Every Memorial Day weekend, Delaware County empties out toward the shore. The traffic backs up on Route 1, the grills come out, and summer unofficially begins. It’s easy, in all of that, to let the day pass as just a day off.
But slow down in the right places, and Delco tells a different story; one written in granite and copper, in flags placed at dawn, in bells rung once for each name on a list of 185. Across the county, memorials, cemeteries, and veterans’ posts hold the line on what this holiday actually means.
Here are seven places worth visiting this Memorial Day.
Delaware County Veterans Memorial, Newtown Square
Standing at the intersection of West Chester Pike and Alice Grim Boulevard, the Delaware County Veterans Memorial stops you in your tracks if you let it.
Nine 18-foot granite columns rise from the grounds, engraved with the names of fallen soldiers, Wounded Warriors, and POWs alongside words from the Presidents and Generals who sent them to war. Personalized pavers from local families line the walkway. A fountain at the center keeps a constant, quiet flow.
None of it exists without one act of private generosity. When the project was proposed in 2013, a man named Claude de Botton and his family donated the land that made it possible. The memorial now honors thousands.
Lawn Croft Cemetery, Linwood
Before the long weekend fully arrives, small American flags begin appearing beside veterans’ graves at Lawn Croft Cemetery in Linwood.
The cemetery has welcomed the dead of every major American conflict since the Civil War, its 80 acres holding more than a century of local military history. Walking among those flags, it becomes clear how many Delco families have sent someone off to war.
American Legion F.A. Scott Post 777, Crum Lynne
For nearly eight decades, the F.A. Scott Post 777 on Walter Street in Crum Lynne has been the kind of place that does the quiet work of remembrance without much fanfare, with honor guards, ceremonies, and community events that keep Memorial Day from becoming just a sales weekend.
Veterans organizations like this one are often overlooked in favor of monuments and parades, but they are frequently the ones making sure neither is forgotten.
Arlington Cemetery, Drexel Hill
Founded in 1895 and stretching across 130 acres, Arlington Cemetery in Drexel Hill has been receiving Delaware County’s dead for well over a century. Around Memorial Day, flowers and flags fill its sections, and the sounds of the surrounding neighborhood drift in over the fence, a reminder of the living world just outside.
One grave here deserves a specific mention. Harry O’Neill played catcher for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1939 for just one game, a single appearance in the major leagues, before enlisting in the Marine Corps. He was killed at Iwo Jima in 1945, one of only two Major League Baseball players to die in combat during World War II.
His story is a means of correcting the way we sometimes think about war memorials as places of abstraction. These were people with careers, ambitions, and box scores. Full lives, cut short.
Market Square Memorial Park, Marcus Hook
Each Memorial Day weekend, Marcus Hook’s Market Square Memorial Park along the Delaware River hosts the annual Delaware County Vietnam Veterans Memorial Service. One hundred and eighty-five names are read aloud, and after each one, a bell rings.
The ceremony has a cumulative weight that sneaks up on you; by the time the last name is called, the repetition has done its work.
St. Denis Cemetery, Havertown
St. Denis Cemetery in Havertown has been receiving the dead since 1822, making it one of the oldest Catholic cemeteries in Delaware County. More than 200 years later, it is still active and home to more than 100 documented military veterans.
On Memorial Day weekend, families arrive with flowers and find their own private rituals of remembrance in the early morning quiet, before the rest of the day takes over.
The Soldiers and Sailors Memorial, Media
The annual Memorial Day parade in Media marches down State Street and ends at the Delaware County Courthouse, but most of the crowd never walks around to the east side of the building.
They miss the Soldiers and Sailors of Delaware County Memorial, a copper standing-soldier statue that has been there since 1903. It was placed to honor the Delaware County men who fought in the Civil War, and it has been keeping watch ever since, through every war that followed and every Memorial Day parade that ended just around the corner.
This Memorial Day, before the traffic backs up and the grills come out, consider making one of these seven Delaware County stops; not out of obligation, but because these places have been waiting quietly all year for someone to show up.
_______
