Twelve burials by Riverton’s old fish cabin

What the newspapers actually reported

Workers grading the Delaware River bank on Henry A. Dreer Company land found the first skeleton near Captain Albert Faunce’s fish cabin. The Philadelphia Inquirer of February 24, 1897 counted five full-sized skeletons after the workers opened a trench. Physician Alexander Marcy Jr. described one skull as fractured and one burial as comparatively recent. His observations could not establish who the person was or how the injury happened.

The February 28 Inquirer follow-up counted twelve after the digging continued. The reports mention an engraved Dutch pipe bowl but no identified personal effects. The remains were boxed for reburial; the inspected articles do not give a documented list of names or a confirmed later burial site.

A clue from Spring Grove Farm

In the March 6 Inquirer and Weekly News clippings, Wallace Toy said his father Isaiah, the former owner of Spring Grove Farm, had spoken of burying twelve men there. Wallace described Isaiah’s work as a justice of the peace and said unidentified people found in the river or nearby were buried on his land. The matching number makes this an important contemporary lead, but it is a son’s account of his father’s practice, not an individual identification for each set of remains.

Initial newspaper theories also proposed Native American burials, fishermen, Dutch sailors, or victims of violence. Those were contemporary guesses. Neither a pipe bowl nor one fractured skull proves a massacre, and the Historical Society of Riverton’s 2015 reconstruction treats the Toy explanation as a possible answer rather than a complete identification.

Another riverfront discovery, a different question

Human remains were found behind a Bank Avenue home in 2014. A 2023 Historical Society of Riverton update based on an interview with a state forensic anthropologist says that pit held commingled fragments from at least five people, including a young child. There is no evidence in the sources inspected that these were the same people discovered in 1897. The 2014 location is private property and is intentionally not mapped here.

Read the landscape

The society’s 1847 and 1849 map comparison places the old fishery on the west side of Pompeston Creek near the Delaware. The modern map pin is an area reference for that shoreline, not the excavation, a grave, or a public access point. Use the historic maps and the later Dreer nursery story to follow how the ground changed.