It's the sort of thing you'd never expect to see.

Standing on the western bank of the Delaware River, beneath the Betsy Ross Bridge in Philadelphia,

there's something unusual beneath the waves, and some days when the tide is very low,

they expose themselves to observant travelers.

Now it's easy to assume it's just a pile of stones, and in some ways that's exactly what it is.

A man-made breakwater built by the same people who built the bridge back in the early 70s,

but the stones they used were actually headstones from a real centuries-old burial ground.

They came from an area about 10 miles to the northwest, on the west side of the campus of

Temple University. In fact, if you stand on the front steps of the Temple Performing Arts Center

and look across the street, you can still see a low stone wall. It is all that remains of

monument cemetery, a burial ground that fell out of use in the 1920s before it was purchased by

the University in 1956 to allow for some much-needed campus expansion.

Disposing of the headstones was the easy part. It was the 28,000 graves that were much more

problematic to relocate. Notices were sent out to living relatives of the people interred there,

and roughly 8,000 of them came and took their loved ones to new locations,

but over 20,000 graves seemed to have been forgotten, so the university moved them to a mass grave

in a newer cemetery north of town. It's an interesting story for a lot of reasons. For one,

knowing your track and field complex is built on the site of an old graveyard,

a graveyard whose headstones now help protect a nearby bridge is a great topic to pull out at parties,

and for that, you're welcome. But it's also interesting for another reason. It shows us with

perfect clarity how people tend to handle the past. We want progress, we want change,

we want to move further down the cultural road, and sometimes the past can hold us back,

...