Franklin Square

This guide to Franklin Square in Philadelphia stands you on a mini golf course built directly over a colonial-era burial ground, where a German Reformed congregation buried more than three thousand people starting in 1741. It follows the decades-long legal fight over the land, the 1836 court ruling that stripped the church's claim, and the laborers who buried the gravestones flat rather than move a single body. Sewer diggers, plaza excavators, and pipe layers kept striking bone here across the following decades, in 1915, the 1920s, and again in 1976.