Southeast Square

Washington Square began as Southeast Square, one of five public squares in William Penn's plan for Philadelphia, and for most of the 18th century it was the city's potter's field. Penn patented it in 1706 as a public graveyard for the poor. Free and enslaved Africans were buried in it, along with suicide victims, people with no church and strangers to the city, and in 1763 more than 60 Native Americans who had died of smallpox. Before the Revolution, Black Philadelphians gathered in the square, sometimes to guard their dead from being dug up for Dr. William Shippen's anatomy lectures. A 19th century historian recorded that on fair days and holidays as many as a thousand came to dance after the manner of their several nations in Africa.

During the Revolutionary War it became a military burial ground for both British and American soldiers. On 27 January 1777 Deborah Norris described soldiers' coffins laid in shared pits, forty or fifty to a hole, and in April 1777 John Adams walked the ground and was told it held upwards of two thousand soldiers. The yellow fever epidemic of 1793 filled what space remained with more than 1,300 victims, and the city closed it to burials in 1794.

From 1815 the square was laid out with public walks, and in 1825 it was renamed for George Washington. By oral tradition, Black Philadelphians called it Congo Square. In 1957 the city dedicated the Tomb of the Unknown Revolutionary War Soldier on its west side, designed by G. Edwin Brumbaugh around a bronze cast of Jean Antoine Houdon's statue of Washington. The tomb holds remains disinterred from beneath the square: a soldier, though whether American or British is uncertain.