Walk through the gates at North Seventh Street and you won’t find a quiet backlot of forgotten stones. You’ll find 85 acres of rolling hills, winding paths, and more than 42,500 people buried beneath them — including a man who signed the Declaration of Independence and a colonel killed in one of America’s most famous battlefield charges.
This is Easton’s largest green space. It’s also one of its oldest.
By the late 1840s, Easton had a problem many growing American cities faced. The dead were buried in small family plots and church graveyards, unregulated and increasingly crowded as the city’s population grew — in 1832, Easton had roughly 3,700 residents packed into five or six hundred dwellings, mostly clustered south of Northampton Street. In 1848, Dr. Traill Green — a physician and Lafayette College chemistry professor — toured cemeteries across Pennsylvania to study how other communities were solving the same problem. He returned convinced Easton needed something different: a large, planned cemetery built in the “rural” style then spreading through American cities, designed less like a burial ground and more like a public park.
Green and a board of twelve prominent citizens secured a charter from the state on April 5, 1849, and Easton Cemetery was born. Green served as the cemetery’s president for more than four decades, and a statue near the entrance still honors that legacy. The design reflected a broader movement in American cemetery planning, one that began with Mount Auburn Cemetery near Boston in 1831 and spread to cities like Philadelphia before reaching Easton. The goal wasn’t just to bury the dead — it was to give a crowded industrial city a place for reflection, recreation, and quiet green space, a place families would visit on weekends the way they might visit a park.
The cemetery grew in stages. Thirty-four acres were acquired and laid out first, with another fourteen added by 1870. Later additions brought the total to roughly 85 acres, bounded by Bushkill Creek on two sides and set on high ground overlooking the city — now part of Easton’s West Ward.
Among those buried here is George Taylor, an Irish-born ironmaster who signed the Declaration of Independence. Taylor died in 1781, decades before the cemetery existed, and was later reinterred here, where an obelisk and eternal flame now mark his grave. Also buried here is Colonel Charles A. Wikoff, a Lafayette College graduate and Easton native who became the highest-ranking United States Army officer killed in the Spanish-American War, struck down during the fighting near San Juan Hill in 1898. His funeral drew a massive local response, with businesses closing and residents lining the streets as his procession moved through the city he grew up in. His monument still stands in Section M.
In 1990, the cemetery was added to the National Register of Historic Places, recognized for its landscape design, architecture, and funerary art. Today it holds more than 42,500 burials, including over 3,000 military veterans spanning conflicts from the Revolutionary War through Vietnam. It remains an active cemetery, with new burials still taking place alongside monuments more than a century and a half old.
Historic Easton Cemetery is more than a burial ground. It’s a record of how a growing 19th-century city chose to honor its dead while giving its living residents a rare public green space — a place designed from the start to serve both purposes at once, and one that still does today, sitting as Easton’s largest stretch of open land more than 175 years after Traill Green first proposed it.
The cemetery remains open to the public every day from dawn until dusk. Visitors walk the same paths past Gothic Revival gates, a 19th-century chapel, and monuments spanning nearly two centuries of Easton history.
Information for this episode was sourced from the Historic Easton Cemetery’s official history website, the National Register of Historic Places documentation and the Lehigh Valley Live’s coverage on Easton Cemetery.
