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| >HOME >PLACES TO GO >SQUARES | |||||
Washington Square Luxuriant grasses, watered by a stream that cut across the northeast corner, made the Southeast Square a favorite grazing site for local farm animals. But it was not pasturage that future president John Adams meditated upon when he stopped at the square in 1777. Speaking to a local sexton, Adams learned that this square, long used as a potter's field, had become the final resting place for over 2,000 Continental soldiers, sailors and British prisoners, many of whom had died in a prison across the street. Wounds, camp fever, and small pox had all contributed to the toll. Later historians surmised that more Revolutionary dead were buried here than at any other place in the nation. After the Revolution, victims of the city's yellow fever epidemics were interred here, and the square was used for cattle markets and camp meetings. In 1815, when the city began to improve the grounds, French botanist Francois André Michaux planted trees in the square. One can still see its unusual variety of tree species - a "really admirable city arboretum," in the words of one 19th century observer. In 1825 "Southeast Square" became Washington Square in tribute to George Washington. As the surrounding area became a fashionable residential neighborhood, a movement arose to build a memorial to Washington. The original plans, however, never proceeded beyond the laying of the cornerstone. Later that century, legal firms moved into the area, and in the first half of the 20th century Washington Square became the center of Philadelphia's publishing industry. Popular books, medical texts, and magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post and Ladies' Home Journal were published from offices around the square. Two major attempts to build on the square have been unsuccessful: an 1805 plan by the University of Pennsylvania to place its medical school there, and an 1870 proposal to use Washington Square as the site for City Hall - an idea rejected by city voters who chose Penn Square instead. Beginning in 1952, public donations helped finance a remodeling of the square and construction of a memorial, not only to Washington as an individual but also to the legions of Revolutionary soldiers and sailors buried beneath the sod. The 1950s design, principally by architect G. Edwin Brumbaugh, endures today. It features an enclosure of brick walls modeled on colonial churchyard walls, with pillars supporting globe-like ornaments at the entrances. Lamps based on a style invented by Benjamin Franklin line the walkways, which form an inner square with wide diagonals. The diagonal paths meet at a circular pool in the center. Holly, dogwood, azaleas, and other small trees and shrubs combine with taller trees to give the appearance of a quiet colonial grove. To the west side of the central pool, Brumbaugh created a multi-part memorial to the Revolutionary dead. A stone backdrop bears the inscription "Freedom is a light for which many men have died in darkness." Before this stands a life-size statue of Washington by Jean Antoine Houdon, a French sculptor who was considered one of the most distinguished neoclassicists. The sculpture is a 1922 bronze cast of a marble original dating from about 1790 - the only full-length statue of Washington modeled from life. The general's left hand rests on a column of fasces, the classical bundle of rods that symbolizes official authority and political unity. At the end of the statue's feet a sarcophagus holds the remains of an unknown Revolutionary soldier. A memorial flame burns in front, and lining the silver-paved flagpole are fourteen flagpoles designed to bear battle standards or other flags representing the original thirteen colonies and the unified nation they formed. A five-day archeological search in 1956 uncovered the unknown soldier's remains in the northwest section of the square, where coffins had been stacked one on top of the other in huge burial pits. One skeleton was carefully exhumed and transferred to the memorial sarcophagus. The inscription reads: "Beneath this stone rests a soldier of Washington's army who died to give you liberty." Other Points of Interest: There is an earlier and much simpler memorial in the northeast section of the square: a stone erected in 1900 by the Daughters of the American Revolution, with a plaque citing the many American soldiers who died as prisoners in local jails and were buried in these grounds. Nearby is a more cheerful monument in the form of a living tree: the Bicentennial Moon Tree, a sycamore planted in honor of the nation's Bicentennial, grown from a seed carried to the moon by Apollo astronaut Stuart Roosa. |
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