During the eighteenth century, many German Reformed adherents emigrated to Pennsylvania and neighboring colonies from Germany and Switzerland, often to escape wars in Europe. On September 21, 1727, the Reverend George Michael Weiss and 400 members of the German Reformed Church arrived in Philadelphia from the Palatinate region of western Germany. They settled in a neighborhood east of Broad Street and north of Market Street. Weiss, the first ordained German Reformed minister in North America, began holding services soon after his arrival. The congregation he organized in 1727 became Philadelphia's Old First Reformed Church.



In 1837, the expanding congregation built a new church building, its third, at its present location. Though the congregation had a burial ground nearby in what would become known as Franklin Square, in 1835, the City of Philadelphia had reclaimed the land for public use and condemned the burial ground,, and many gravestones there were laid down flat overtop the graves and built over.

The architect of the 1837 church thus included 18 burial crypts, accessible through the basement, in the new church's design. A member of the congregation could buy a crypt for $300 and have space for several family members. Some crypts were earmarked as temporary storage for cadavers when icy weather made the ground at other cemeteries too hard for digging.

In 1882, facing demographic changes, the congregation sold the building to a paint company and moved to West Philadelphia. The bodies entombed in the crypt were moved to West Laurel Hill Cemetery.

In 1967, the congregation, which had become the Old First Reformed Church United Church of Christ, repurchased and restored the building for use again as a church. As part of its efforts to honor its history, several tombstones from the congregation's former burial ground in Franklin Square, recovered during construction activities there prior to the national Bicentennial celebration in 1976, were placed on view in the church's lower narthex as part of its "For All the Saints" display, while other recovered stones and fragments are in stored in the crypt.

These stones are separate from the memorial garden located outside the church.