Laurel Hill Cemetery

Laurel Hill Cemetery is in the East Falls neighborhood of Philadelphia, on a slope overlooking the Schuylkill River. Founded in 1836, it was the second major rural cemetery in the United States, after Mount Auburn in Massachusetts. It holds more than 33,000 graves on over 11,000 family lots, many marked by marble and granite monuments, sculpted hillside tombs and mausoleums.

John Jay Smith, a librarian and editor, started it after he was troubled by how his daughter had been buried in a damp city burial ground. He wanted a rural cemetery on dry ground. The commission chose John Notman, whose design followed the terrain with terraces stepping down to the river. Notman also designed the gatehouse, a massive Roman arch framed by a classical colonnade and topped with a large ornamental urn.

From the start it was meant as a civic space. Before public parks, museums and arboretums, it offered everyone a place for art and green space, and by the late 1840s it was hugely popular: one writer reported nearly 30,000 people entering its gates between April and December of 1848. It is an accredited arboretum with over 6,000 trees and shrubs of 700 species. It joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1977 and in 1998 became the first cemetery in the United States named a National Historic Landmark.

In front of the gatehouse stand three sandstone statues called Old Mortality, bought in 1836 from the Scottish sculptor James Thom. They show Walter Scott talking with Old Mortality, an elderly man who traveled the Scottish Highlands re-carving weathered gravestones, and his pony. The cemetery's owners saw their own task the same way: keeping the grounds in perpetual care so that future generations remember the dead.

The Yellow Fever Monument, built in 1859, honors the doctors, druggists and nurses who fought the epidemic in Portsmouth, Virginia. Hundreds of military figures rest here, including 40 Civil War-era generals. In 2013 a bronze Civil War soldier called The Silent Sentry, stolen from another cemetery in 1970 and later recovered, was installed and rededicated at Laurel Hill.

Film crews have used the grounds as well. The tombstones of the fictional Adrian Balboa and Paulie Pennino from the Rocky films sit near the main gatehouse, and the cemetery appeared in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and Law Abiding Citizen in 2009.