The Hanover Street Burial Grounds contained three separate and distinct graveyards fronting on Hanover Street – the Kensington Methodist Episcopal Burial Ground, the Union Harmony Burial Ground, and the Union Wesleyan Burial Ground.

The burial grounds here began in 1826, when the Kensington Methodist Episcopal Church purchased a lot between Duke and West Streets (now Thompson and Belgrade Streets) for $700. There, they established a burying ground for their congregation.

To the south of that burial ground, the Union Wesleyan Church of Kensington laid out a burying ground of its own in 1828. At one time, this burial ground seems to have been under the supervision of undertaker George Copp, as several obituaries refer to this as the "burial ground of George Copp, Kensington."

That same year, 1828, the Union Harmony Burial Company of Kensington was organized by Nicholas Helverson, a coffin manufacturer and undertaker. The company was incorporated by an act of the legislature in 1831. Burial privileges in the ground were sold for as little as $6. All three cemeteries together – the Kensington Methodist Episcopal Burial Ground to the north, the Union Harmony Burial Ground to the south, and the Union Wesleyan Burial Ground in between – were known as the Hanover Street Burial Grounds (or the singular Hanover Street Burying Ground).

By the 1920s, an estimated 3,000 people had been laid to rest in the Union Harmony Burial Ground (the company was then under the control of a descendant, William S. Helverson), and permission was received from the Board of Health to remove all three grounds. Interments from the Union Harmony and Union Wesleyan Burial Grounds were said to have been removed in 1922 and 1923 to Fernwood Cemetery in Delaware County, and those from the Kensington Methodist Episcopal Burial Ground to Forest Hills Memorial Park in Montgomery County. Other burials were said to have been removed to Graceland Cemetery in Yeadon, Delaware County, and North Cedar Hill Cemetery on Frankford Avenue in Philadelphia.

Today, the Hetzell Playground occupies the site.