Day 12 - Chicago City Cemetery
Couch Tomb, Lincoln Park
Cemetery
For my first trip to the north side it seems that I have ended up in a massive graveyard… my destination today is the old Chicago City Cemetery, now known as Lincoln Park. It turns out that my work has been made significantly easier over the past several years: a Northwestern lecturer and local artist named Pamela Bannos began an exhaustive research project on the history of the Chicago City Cemetery in 2007. Her project is called Hidden Truths and is presented on hiddentruths.northwestern.edu.
From 1844 through 1866, the City Cemetery that lay on the north border of the town of Chicago accepted residents. During this time there were several large events that contributed greatly to the residency there, including a major outbreak of cholera and deaths of thousands in the Confederate prison camp at Camp Douglas. The cemetery was divided into several parts – a Catholic and Jewish section, the main body of the City Cemetery, and then the Potter’s Field, where people who couldn’t afford full plots were buried. It was in the Potter’s Field that mass burials from the cholera outbreak and the confederate soldiers occurred.
The lone visible sign of the park’s old life as a cemetery is the Couch Tomb, still standing near the intersection of LaSalle and Clark, conveniently just to the north of the Chicago History Museum. Ira Couch was a wealthy Chicago businessman who arrived in 1836 and rode the wave of Chicago’s growth to successfulness. While he was involved in various real estate holdings throughout the area, he was most known as the founder of the Tremont House Hotel, the first of three of which was located at Lake and Dearborn. In 1857, Couch died while wintering in Cuba with his family. By mid 1858, the tomb was completed and Mr. Couch took his place in the structure. Within 10 years disinterments had begun in the cemetery and continued for nearly 30 years.
Stories always made it seem that this was the lone remaining gravesite in Lincoln Park, the last vestige of the park’s old history as a cemetery. However, crunching the numbers from Bannos’ research, it appears that as many as 10,000 to 15,000 bodies may have been left behind in Lincoln Park (although this is somewhat debated - the students of Rush Medical School were supposedly notorious for stealing bodies from the cemetery in the 1850s and 1860s). But contributing to the in-accountability was the Chicago Fire’s destruction of many of the gravestones. On Day 4 I talk about the fact that reportedly 6,000 Confederate dead were moved to Oak Woods Cemetery (although Bannos quotes a much lower number). Based on the documentation she found, she suspects that a significant number of the soldiers still remain under the baseball fields in the park.
Regardless of the true number of dead left behind in the old cemetery, remains seem to be found every time a shovel hits the ground in the area. In fact 11 skeletons were found to the northwest of the baseball fields when putting in a line for a water fountain in the mid 1980s. A high concentration of skeletons have been found to the south of North Avenue in what used to be the Catholic Cemetery – this is in part due to the high density of private housing constructed in the area. Here’s a good map of documented cases: hiddentruths.northwestern.edu/evidence/findings_map/unexp...
Day 12 - Chicago City Cemetery
Couch Tomb, Lincoln Park
Cemetery
For my first trip to the north side it seems that I have ended up in a massive graveyard… my destination today is the old Chicago City Cemetery, now known as Lincoln Park. It turns out that my work has been made significantly easier over the past several years: a Northwestern lecturer and local artist named Pamela Bannos began an exhaustive research project on the history of the Chicago City Cemetery in 2007. Her project is called Hidden Truths and is presented on hiddentruths.northwestern.edu.
From 1844 through 1866, the City Cemetery that lay on the north border of the town of Chicago accepted residents. During this time there were several large events that contributed greatly to the residency there, including a major outbreak of cholera and deaths of thousands in the Confederate prison camp at Camp Douglas. The cemetery was divided into several parts – a Catholic and Jewish section, the main body of the City Cemetery, and then the Potter’s Field, where people who couldn’t afford full plots were buried. It was in the Potter’s Field that mass burials from the cholera outbreak and the confederate soldiers occurred.
The lone visible sign of the park’s old life as a cemetery is the Couch Tomb, still standing near the intersection of LaSalle and Clark, conveniently just to the north of the Chicago History Museum. Ira Couch was a wealthy Chicago businessman who arrived in 1836 and rode the wave of Chicago’s growth to successfulness. While he was involved in various real estate holdings throughout the area, he was most known as the founder of the Tremont House Hotel, the first of three of which was located at Lake and Dearborn. In 1857, Couch died while wintering in Cuba with his family. By mid 1858, the tomb was completed and Mr. Couch took his place in the structure. Within 10 years disinterments had begun in the cemetery and continued for nearly 30 years.
Stories always made it seem that this was the lone remaining gravesite in Lincoln Park, the last vestige of the park’s old history as a cemetery. However, crunching the numbers from Bannos’ research, it appears that as many as 10,000 to 15,000 bodies may have been left behind in Lincoln Park (although this is somewhat debated - the students of Rush Medical School were supposedly notorious for stealing bodies from the cemetery in the 1850s and 1860s). But contributing to the in-accountability was the Chicago Fire’s destruction of many of the gravestones. On Day 4 I talk about the fact that reportedly 6,000 Confederate dead were moved to Oak Woods Cemetery (although Bannos quotes a much lower number). Based on the documentation she found, she suspects that a significant number of the soldiers still remain under the baseball fields in the park.
Regardless of the true number of dead left behind in the old cemetery, remains seem to be found every time a shovel hits the ground in the area. In fact 11 skeletons were found to the northwest of the baseball fields when putting in a line for a water fountain in the mid 1980s. A high concentration of skeletons have been found to the south of North Avenue in what used to be the Catholic Cemetery – this is in part due to the high density of private housing constructed in the area. Here’s a good map of documented cases: hiddentruths.northwestern.edu/evidence/findings_map/unexp...