Aaron Palmer

Palmer is an English surname meaning palm bearer, alluding to someone who went to the Holy Land and brought back a palm leaf or branch as proof of their journey. It has deep and widespread roots in colonial Philadelphia, illustrated here by a list of Palmer marriages in just one church in the city from 1722-1803. 

A colonial governor and merchant named Anthony Palmer owned 200 acres north of the original city limits and founded the community called Kensington. He set aside some of it as a burial ground in 1732 which is known today as Palmer Cemetery.

 

The Palmer Burials

Here at Mount  Moriah, Aaron’s immediate family occupies a plot in Section 121 on the Yeadon side while a large number of unrelated Palmers are in Section 142. In fact, an undocumented story is told that the first grave on the Yeadon side of the cemetery was someone buried in that section whose name was Palmer.

Researching the family name revealed another clan of Palmers with roots centered around the Quaker Meeting House in Concordville in the western corner of Delaware County. In 1913, a group of 36 others with that name were moved from Trinity Cemetery in Philadelphia to Section 154, but none of the names appear to directly connect with Aaron’s ancestors. 

Those ancestors of his, including parents, grandparents, and several others, are buried within the boundaries of Mount Moriah in a small family plot that was actually here before Mount Moriah was founded.

The Palmer Burial Ground occupies only about 1500 square feet of land which protrudes into the backyard of 1320 Angora Avenue and into the northwest corner of the Naval Plot. This tax map shows the cemetery property in green where it borders the houses on Angora in blue. The only remaining evidence of the burial ground today is one side of what surely was a four-sided stone wall. It can be seen here with space for what used to be a gate. 

Also occupying some graves here were some in-laws named Owen, Jones, and Worrell. A few documents refer to it as the Owen and Palmer Cemetery, with either 28 or 30 graves. A map of the plot and a survey of the grave stones was made in 1936, cataloging what was inscribed on each stone. Six of them were either illegible or missing. (See the complete list here.) Today, unfortunately, they’re all missing. There are 35 memorials found under “Owen and Palmer Burial Ground” on the Findagrave website, so there are probably some duplicates.

 

The Palmer Lineage

Aaron was the son of Joseph (1795-1873) and Hannah (1802-1883) and was named after his grandfather, whose mother’s name was Mary Hibberd. She had received 130 acres (including the current cemetery land) from her mother, Sarah Bradshaw Hibberd. It was bequeathed to her from her uncle, Samuel Bradshaw (1663-1701), who bought 222 acres on August 10, 1682 from William Penn, the proprietor of colonial Pennsylvania.

This was the area west of Cobbs Creek and east of today’s Church Lane in the northeast corner of Darby Township. Now it is part of Yeadon which was incorporated as a borough in 1893. The first school in this area was built in 1811 and named the Palmer School.

Aaron’s grandfather and his six siblings inherited all this land from their parents, John and Mary Hibberd Palmer. Portions were eventually acquired by his brother Moses, as seen on this map from around 1840. (The street labeled Palmers Road is now Church Lane, and by 1900 none of those large tracts were owned by anyone named Palmer.) 

After Moses and his wife died, his sons sold part of his tract to a man named James Raymond in 1857. He sold it a year later to the Mount Moriah Cemetery Association. An early photo of the newly acquired cemetery property shows a barn still standing there.

Another part of John and Mary Palmer’s story is they built a home in 1774 which remains to this day at 605 Rockland Avenue. It’s surrounded by a neighborhood of mid-to-late 20th century homes, just a few hundred feet from the cemetery’s boundary behind Angora Avenue. Reflecting their Quaker convictions, the Palmer House was a safe house on the Underground Railroad. 

 

The Aaron Palmer Story

Aaron, son of Joseph, was a farmer like his father, and some of their land was across Cobbs Creek due east of Mount Moriah’s Yeadon property in the county of Philadelphia (which merged with the city in 1854.) Joseph listed his occupation in the 1860 census as “master farmer” with real estate worth $40,000 and a personal estate of $5,000. Ten years later those numbers were $70,000 and $20,000 respectively. 

Aaron was 45, single, and a farmer according to the 1870 census, while his father was a “gentleman,” a term for those who didn’t need to work. The farm is shown on this 1872 map under “Jos. Palmer,” shaded in light blue. Like previous census reports, the Palmer household included live-in domestic help and farm labor. Joseph died in 1873.

An interesting fact from the 1880 enumeration is on the page before the Palmer listing. Living around the corner on a street called “Mount Moriah Lane” was Elizabeth Connell and her family. A tract of land in her name is shown here in yellow. Her husband, George, co-founded the cemetery and her son and grandson were the de facto owner/operators for the next 60 years. Read more about the Connell dynasty here.

Sometime after his father died, Aaron became an active member of the Protestant Episcopal Church. In 1879 he was baptized, at age 53, at St. James Kingsessing Church. A short time later he became a lay deputy there and then, in 1882, a vestryman, similar to what other denominations describe as an elder or trustee. (Common surnames of his fellow church members included Bonsall, Paschall, Crozier, and the Connells from Mount Moriah, whom he certainly knew well.)

The year 1883 was a tough one but not just because there was a theft of some chickens, as described here. Aaron’s sister, Lydia, died in June and his mother died in December. Lydia was buried in Section 113, perhaps because it overlooked the creek and Aaron’s property just beyond it. Hannah was buried beside Joseph in the Palmer Burial Ground.

The 1880 census recorded Aaron’s marital status as widowed, but there is no documentation to confirm a marriage. However, New Jersey records show he married Elizabeth Belcher Taylor on February 17, 1886 in Camden. That stands in contrast to facts that confirm a daughter was born years earlier. 

Was she a child born out of wedlock, or could she have been birthed by his first wife who may have died during or after childbirth? No date of birth was ever recorded and she doesn’t appear on any census, but the girl’s obituary from 1896 is shown here. Using this information, her birth must have been between February 14, 1880 and February 13, 1881. But the 1880 census, taken in June, places Aaron, age 55, in the city while a separate enumeration for Delaware County lists 19-year-old Elizabeth at her parents’ home in Darby Borough. For her to get married and give birth in that year would be highly unlikely.

Meanwhile, Aaron became $14,000 wealthier in 1885 when he sold eight acres of his farmland to the Baptist Orphanage. Their new property was between Cobbs Creek and 58th Street and bordered by Thomas and Whitby Avenues. The obituary above reveals the Palmers were living at 6717 Woodland Avenue and it appears he was no longer interested in farming. In 1898 he sold several hundred acres described as “Grays Lane and Whitby Ave.” for $146,000, or $5.6 million in today’s money.

After years of living his life a certain way, Aaron had to make some adjustments to married life, especially with a houseful of children. After Annie there was Mary (1887-1955), James (1888-1911), Irene (1889-1973) and Aaron (1893-1917). The lives of both boys were cut short by tuberculosis, and everyone except Irene was buried at Mount Moriah.

Aaron missed his 80th birthday by six months and lost his life due to uremia from kidney failure. Had he been born 100 years later he might have been treated by dialysis or a kidney transplant. There was no published obituary and no record of a will after his death. A brief item in the newspaper was published two weeks later stating that his will “disposes of property valued at $42,000 in private bequests.” That figure no doubt excludes whatever bank accounts and other financial assets were left.

He must have provided well for his family. Elizabeth, who just turned 44 when Aaron died, saw Mary and Irene get married before she had to bury both of her sons. She moved a few doors down to 6732 Woodland (even closer to St. James church) and lived with Irene’s family until 1931 when she joined Aaron here and was added to this gravestone.

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Thanks to Robert Johnson, a Palmer descendent, for his genealogical research.