Philadelphia — Old City & Independence
Washington Square
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
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Transcript
Washington Square is peaceful enough to conceal its earlier uses. In the eighteenth century, this was the city’s southeast square and served for burials, including poor people, strangers, soldiers and victims of epidemic disease.
During the Revolutionary War, thousands of soldiers who died from wounds or disease were buried in or around this ground. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier of the American Revolution, installed much later, turns that diffuse burial history into a national commemorative focus.
Disease deserves more attention in revolutionary history. Armies did not lose people only in heroic battle. Crowded cities, military camps and inadequate sanitation made illness a constant threat. Smallpox in particular shaped military planning, and Washington eventually ordered large-scale inoculation of Continental troops.
The square also shows how cities repurpose difficult land. A burial ground becomes a landscaped park; later monuments teach visitors how to interpret what lies beneath.
Philadelphia’s founding sites tend to celebrate documents and debates. This square restores bodies to the story. Political independence required people to survive war, disease, supply shortages and uncertainty — and many did not. The quiet landscape is partly the product of forgetting exactly how crowded with death this area once was.