All Bones Considered: Laurel Hill Stories
Brief biographies of permanent residents of Laurel Hill East in Philadelphia and Laurel Hill West in Bala Cywnyd, Pennsylvania. Often educational, always entertaining.
Episodes
BBB:LHWS #057-1 Rudolph Hennig...
...was a German born master of the cello who was the Philaldelphia Orchestra's first cello soloist after he had already been painted by Thomas Eakins. A century after his death, his portrait was again in the news.
BBB:LHWS #057 Three More LHW Musicians
- Rudolph Hennig was the first cello soloist for the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1901; a few years earlier, Philadelphia artist Thomas Eakins had represented him in oils as The Cello Player, which was used as a bargaining chip more than a century later.
- Winston Samuels McGinnis was a moderately successful Jamaican ska and rocksteady performer who sang backup in one of reggae's fi...
ABC:LHS #087-5 Rev. William Smith...
...was a Scottish-born Anglican who impressed Benjamin Franklin with his ideas about higher education and set up the skeleton and backbone of what became the University of Pennsylvania today, but he made few friends and is little remembered today
ABC:LHS #087-4 Hilery Baker...
...was a German immigrant who became two-term mayor during the time when the city was also the nation's capital. He established the first city police force and was the first "Officer Down" in the city's history.
ABC:LHS #087-3 Alexander Murray...
... came from a family that was part of the Scottish diaspora to the New World after the Jacobite Rebellion in the early 1700s. Born in Maryland, he was a ship's captain before he was out of his teens and rose to become a Commodore in the Navy. By the time he retired, he was a battle-hardened veteran with years at sea.
ABC:LHS #087-2 Thomas Godfrey...
...was one of the New World's first native inventors. While working as a glazier, he was intrigued by the reflection and refraction of light through a shard of glass. This led to his invention that made life on the seas easier and safer, and saved thousands of lives in the process.
ABC:LHS #087-1
The concept of "celebrity corpses" to attract customers to a cemetery was nothing new. People had been digging up other people for years for legal, political, religious, scientific, and other reasons, so why not for commerce? Many transportable cadavers have made interesting journeys to their final resting places.
ABC:LHS #087
Even in death, some people don’t rest easy. Someone always wants to dig them up and move them. Though Laurel Hill East opened in 1836, several of its 18th-century dead were buried elsewhere first.
First, I trace the many reasons people exhume the dead. And there are plenty.
Thomas Godfrey invented a lifesaving navigational instrument. Buried first on a Germantown farm, he was later pursued by Laurel Hill as one o...
BBB:LHWS #056 George Gerbner...
...was a Hungarian refugee and combat survivor who grew up through the start of European Fascism during the 1930s. His discovered that the power lay with those who controlled the narrative and tell the stories. He used violence as an example to spread his message, but a deeper reading shows that his concerns were that American media were starting to resemble the prefascist state he had kn...
River Section starts at the BODE plot
Join me on an audio guided tour of the River Section of Laurel Hill West, one of the original four segments when the cemetery opened in 1869. You won't miss and of the fancy mausoleums or Tiffany studio stained glass, since they came later.
You will meet the Father of Scientific Management and the Mother of Mother's Day, the man who literally changed two sports and his sister who wrote fo...
ABC:LHS #086-4 Drews and Barrymores...
...are among the best-known acting families in the United States. Although many of them started in an alternate final resting place, Louisa Lane Drew, owner-manager of the Arch Street Theater found a final resting place at Mount Vernon. Several years later she was joined by the ashes of her grandson John Barrymore, aka "The Great Profile." Thomas Keels tells their story.
With the warm weather here, you can take advantage of Laurel Hill's location as part of the Trails System that connect the Cynwyd Heritage Trail to the Wissahickon trail system. If you have walked or ridden your bike through West Laurel Hill Cemetery from the entrance just off the Cynwyd Trail all the way to the Pencoyd exit on Righter’s Ferry Road, you have probably passed dozens of mausoleums and gravesites that you had que...
With the warm weather here, you can take advantage of Laurel Hill's location as part of the Trails System that connect the Cynwyd Heritage Trail to the Wissahickon trail system. Your walk or ride from the Righters Ferry entrance to the Barmouth entrance at the Cynwyd Heritage Trail is less than a mile, but you pass scores of grave markers and dozens of mausoleums, most with stained glass. This 47-minute narration gives you mi...
ABC:LHS #086-3 William Potter & Frederick Vanuxem...
... were brothers-in-law and best friends. Potter served as President of Thomas Jefferson University for many years despite the lack of a college degree. Vanuxem left a legacy for Princeton which is still celebrated.
ABC:LHS #086-2 Charles & William Kindred...
...became rich men in railroad land speculation. There is a town named for them in North Dakota. They broke quite a few rules along the way.
ABC:LHS #086-1 Francis Thomas Lilly Sully Darley...
...was the grandson of the famed portrait painter and married the daughter of locomotive manufacturer Matthias Baldwin. He wrote operas, played the organ, conducted choirs, but his art collection was staggering.
ABC:LHS #086 for May 1, 2026
I was tied up with preparing some new tours and could not finish the podcast on the Bible Riots of 1844. I scrounged around and found a few scripts I had written and never used. And then I remembered a segment that Thomas Keels recorded for me for an abandoned project.
Francis Lilly Sully Darley was the grandson of a great portrait painter who married the daughter of Matthias Baldwin and became th...
ABC:LHS #085-5 Samuel Perkins...
...was the driving force behind getting the job done at City Hall. He established a close relationship with architect John McArthur, Jr., and sculptor Alexander Milne Calder, who honored him with a series of playful marble cats tucked away in the south entrance vestibule.
ABC-LHS #085-4 John Christian Bullitt...
...was a native Kentuckian who was pro-slavery, but who made his career as a Philadelphia lawyer. His constitutional knowledge and skills led to him rewriting the City's Charter, which immediately became known as The Bullitt Bill. He also helped clear Fitz John Porter of his court martial charges 15 years after the fact. His statue has stood at the northwest corner of City Hall f...
ABC:LHS #085-3 John McArthur, Jr....
...was a Scottish immigrant who specialized in huge buildings that were meant to last a long time. When his massive Philadelphia City Hall was finished, it was the largest building in the Western Hemisphere. Sculptor Alexander Milne Calder honored him with a representation as SCIENCE in the eastern portico. He is naked ... and buff.
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