Embreeville began as the Chester County Almshouse in West Bradford, Pennsylvania in 1798. Its name changed to the Chester County Home in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and an adjoining “insane asylum” opened in 1900. The entire complex passed from Chester County to the state in 1914. It became part of the official state hospital network by 1938 under a new name, Embreeville State Hospital. It operated as a psychiatric hospital until the state closed the larger campus in 1980, but a small portion of the complex was renamed to the Embreeville Center, serving those with intellectual disabilities. In the 1990s, the Arc- Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania Protection Advocacy Inc. brought a class action lawsuit against the Embreeville Center, alleging inhumane living conditions, neglect, and medical malpractice. The case, Nelson V. Snider, was consolidated with a 1993 case brought against the state of Pennsylvania by the Department of Justice, also concerning mistreatment at state institutions. This lawsuit ultimately resulted in a federally ordered closure of the complex, to be completed by 1997. The complex lay abandoned until Embreeville Redevelopment completed a total demolition in 2022.

There seem to be at least three separate burial grounds on the premises, with each hailing back to the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century. The third and most recent of these is the most recognizable cemetery located within what is now called the Cheslen Reserve, which is owned and maintained by the non-profit organization Natural Lands. This cemetery has 204 markers which are regularly maintained. The earlier burial grounds are still unmarked and have few existing records. According to Jonathan Hoppe, a digital asset librarian at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the records were destroyed in Hurricane Agnes, which brought major flooding statewide in 1973. But state death certificates do show that residents of the Almshouse/County Home, Asylum/State Hospital, and many unclaimed persons and indigents were buried on the land between 1798 and 1949.  The proportion of burials is unclear, but it does seem that most people with death certificates that list the Hospital for the Insane as their place of death were transported to public cemeteries elsewhere, likely their home counties. Therefore, the majority of those buried within the Embreeville complex were associated with the county home rather than the state hospital.

Further Reading

Chester County article about the upkeep of the cemetery (2018)

Crowdsourced history of the complex (2025)

Local archivists' history of the cemetery and campus (2020)