All Bones Considered

Lex presents the life stories of the women buried in two Pennsylvania cemeteries.

In this companion volume to his monthly podcast All Bones Considered: Laurel Hill Stories, the author explores two large cemeteries in southeast Pennsylvania: Laurel Hill East and Laurel Hill West. East covers 78 acres, with 11,000 family plots, 33,000 monuments, and more than 75,000 interred bodies. West, located across the Schuylkill River, occupies 187 acres, has 270 family mausoleums, and nearly 100,000 dead—it still hosts around 200 burials per year, so that number is steadily growing. (These are vast populations, as Lex notes, comparable to those of cities like Allentown or Scranton.) In these pages (with accompanying unflattering illustrations by Wilhelm), the author tells the stories of some of the hundreds of women from the last three centuries buried in these cemeteries, ranging from historical figures to more contemporary people. In each case, he devotes a few hundred words, based on his research expanding on the meager details of headstones or mausoleum walls, to fleshing out the histories of these women. Readers get glimpses into the lives of people like Nellie Neilson (1873-1947), described as “Medievalist, Scholar, Athlete.” Neilson was the first woman to publish an article in the Harvard Law Review, and in 1943 became the first woman president of the American Historical Association. While there are limits to what can be gleaned from historical records (“I cannot find where Nellie Neilson did her primary education,” Lex writes, “but she majored in Greek and English in the relatively new Quaker college of Bryn Mawr, founded in 1885”), the fuller picture presented here is definitely one of a real, knowable person.

This sense of history in these pages is only enhanced by the author’s digressions about his own career in medicine, which is grounded in the long history of medicine in Philadelphia—Lex notes that in 1841, Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Hospital became the first hospital in the world to have a separate department for physical medicine—a practice that would come into its own when “the American Civil War opened the eyes of organized medicine to the need for rehabilitation for the tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians” wounded during the conflict. The book’s greatest asset is the author’s skill at fitting a great deal of compelling biographical information about each of his subjects into a compact space. The profile of art connoisseur Bernice “Bonnie” McIlhenny Wintersteen is a perfect example; Lex documents her accomplishments, but also includes ample dashes of her personality (when questioned by a reporter in the 1970s about how she planned to dispose of her substantial collection of Picassos, for instance, “she said that she would have given them to the Philadelphia Museum of Art if the museum’s former director, Evan Turner, had treated her a bit nicer”). “To remember these women is not just to honor their memories; it is also to recognize their contributions to our community,” Lex writes, summing up the book’s central thesis. “Many of them defied familial and societal expectations to advocate for change in a time when their voices were marginalized and felt to be of lesser value.”

An episodic but fascinating collection of biographies of the women buried in Laurel Hill Cemetery.