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- Visit Historic Fair Hill -
We encourage you to visit this beautiful site on a work day, a special event, or by reservation.
Tours are given for descendants, school groups, others interested in Quaker history, Underground Railroad/Abolition, and women's history.
- Summer Hours -
Starting Saturday, May 31, 2008, we will be open every Saturday from 12-3 and on Sundays from 3-6
- Community Days 2008 -
July 19 - Summer Festival
October 19 - Fall Clean-Up We welcome volunteers to help with community projects and to work on the site.
We are open the second Saturday of April, July and October from 10am-1pm and Sunday afternoons June-October 3-6pm. Bring groups and tools to to pick up trash, work on the flower beds and vegetable gardens, mulch and compost, and return displaced stones to their rightful places.
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Famous People Buried at Fair Hill
The Fair Hill Burial Ground Corporation is the final resting-place of several well-known members of the Religious Society of Friends and advocates of social justice
Lucretia Mott
Lucretia Mott (1793-1880) was born and raised on Nantucket. She moved to Philadelphia and married James Mott in 1811. They had five children. Lucretia Mott was a recorded minister in the Society of Friends who was known for her eloquent words. She was also active in the abolitionist movement and early women's rights movement in Philadelphia. Lucretia organized the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. She lectured to the U.S. Congress and to President John Tyler against slavery in 1845. She helped many escaping slaves through the Underground Railroad and assisted Harriet Tubman from 1849-1860. After the Civil War, she advocated for the rights of the freedmen. Lucretia was also involved very early in the women's rights movement. She was one of the five women who planned the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848.
For more information about Lucretia Mott, check out the following links for:
Robert Purvis
Robert Purvis was sometimes called the president of the Underground Railroad. An ardent abolitionist, he founded the Vigilant Association in Philadelphia in 1837 to aid fugitives. From 1837 to 1844 this group coordinated all slave rescues in the area. Meetings were often held in Purvis's own house at 9th and Lombard Streets, and sometimes travelers were housed there as well behind a trap door that led to a secret hiding place. Records tell us that between June 9 and September 8, 1941, the Association sent 117 refugees on their way.
News that Purvis was sheltering refugees caused mobs to gather about his house on several occasions. In 1842, when the city was rocked by the worst race riot in history, an angry crowd surrounded his house for forty hours.
Purvis was a close friend of Lucretia and James Mott. He was a founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society and of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, serving as its president for five successive terms. After the Civil War, he worked on reconstruction in Washington for some years, then took an active role in Philadelphia reform politics. He died in 1898.
Anna Jeanes
Anna Jeanes (1822-1907) is widely remembered in African American communities all over the rural South for the Jeanes Fund, which she established in 1907. This fund, based on an original gift of over a million dollars, was set up for the improvement of rural elementary schools for African Americans. Jeanes teachers were hired to travel to all the schools in a county, helping the local teachers organize classes in domestic science, gardening and carpentry.
The Jeanes teachers contributed to the schools in other ways, often serving as informal social workers. For thirty years they provided a precious ingredient, hope, to small black communities. In 1937, the Jeanes Fund merged with the Slater Fund to found the Southern Education Foundation, which has continued to do much good work.
Anna Jeanes philanthropy shows in other ways as well. The Jeanes Hospital in Fox Chase was established as a result of a large gift in her will, and in 1896 she gave $200,000 to set up eight Quarterly Meeting homes for elderly Friends. In one of these, Stapley Hall in Germantown, she spent the last years of her life.
Anna Jeanes was a small woman, weighing less than one hundred pounds, with an indomitable will. She was interested in the sciences, studied art, and wrote a book on liberal religion. She also published a volume of poetry. When she discovered that she had inherited a fortune as the surviving member of a large and prosperous family, she set about giving her money away with great care. She is buried with her brothers and sisters at Fair Hill.
Ann Preston
Ann Preston was a pioneer woman doctor who devoted her life to medical education for women.
Born in 1813 in West Grove, Pennsylvania, the oldest daughter and second of nine children, Ann grew up in a family of abolitionists. She attended a Quaker school in West Grove and later a Quaker boarding school in West Chester. Needed at home because of the ill health of her mother, Ann joined the Clarkson Anti-Slavery Society. Through these activities she met Lucretia Mott, with whom she established a life long friendship. After her brothers grew up, she taught school and wrote stories and poems for children.
In 1847, at the age of 34, she enrolled herself as an apprentice in the office of Dr. Nathaniel Mosely, and after two years of apprenticeship began applying to medical colleges. She was turned down because she was a woman. In 1850, a group of Quakers organized the first women's medical college, at 227 Arch Street, called the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania. Ann Preston enrolled in the first class and graduated the following year. In 1853, she was appointed professor of physiology and hygiene and in 1866, she became dean of the College- the first woman to hold this post. Under her leadership, the College trained the first African American and the first Native American woman doctors in the country.
Ann died in 1872 and was buried at Fair Hill, though her grave was later moved to West Grove.
Sarah Pugh
Sarah Pugh was a schoolteacher who devoted her life to the abolition of slavery and advancing the rights of women.
Born in Virginia, she moved to Philadelphia at the age of three when her father died, and spent her life in this city. She attended Westtown boarding school for two years, and in 1821 began teaching at the Friends School connected to the 12th Street Meeting
At the time of the separation between the Hicksite and Orthodox Quakers, 12th Street became Orthodox, and Sarah resigned and started her own school, which she ran for most of her life.
When the English abolitionist George Thompson spoke in Philadelphia in 1835, Sarah was converted to the immediate abolition of slavery. She joined the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society and became its presiding officer for many years. She was also a member of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society.
In 1838, the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women held its first meetings at the newly constructed Pennsylvania Hall. When that building was burned to the ground by an angry pro-slavery mob, Sarah was one of the women who escaped by walking out, two by two, one black woman and one white woman, arm in arm. The next day, the convention met at Sarah's schoolroom and pledged to expand their relationships with black men and women.
After the Civil War, Sarah became interested in establishing schools for the freedmen and worked for the Pennsylvania Woman's Suffrage Association. She died in 1884 and was buried at Fair Hill.
Mary Ann McClintock
Mary Ann McClintock was one of five women who planned the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, at the Waterloo home of her sister-in-law Jane Hunt. The next day, the women met at her house and framed the famous declaration of women's rights, the first such document in the world. Mary Ann attended the conference and was thereafter active in women's rights.
Born Mary Ann Wilson in Burlington, New Jersey, of Quaker parents, she attended Westtown School in 1814 for one year. In 1820, she married fellow Quaker Thomas McClintock, a druggist and Biblical scholar, and moved with him to 107 South Ninth Street, his store in Philadelphia. Here, their children Elizabeth, Mary Ann, Sarah and Julia were born.
Both McClintocks were active abolitionists. In 1827, Thomas was the first secretary of the Free Produce Society, which encouraged the abolitionists to buy goods not produced by slave labor through Free Produce stores. In 1933, Thomas participated in the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society and Mary Ann in the creation of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery society four days later. She helped with the Society's first Anti-Slavery Fair in 1836.
In 1837, the McClintocks and their children moved to Waterloo, New York, where they helped for form the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society. The McClintocks returned to Philadelphia in 1876. Shortly afterward Thomas died and was buried at Fair Hill. Mary Ann remained active until her own death in 1884.
Edward Parrish
Edward Parrish (1822-1872), was the first President of Swarthmore College. He left behind a prosperous career as a pharmacist, teacher and author of a textbook on pharmacy in 1864 to devote himself to the founding of Swarthmore College. He spent a large part of the next four years traveling Pennsylvania on horseback to raise money for it.
Sadly, his term was a short one. Only a year after the college was founded, he received word from major donor, Martha Tyson of Baltimore, that she strongly disapproved of his policy allowing male and female students to mingle in hallways and dining halls. Three months later, he was forced to submit his resignation as President.
Within the next two years, Parrish's wife Margaret, also buried at Fair Hill, passed away. While recovering from his grief, he accepted an appointment from General Ulysses S. Grant to join a Commission at Fort Still in the Oklahoma Indian Territory to try to settle difficulties with the Indians in that area. There, he contracted malaria which proved to be fatal.
The keenest tragic element of Parrish's short term as college president was that he was an excellent teacher who took a personal interest in his students and reflected the kind of attitudes that make Friends schools and colleges successful today.
Harriet Forten Purvis
Harriet Forten Purvis (1810-1875), was prominent in both the antislavery movement and the women's rights movement in the nineteenth century.
Daughter of James Forten, a well-to-do African Amernican sailmaker, Harriet Forten grew up in a home dedicated to both reform and culture. Both John Greenleaf Whittier, the poet, and William Lloyd Garrison were frequent visitors. Harriet's mother, Charlotte Forten, ran a successful school which Harriet and her three sisters attended. All were accomplished writers, and all belonged to several black female literary societies.
In September 1831, Harriet married Robert Purvis, a wealthy African-American who had been educated at Amherst Seminary. The two ultimately had six children. Robert, also a supporter of women's rights, hired abundant household help, permitting Harriet to continue to work on social concerns.
In December of 1833, Harriet became a founding member of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, along with her mother and sisters. In 1838 and 1839, she was a delegate to the American Convention of Anti-Slavery Women held in Philadelphia. The 1838 Convention was marred by a riot and the burning of Pennsylvania Hall. One reason given was the mixing of white men and black women. The case cited by a rioter was actually that of lightskinned Robert Purvis accompanying his darker skinned wife.
Harriet also became a prominent member of the Female Vigilant Society, which raised money for clothes and transportation for refugee slaves, some of whom were hidden in the Purvis house in Philadelphia. The house was so often surrounded by angry and threatening mobs that in 1842 the Purvises moved to a spacious home in Byberry, across from the Byberry Friends Meetinghouse. Here Harriet entertained many of the most prominent abilitionists of the day. Although Byberry seemed far out in the country, Harriet continued to commute to Philadelphia to attend meetings of the many reform groups to which she belonged, as well as lyceums and lectures, until her early death in 1875.
