For further information about any of these topics, the reader is advised to consult the recommended readings. The earliest Pennsylvania cemeteries were merely burial grounds on family or church property. Initially, burial was largely a matter of expedience. Burials were marked by a wooden marker or a crude fieldstone. Early wooden markers have long since decayed, but in many graveyards the crude fieldstones of the frontier period still remind visitors of the struggle to transplant a culture into the wilderness.
Some early fieldstones bear the initials of the deceased, or the date of death, or both.
In rare instances, more sophisticated gravemarkers began appearing during the first few decades of settlement, either because the settlers imported stones from more developed areas or because some of the settlers were accomplished stonecarvers and quarrymen. Settlers' graves reveal the efforts of survivors to reproduce the culture from whence they came in the new, strange surroundings. Many of these markers are strikingly beautiful and moving despite, or perhaps because of, their crudeness. By the era of the Revolution, most of Pennsylvania had long been settled. With the development of a quarrying industry and the growing prosperity of many of Pennsylvania's residents, gravemarkers became more sophisticated.