Christ Church Burial Ground

This guide to Christ Church Burial Ground in Philadelphia opens with the summer of 1793, when residents began collapsing with black vomit and yellowing skin and doctors blamed rotting coffee and foul air rather than the mosquitoes swarming every puddle in the city. It traces the graveyard back to its 1719 opening, and the roughly four hundred fever victims who ended up buried here among more than four thousand graves, including five signers of the Declaration of Independence. Benjamin Franklin was already three years in the ground by the time the epidemic hit, and his flat marble stone in the northwest corner still draws visitors who toss pennies onto it.