St. Raymond's Cemetery + Typhoid Mary Grave

Back in October I decided to venture to St. Raymond's Cemetery in the Bronx to seek out the final resting place of Mary Mallon, aka Typhoid Mary. I researched the location of her grave and set out to find her—only to find myself wandering around St. Raymond's completely lost. Find A Grave notes the location as "St. Raymond's Cemetery (New)," but Mallon is actually buried in a newer section of the old cemetery. Sound confusing? Yes, it was. I was actually so frustrated that I nearly gave up the search, but after lunch decided to explore the old part of the cemetery so the day wasn't a complete loss (and then discovered that I didn't have a memory card in my camera so I had to buy one at Walgreens—I didn't have the best adventure luck that day).

St. Raymond's is a Roman Catholic cemetery and is one of the busiest cemeteries in the US with approximately 4,000 new burials each year. The old section was opened in the 1870s and the new section was developed in the 1950s. The old St. Raymond's was full of wonderful things, including a lot of headless statues (like St. Michael's) and ceramic portraits (deserving of their own post). In 1932, Charles Lindbergh met with his son's alleged kidnapper at St. Raymond's to deliver $50,000 in ransom money.

Mary Mallon was born in Ireland, and immigrated to the US, where she notoriously worked as a cook for affluent families in New York City. When the families that she cooked for began contracting typhoid, she was quarantined twice on North Brother Island. She refused to adhere to proper hygiene practices (ew) and profusely denied that she was a carrier of the disease. She was, of course, and was in fact the first person identified in the US as an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid.

While exploring the old section, I realized that the section numbers started to match the naming convention of the directions I had for Mallon's grave—Division 15, Row 19, Grave 55—and although I had to cross a street into yet another section of the cemetery (St. Raymond's is huge), I finally found Typhoid Mary. I had been so frustrated and confused for most of the day that finding her felt like hitting the jackpot. I was also so mad at the lack of proper information that I took a screenshot of her grave's location on Google Maps—it's not exact coordinates, but if you're looking to pay your respects to Typhoid Mary, you at least have a head start.

Mary Mallon died of pneumonia at age 69 in 1938, after living out her later years in quarantine at Riverside Hospital. At the time of her death, live typhoid was found in her gallbladder, and she was cremated and interred at St. Raymond's, beneath a headstone she paid for herself. No one is buried on either side of her—in a very crowded cemetery—which may be a coincidence, but still seems fitting.