides through delicate grill fences and accessible through a gate beside the church entrance. Those buried here wanted their vaults to be seen from the streets, to be visited within the churchyard, and themselves to be acknowledged, if not remembered. They counted on remaining part of the community across time. On consecrated ground attached to God’s house, this was a shared space for the living and the dead, not just for the dead.

When in 1878 the growing parish decided to expand the “living” activities of the church here rather than to move, they retained the cemetery—though they’d acquired a larger offsite burial zone at Laurel Hill Cemetery--but covered it with additional buildings. Most tombs disappeared. Some markers survived within the new annex’s tiled vestibule floor. Frank Furness’ new transept floor included the taller vaults’ lids but covered them with box pews or carpets. In 1989, when the box pews were removed from the church’s ground floor, the entire area was carpeted. The departed were physically present but inaccessible and lost to view and memory—except where families installed wall memorials marking their invisible tombs nearby.

In uncovering the tombs beneath the onetime transept in 2017-9, we reaffirmed the departed as present amongst us. We went even further: We included their intended setting. The glass floors over the exposed sunken vaults were designed and lit to feature the original cemetery ground around them. The cemetery was “restored” even if only in fragments and within the expanded church--but once again part of community. 

We produced biographies of individuals and families buried there to recover their identities and stories. As St. Stephen’s foundation, this early 19th-century generation emerges, through its stories, as remarkably mixed, some admirable, some tragic, some compromised. 

The small group thus encapsulates our range and similarities as humans. Sharing the same space, if from different historical and existential planes, we acknowledge their existence and embrace our bond as fellow travelers through life and time. Wandering around each vault at our feet, as in the original cemetery, we “walk” that journey together.

— Suzanne Glover Lindsay, St. Stephen’s historian and curator

*To learn more about the Furness Burial Cloister, click here.