Graveyard arboretum
The graveyard at Old Kennett Meetinghouse dates also from the early eighteenth century. It is graced with many massive historic trees, including two Pennsylvania champion trees, sassafras and Aeschylus.
The earliest burials were not permanently marked; wooden stakes marked graves until they decomposed. Our earliest stone markers were installed over a century later by descendants after the tombstone strictures were lifted. Most gravestones are simple and modest in keeping with Quaker principles. There is a mass grave for the Hessian soldiers who died in the Battle of the Brandywine of 1777.
We have opened a green burial area where the school used to be. It is planted in native wildflowers and meadow grasses.
Old Kennett Meeting House Cemetery
While people have been buried at Old Kennett since its founding in 1710, early Quakers did not allow stone headstones to mark graves. Wooden stakes, which would eventually decompose, marked graves until the 1840s, when rules loosened to allow gravestones. At that time, some earlier graves were marked posthumously. Quaker minute records housed at Swarthmore and Haverford College indicate the deaths of members but not where they were buried.
In 1800, the USS Ganges intercepted 2 illegal slave trader ships and brought them to Philadelphia. After quarantining, the 126 enslaved Africans were put in the care of the Abolition Society of Pennsylvania. They were placed in indenture or apprenticeship programs for 7 years to learn trades and to read and write. Many took the surname Ganges, and lived in this area, and their descendants are buried in the lower right orsoutheast quadrant.
Battle of the Brandywine September 11, 1777: The Hessian casualties who fought alongside the British were buried in a mass grave now marked by a stone and a German flag. State Street Meeting House graves: When the Kennett Square Meeting House was moved to its current location on Sickle Street to make way for a public library, the adjacent graveyard on State Street was disinterred and moved to this cemetery, marked by a bench along the north border.
In 1910, a tornado ripped through, tearing off the roof of the meeting house and uprooting many trees. The largest of our remaining old trees are labeled with their species name. An Aesculus (Ohio buckeye) and a Sassafras are Pennsylvania champions. In 2025, it was recognized as a Level 1 Cemetery Arboretum.
Early Quakers emphasized the importance of education in an era without public schools. The school that once stood in the northeast quadrant was pulled down when public schools were established, and a green burial meadow was created in its place. It is planted with native grasses and flowers.