Aerial survey · USDA NAIP · public domainA hillside mass grave for more than 500 Continental soldiers who died in Bethlehem's wartime hospital, now marked by a Tomb of the Unknown Revolutionary War Soldier.
1st Ave & W Market St, Bethlehem, PA 18018
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free to view. The Tomb of the Unknown Revolutionary War Soldier monument stands on a public hillside; there is no admission or formal cemetery enclosure.
Access
Limited Access
Sloping hillside between a residential neighborhood and Route 378; the monument sits on uneven ground.
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1776 · Burial site of more than 500 Continental Army soldiers who died at Bethlehem's wartime hospital (1776-1778) · Marked by a Tomb of the Unknown Revolutionary War Soldier, reinterred 1932 · One of the few documented mass graves of Revolutionary War soldiers in Pennsylvania
Bethlehem was founded by the Moravians in 1741, and its large communal buildings made it useful to the Continental Army. On two occasions during the Revolutionary War, from December 1776 into early 1777 and again from September 1777 to spring 1778, Washington's medical officers commandeered the Single Brethren's House as a general hospital. The wards were severely overcrowded, holding as many as 700 patients at points, and the combination of war wounds and disease, including what contemporaries called putrid fever, was deadly.
Moravian leader John Ettwein recorded burials of the dead on a hillside above the Monocacy Creek, in the area now overlooking Route 378. Accounts and the site's monument cite more than 500 soldiers buried here, many of them from Virginia and Maryland regiments. The exact dimensions of the burial ground are unknown; the Pennsylvania Historic Preservation Office has suggested Route 378 forms the eastern edge, while the other boundaries remain unclear, and remains have occasionally been uncovered under the roads, sidewalks, and yards of the surrounding neighborhood.
In 1932 a single set of remains was placed in a Tomb of the Unknown Revolutionary War Soldier, a grave and monument that now sits between an old residential street grid and the highway. The site is documented by the Pennsylvania Historic Preservation Office, Roadside America, and regional news coverage as one of the few marked mass graves of Continental soldiers, and it is presented here as a place of memory rather than a paranormal attraction.
Sources
Unlike many sites on a ghost tour, the Revolutionary War Burial Ground draws its weight from documented fact. More than 500 soldiers were buried on this hillside, the great majority in unmarked graves whose exact locations were never fully recorded. Over the years, construction and gardening in the surrounding West Bethlehem neighborhood have occasionally turned up human remains, a reminder that the dead lie well beyond the small monument.
The Tomb of the Unknown Revolutionary War Soldier, dedicated in 1932, gives the site a single point of focus, but the broader story is of an entire field of forgotten graves hidden in plain sight beneath streets and yards. That is what local guides emphasize when they bring visitors here, and the atmosphere reported is one of solemnity rather than the rattles and apparitions claimed at the nearby Brethren's House hospital.
The site is treated here as a war memorial first. The soldiers buried on this hill died far from home in crowded hospital wards, and the appropriate response is remembrance, not embellishment.
Notable Entities
Visit the monument marking the hillside where more than 500 Continental Army soldiers who died at Bethlehem's Brethren's House hospital were buried between 1776 and 1778. A single set of remains was reinterred at the Tomb of the Unknown Revolutionary War Soldier in 1932. This is a free outdoor stop near downtown Bethlehem.
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