HistoricSiteMarkers
Colonial AmericaAmerican Revolution

Old Swedish Burial Ground

Chester, Delaware County, Pennsylvania

Marker Inscription

Site of first St. Paul's Episcopal Church, built in 1702. The grave of John Morton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, is located just south of here.

Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission

The Story

This ground in Chester marks the site of the first St. Paul's Episcopal Church, built in 1702 in one of Pennsylvania's oldest settlements with roots in New Sweden. Just south lies the grave of John Morton, the Pennsylvania delegate whose vote helped tip the colony toward independence and who signed the Declaration of Independence.

Why it matters

As the resting place of a signer of the Declaration, the old burial ground connects a colonial immigrant community to the founding of the nation.

The story behind this marker

AI context

The era

Chester sits in one of the oldest corners of Pennsylvania, in a stretch of the Delaware Valley that Europeans had already begun settling before Penn's colony was chartered. This was once the country of New Sweden, where Swedish and Finnish colonists planted farms and worshiped along the river decades before English rule. Those early immigrant communities left a lasting imprint on the land and its faith.

By the opening of the eighteenth century, the region was a settled, church-going place. When a house of worship rose here in 1702, it belonged to a community with deep roots — people whose parents and grandparents had crossed an ocean to make a life on the Delaware.

Over the century that followed, this quiet ground on the edge of a river town would become tied to one of the largest events in the nation's history: the decision of thirteen colonies to break from Britain and declare themselves free.

People & events

The marker records that the first St. Paul's Episcopal Church stood on this site, built in 1702 — a place of worship serving one of Pennsylvania's oldest settlements. Around such early churches grew the burial grounds where a community laid its generations to rest.

Just south of here lies the grave of John Morton, and his is a name worth pausing over. Morton was a Pennsylvania delegate to the Continental Congress, and he was among the men who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 — putting his name, and with it his fortune and safety, behind the cause of a new nation.

Morton's vote is remembered as one of the pivotal ones in Pennsylvania's divided delegation, helping to move the colony toward independence at a moment when the outcome was far from certain. That a signer of the founding document rests in this old riverside ground gives the place a quiet gravity.

Its place in the American story

Every signature on the Declaration of Independence was an act of courage, made by men who understood they might be branded traitors. To find the grave of one of those signers in a modest churchyard, rather than a grand national monument, is a reminder that the Revolution was made by real people rooted in real communities.

The site also joins two threads of the American story. One is immigration — the Swedish and Finnish settlers whose presence on the Delaware predated English Pennsylvania and helped shape this region's earliest identity. The other is founding — the birth of the United States, embodied in the man buried here.

Together they tell a very American truth: that a nation built by immigrants was declared free by their descendants and neighbors, and that the two stories are inseparable. This ground holds both.

If you visit

This is a place for quiet reflection rather than spectacle. Come to walk an old burial ground and to stand near the resting place of a man who signed his name to American independence.

Look for the marker's guidance toward Morton's grave, just south, and take a moment there — it is not every day you stand beside a signer of the Declaration. Read the surrounding stones, too, if you can; they carry the names of a community whose history reaches back to Pennsylvania's very beginnings and the early Swedish presence on the Delaware.

It makes a natural stop on a tour of historic Chester, and it pairs well with the town's other early landmarks. Give yourself the unhurried few minutes such a place asks for — the story here is old, layered, and best felt standing still.

Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.

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Related people

  • · John Morton

Related events

  • · Signing of the Declaration of Independence

Themes & tags

American RevolutionImmigrationChurch

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