“Here . . . lie the social ciphers. Individuals interred at potter’s field are stripped of all the symbols which classify them as human beings. They are buried without flowers, without clothes, without graves, and without names.” —W.M. Kephart, “Status After Death,” American Sociological Review, October 1950
There may have been a grave marker–but if there was, it did not last long. Huber’s remains vanished into the cemetery, along with those of thousands of other people–the poor, the insane, the tubercular, the stillborn, the vagrants–whose only crime had been to die in Cook County without friends and without money.
In 1851 Chicago was a bustling metropolis of 30,000, getting farm produce and immigrants aplenty via the three-year-old Illinois and Michigan Canal. The new Galena and Chicago Union Railway was inching its way west from Elgin toward Belvidere.
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At some point–we don’t know just when–those who died at the poorhouse began to be buried on the farm. It was a long trip back to the city, and anyway Chicago, which had more than tripled in size during the 1850s, was fast outgrowing its own cemeteries. By the time Lincoln and Douglas had finished debating in 1858, the city cemetery and potter’s field, at Clark and North, were no longer at the edge of town. At the insistence of north siders, no more plots were sold there after 1859, and further burials were forbidden in 1866. Those who could afford to pay for their final resting places were directed to the recently incorporated Graceland, Rosehill, Oak Woods, and other private cemeteries. Those who couldn’t pay went to the County Farm.
Where at the County Farm? Since the reappearance of the body this spring, three real estate developers, two departments of Cook County government, three departments of the city, six departments of the state, several archaeologists, one neighborhood church, and an amateur historian have all wanted to know.
So where exactly was this 20-acre burying ground? A better question, says Fleig, is where wasn’t it? “We know it’s close to the insane asylum. We know it has to be in the first 80 acres. [The county ultimately bought more than 200 acres there.] It has to be where buildings and ponds aren’t.” The 1905 Sanborn fire-insurance map shows just one such area–and it includes the spot where the body and the bones turned up in March.
Still the city-outside-the-city grew, founded on the philosophy expressed in 1914 by a committee of the Illinois State Hospitals’ Medical Association: “segregation of the unfit, the insane, the feeble-minded, the defective, delinquent, the criminal and the like.” A new nine-building infirmary complex was erected in the early 1880s. After a patronage scandal in 1885, the asylum was eventually removed from the patronage system and placed under civil service. Building continued apace: several new dormitories or “cottage wards,” a tuberculosis hospital, a new morgue, and several more buildings for the tuberculous.
