As a hoisting rig slowly removed the 1,200-pound ledger tombstone - cobwebs dangling from the marker's ends - John Hopkins could barely contain his excitement today at the Christ Church Burial Ground.
Hopkins is the church's burial ground coordinator, and workmen were opening vaults in the church's allee, a narrow section of the burial ground that contains 20 large vaults built in the early 19th century and the remains of numerous prominent Philadelphians interred in them.
As the stone rose higher - accompanied by a strong musty smell - Don Smith, executive director of the Christ Church Preservation Trust, exhorted onlookers: "Go ahead, be the first person to look inside for more than a hundred years."
Hopkins' eyes lit up as he looked down into the 36-foot-deep, hand-dug brick vault.
"I see a skull right there!" he shouted.
The vaults were being opened for the first time since they were sealed so that workers could inspect damage to their brick walls. Each vault holds anywhere from two to 20 people, often buried one on top of another.
The burial ground - at Fifth and Arch Streets, three blocks from the church at Second and Arch - is the resting place of more than 4,000 prominent Philadelphians, including Benjamin Franklin and four other signers of the Declaration of Independence. None is buried in the section known as the allee, whose vaults were installed from 1810 to 1835. The last coffin was believed to have been placed in a vault in 1927.
Late last year,, Hopkins noticed a widening crack in one of the vaults. He found that overgrown roots from two sweet gum trees planted near the vaults were cracking the brick walls underground.
He and Smith were concerned that because of the depth of the vaults, eroded walls could cause the narrow pathway separating the two rows of 10 vaults each to collapse.
In previous weeks, workers cut back the intruding roots and installed a fabric bio-barrier underground to keep them from growing back enough to damage the vaults. The work to inspect individual vaults for damage will continue Tuesday, with the allee closed but expected to reopen to the public within two weeks.
Several vaults were found to need repairs, but most seem to have held up surprisingly well. Most of their inscriptions are still legible, which is unusual for marble markers in this region, Smith said.
Those buried in the allee include Peter McCall, mayor of Philadelphia in 1844; George Cadwalader, a Civil War general; William M. Meredith, secretary of the treasury for President Zachary Taylor; and John Cadwalader, assistant secretary of state for President Ulysses S. Grant.
Jessica Baumert, senior conservator of Fairmount Park Historic Preservation Trust, was on hand for today's inspections.
"I've seen burial grounds all over the country and I've never seen anything like this," she marveled.
What makes the allee unique - the only one of its kind in the country for this time period - is the depth of the vaults and intricacy of their brickwork.
And until today, no one had gotten an inside view.
"We have diagrams of the vaults in our guidebooks, but they were just based on estimates," Hopkins said. "These are really different from those drawings."
The diagrams depicted shelves on each side of a vault, and it was thought that the coffins were set upon those side shelves. Now experts have learned that the coffins were actually in the center of the vault, resting on long wooden beams that ran from wall to wall. The coffins were centered one atop the other on the beams, and many beams have decayed so much that coffins have fallen to the bottom.
Hopkins, who has worked at the burial ground for five years, said he can't wait to draw newer, more accurate sketches of the vaults.
"I feel like I can give tours on a more personal basis now that I've been able to see into the graves of people I talk about every day," he said.