Landmarks with Leon is now also known as Lehigh Valley Landmarks. I'm your host, Rachel Leon, and president of the City Council in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Each week, I'll share a short feature with a big story commemorated with a historical marker that explores a person, place, or an event important to the Lehigh Valley.
In 1901, the city of Easton demolished an entire colonial-era cemetery to build a public library. Nearly every grave was dug up and relocated. But city officials made one unusual exception: two graves were left exactly where they were, on the ground that would become the library's front lawn. One belonged to the man who had designed the streets of Easton itself, a century and a half earlier.
William Parsons was the surveyor who laid out the city of Easton, Pennsylvania, in 1750 — a shoemaker turned self-taught mathematician whose friendship with Benjamin Franklin shaped his entire career, and whose grave still rests on the grounds of the library built where his adopted town's oldest cemetery once stood.
Parsons was born in England on May 6, 1701. His family emigrated to Philadelphia while he was still young, where he apprenticed as a shoemaker. In his off-hours, he taught himself mathematics with such intensity that he caught the attention of Benjamin Franklin. In 1727, Parsons joined Franklin's Junto, a small club of tradesmen and self-taught scholars who met on Friday evenings to debate ethics, politics, and natural philosophy — a club that would later grow into the American Philosophical Society. Parsons also served as librarian of Philadelphia's first subscription library from 1734 to 1746, all while continuing to run his shoemaking shop on the side.
Parsons' mathematical skill translated directly into surveying work. His first professional surveys date to 1730; within a decade he had impressed Pennsylvania's land office enough to be appointed Surveyor-General of the entire province in 1741, succeeding Benjamin Eastburn. He held the post for seven years, laying out the town of Reading among other assignments, before resigning in 1748 due to failing health and the physical hardships the position demanded of him.
In 1750, acting on instructions from Thomas Penn, Parsons surveyed a wedge of land at the confluence of the Lehigh and Delaware Rivers and laid out the streets and central square of a new town he named Easton. When Northampton County was formally created two years later, in 1752, Parsons moved his family there and hired roughly twenty laborers to grade the streets, dig a well, and lay out a cemetery of their own — the same cemetery where he himself would one day be buried.
As the French and Indian War reached the Pennsylvania frontier, Parsons was commissioned a major and took on a new role inspecting the province's chain of defensive forts. In May 1756, he personally toured Fort Henry and Fort Swatara in Berks County, filing detailed written reports on their condition directly to Lieutenant Colonel Conrad Weiser, the province's chief Indian affairs negotiator and militia commander during the war.
Parsons never fully recovered his health. He died in his newly built Easton home on December 22, 1757, having lived in it for less than a year. Franklin, learning of his death from London, wrote to a mutual friend that Parsons had been 'a wise Man, that often acted foolishly' — an odd, affectionate epitaph for a man Easton would come to call its founder and, in time, its father.
In 1901, Easton demolished the German Reformed Church cemetery where Parsons was buried to build a new public library. Nearly every grave was relocated to Easton Cemetery. Parsons' was one of only a few left in place. His grave remains today close to the grounds of the Easton Area Public Library, alongside the Parsons-Taylor House he built, still maintained by the Daughters of the American Revolution as a historic site open to visitors.
Information for this episode was gathered from John W. Jordan, ‘William Parsons, Surveyor General, and Founder of Easton, Pennsylvania,’ The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 1909; A.D. Chidsey Jr., ‘William Parsons: Easton’s First Citizen’; the Daughters of the American Revolution’s Parsons-Taylor House archive; Find a Grave; Wikipedia’s Fort Swatara and Fort Henry entries; and the Marx Room local history blog of the Easton Area Public Library.
