Hyde Park Catholic Cemetery

The cemetery was established around 1850 on a hilltop along Oram Street in the Hyde Park section of Scranton. It served the Irish Catholic community that had settled in Hyde Park to work in the iron furnaces and coal mines. At the time, Hyde Park was a separate borough. It would not merge into the city of Scranton until 1866.

The original name was Hyde Park Catholic Cemetery. When Pope Pius IX erected the Diocese of Scranton in 1868 and appointed William O’Hara as first bishop, the cemetery came under diocesan administration. It was renamed Cathedral Cemetery sometime after 1898.

Bishop O’Hara’s Monument

William O’Hara died on February 3, 1899, at age 82. He was initially buried beneath the main altar of St. Peter’s Cathedral in downtown Scranton. His remains were later exhumed and re-interred at Cathedral Cemetery, where a monument was erected over his grave. O’Hara had led the diocese for its first three decades, from its founding in 1868 until his death, establishing parishes and schools across eleven counties of northeastern Pennsylvania.

The Mitchell Monument

John Mitchell, president of the United Mine Workers of America from 1898 to 1908, died on September 9, 1919, in New York City of pneumonia. He was 49. Mitchell had led the Great Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902, which brought 147,000 miners off the job for five months and ended with a presidential arbitration commission awarding the workers a ten percent raise and a nine-hour day.

Mitchell was cremated. The United Mine Workers Union erected a monument at Cathedral Cemetery in his memory. Each October, a memorial service called “Remember Johnny Mitchell Day” is held at the site. The tradition draws from the phrase anthracite miners used during the 1902 strike, rallying around Mitchell’s name in multiple languages.

The Bivouac of the Dead

Section 9 is a dedicated veterans area named after Theodore O’Hara’s poem “The Bivouac of the Dead.” A cannon and commemorative plaque mark the entrance. The section contains graves of veterans from the Civil War, Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II. Approximately 15,000 veterans are interred across the full cemetery grounds. Since around 2021, Cathedral Cemetery has participated in the Wreaths Across America program, which places wreaths on veterans’ graves each December.

The Hilltop Today

Cathedral Cemetery is the largest cemetery in the Diocese of Scranton system. Find a Grave documents 53,524 memorials on the grounds. The cemetery is administered by the diocese under superintendent Josh DePrimo, with offices open daily from 9 AM to 5 PM.

Several other cemeteries sit on adjacent hilltops along the same ridge. The Greek Orthodox Cemetery, Sacred Heart Lebanese Cemetery, Russian Orthodox Cemetery of Saints Peter and Paul, and Saint John the Baptist Cemetery all occupy nearby land. The cluster of burial grounds reflects the successive waves of immigrant communities that settled in Hyde Park from the 1840s onward.