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Local History
Senator Jonathan Roberts and the Roberts Family Burial Ground
Black Revolutionary War hero Edward “Ned” Hector,
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On March 4, 1811, Upper Merion resident Jonathan Roberts, began his tenure as a US Representative from PA’s 2nd Congressional District. He went on to serve in the U.S. Senate from 1814 to 1821. Roberts remained active in politics and supported a variety of local initiatives. He was an advocate for education and donated the funds to build the first Roberts School for the children of local Croton Mill workers. His name lives on in the current Roberts Elementary School. Jonathan Roberts was instrumental in the Abolitionist Movement and an early advocate for the freedom of slaves. His historic home, which now serves at the offices of the Valley Forge Memorial Gardens, is thought to have been an Underground Railroad site.
Roberts set aside two acres of his land on what was then known as “Red Hill” and established what is now known as the Roberts Family Burial Ground. It was open to not only his own family members, but for any poor people in need of a burial plot regardless of color. Among those people of interred there are Black Revolutionary War hero Edward “Ned” Hector, Civil War soldiers; and victims of the 1918 flu epidemic. It is also to this cemetery that approximately 190 bodies were transferred from the Mt. Zion AME Church graveyard in Norristown in the 1870s.
Senator Jonathan Roberts died in 1854, and along with many other of his family members, is buried in the family burial located at 260 DeKalb Pike, King of Prussia.
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Old Roberts Schoolhouse
