York’s City Cemetery monument has been installed!
While we have the community’s attention, we’re launching phase 2: An additional $5,000 fundraiser to landscape, adding flowers to beautify this space. Give us a boost at Preservation PA.
an Unveiling ceremony took place on Saturday, March 9th at York’s City Cemetery. We commemorated this installation of this new monument with a dedication to the 800+ buried here, of which only 270 names are known.
Watch THIS YDR video that shows the installation of the monument.
Contact Jamie at JamieTyson2442@gmail.com with inquiries.
The Friends of York City Cemetery invite you to support the installation of a memorial that will at last provide public recognition to the 800+ people who were buried without markers at the cemetery often called Potter’s Field or Penny Heaven.
When someone died, the city physician would coordinate the paperwork and the engineer would locate and identify the burial site. Then a public works crew dug and filled in the grave.
In 1897, York City exhumed over 600 bodies from West College Avenue between South Beaver Street and South Cherry Lane, moving them to a new location; their final resting place along Schley Alley and W. 7th Ave. in North York. Close to 200 more people have been interred here since then, with the last known burial taking place in 2004.
All the KNOWN names have been cast in aluminum for a plaque that has been installed on the front of the granite monument. There is also a plaque describing the history and significance of Penny Heaven.
access our working list of names here.
access the full report of the Ground Penetrating Radar HERE.
Articles about Project Penny HEaven
- Witnessing York: WWII Veteran moved from York City’s Cemetery to Indiantown Gap National Cemetery
- Witnessing York: Class division, even in death
- Witnessing York: Feuding over a baby’s death: When people can’t afford a gravedigger
- Witnessing York: DIY work in old York cemeteries, unsung memorials and weedy lots
- YDR: Restoring York’s potter’s field: This volunteer practiced do-it-yourself urbanism
- YDR: Official unveiling to ‘honor and dignify’ York’s potter’s field will be March 9 at 10 a.m.
- York Dispatch: ‘Deserve to be remembered’: York College students research those interred at potter’s field
- York Dispatch: Gone but no longer forgotten-Project Penny Heaven in York
- Fox 43: ‘Project Penny Heaven’ aims to keep an unseen past alive
- Wandering in York County Blog: Project Penny Heaven: What started as a pretty view took on a much graver meaning
- Wandering in York County Blog: It’s more than a grassy field, City Cemetery bears 800 unmarked graves
- York Town Square Blog: York’s Potter’s Field exhumations center of early dispute about disease
- YDR: P.T. Barnum’s ‘Fiji cannibal’ died in York in 1872 – and the body disappeared
- Facebook: “Negro turning white”: The headline of the 1927 York Dispatch article about Samuel King
- WGAL: Local NBC affiliate honors Jamie Noerpel in this 8 Who Care segment about Project Penny Heaven.
- WGAL: New memorial in North York cemetery remembers those who died poor and abandoned
FRIENDS OF YORK CITY CEMETERY
- Jamie Noerpel, Ph.D., Wandering in York County, Witnessing York, Chair
- Samantha Dorm, Friends of Lebanon Cemetery
- Tina Charles, Friends of Lebanon Cemetery
- Dr. Joy Giguere, Pennsylvania Chapter of the Association of Gravestone Studies
- Jack Sommer, President Historic Prospect Hill Cemetery Heritage Foundation