WOODLANDS CEMETERY HALS PA-5 4000 Woodlands Avenue PA-5 Philadelphia Philadelphia County Pennsylvania
WOODLANDS CEMETERY HALS PA-5 4000 Woodlands Avenue PA-5 Philadelphia Philadelphia County Pennsylvania PHOTOGRAPHS PAPER COPIES OF COLOR TRANSPARENCIES WRITTEN HISTORICAL AND DESCRIPTIVE DATA REDUCED COPIES OF MEASURED DRAWINGS FIELD RECORDS HISTORIC AMERICAN LANDSCAPES SURVEY National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior 1849 C Street NW Washington, DC 20240-0001 HISTORIC AMERICAN LANDSCAPES SURVEY WOODLANDS CEMETERY HALS No. PA-5 NOTE: This report concentrates on Woodlands Cemetery (1840) and, to a lesser extent, on the grounds of The Woodlands, an eighteenth-century estate from which the cemetery was formed. Readers interested in the site's neoclassical mansion should consult Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) No. PA-1125, especially the 2002-03 "addendum," and its accompanying drawings and photographs. An interpretive division between landscape and architecture, while a practical necessity, is awkward in several respects. On one hand, it violates the unifying principle around which the estate was designed. On the other, it generates overlapping narratives. While the HABS and HALS projects are largely self-contained, a broad understanding of this cultural landscape requires reading them as complementary. Location: 4000 Woodland Avenue, Philadelphia, Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania. Owner: The Woodlands Cemetery Company of Philadelphia. Present Use: Cemetery, tennis courts, equipment storage, and maintenance. Significance: Philadelphia's Woodlands Cemetery occupies the grounds of an estate recognized throughout post-Revolutionary America as a leading example of English taste in architecture and landscape gardening. This was William Hamilton's Woodlands, formed in the late eighteenth century on the low bluff where Mill Creek, now buried, meets the Schuylkill River. The mansion, a National Historic Landmark, has long been the subject of scholarly inquiry.
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