Emmanuel Church cemetery
rocked by vandals

By Diane Prokop
Times Staff Writer

For the third time in five years and the fourth time in eight years, vandals have toppled tombstones in the Emmanuel Church Cemetery at 8201 Frankford Ave.
Thirteen large tombstones were knocked from their foundations between Sunday evening, July 20 and Monday morning, July 21, according to Fred Moore, the church sexton/caretaker and president of Holmesburg Civic Association.
"Right down the center lane all the way back to the very last row, they’re just kicked over," Moore said.
Burials in the Holmesburg graveyard date to 1840 and include names of the area’s earliest movers and shakers, including Castor, Hartel, Comly, Ashton, Brown and Rowland.
"This is a pretty old graveyard. The church dates began as a chapel of ease — easy to get to — of All Saint’s Church (Torresdale) in 1832," Moore said.
On Wednesday evening last week, the Rev. John Keefer, Emmanuel’s priest-in-charge, was showing participants in a Bible study class the damage that had been done, as some of their family’s graves had been affected when a youth yelled to them from a passing car.
According to Keefer, the fairly new blue-gray compact car loaded with six youths was driving north on Frankford Avenue and slowing at the light at Stanwood and Frankford, when one of the occupants stuck his head out of the window and yelled, "Oh, so you’re looking at all those tombstones that were toppled over."
The vandalism isn’t easily seen from the road.
"Of course, he said it with a dirty look on his face. It was almost uncanny the fact that they knew," Keefer said of the youths in the car.
Keefer said he doesn’t necessarily believe that the youth was involved in the vandalism, but he said he might have friends that were involved in the escapade.
"He had a look of gloating. He was enjoying seeing us look with some pain at what had been done," Keefer said.
Some of the older stones that Keefer described as thin slabs, were cracked.
Fixing the stones that didn’t suffer that fate is not so easy, either, according to Moore.
"These things are heavy — two-hundred-fifty up to four-hundred pounds. One person can’t do it, two people struggle to do it with proper equipment — a good-size hand truck," he said.
Fortunately for the church, the Travis Memorial company has come to the church’s aid each time, resetting the stones at no charge. The last incident was about 18 months ago, according to Moore.
Due to problems with vandalism, folks can no longer erect large monuments for their loved ones.
"We now require slant face stones twelve to eighteen inches high," Moore said. ••
Reporter Diane Prokop can be reached at 215-354-3036 or dprokop@phillynews.com