Artist Pamela Bannos Uncovers the Hidden Truths of the City of Chicago Cemetery and Lincoln Park

Up to 35,000 early Chicagoans could be buried incognito in Lincoln Park, which was the city’s cemetery in the mid- 19th century, says Pamela Bannos, originator of the Hidden Truths project.

Bannos is an artist and researcher who utilizes methods that highlight the forgotten and overlooked; she explores the links between visual representation, urban space, history, and collective memory.

A native Chicagoan, Bannos became involved with the hidden history of Lincoln Park because of the Ira Couch mausoleum, which is immediately north of the Chicago History Museum and east of Clark Street along LaSalle Drive. Why was the stone tomb all alone, she wondered.

“I walked over there to have a look in 2007, and I did not stop until it was done,” she said in a telephone interview. The Tribune had just started to allow access to its digitized version “so technology brought me back to the past in an efficient way.” She kept asking questions, finding period stories, and recording them along with other documents, to the point where the Hidden Truths website (hiddentruths.northwestern.edu) today amounts to more than 100 pages.

“As an artist, what I was interested in was, 'how did we lose the history of this cemetery? Why don’t we know that the first and second generation of Chicagoans are buried there?'”

Bannos is often interviewed around Halloween, but she does not view Lincoln Park as a “creepy graveyard.” Instead, she sees the Hidden Truths project as manifesting early Chicago history for the masses.

“It’s not a gory story. The best thing this project could do is to recognize these people, bring attention to them and this part of our history.”

“Gentrification” would be the word modern urbanologists use to tell why the bodies remain in Lincoln Park, and to some extent, Bannos agrees. The evolving city had other uses for the land than a graveyard, particularly the “potter’s field,” or unmarked graves for the indigent, which were located east of what is now Dearborn Street and north of North Avenue, under the present-day Lincoln Park baseball diamonds.

“Everyone did their diligence. But for me, it always came down to money. Their graves were not marked. We do not know who they are.” After the Chicago Fire of 1871, the 10,000 remains in the potter’s field were supposed to be moved to Dunning Cemetery, far west on what is now Irving Park Road, but what Bannos read about the job does not add up. On Sept. 18, 1872, the Tribune noted that 10 men would be able to move 20 remains per day (digging by hand): a job she estimated would take 500 days. Twenty-five days later, on Oct. 13, 1872, another Tribune story said that the job would be completed in a week. The next August, a Tribune story said that “upwards of 6,000 bodies” had been removed — which leaves a gap of 4,000.

Still more changing numbers at the potter’s field concern the nearly 4,000 Confederate prisoners of war who died during the Civil War at Camp Douglas, which was located at what is now 31st and Cottage Grove. The “rebel dead,” as they were known in city records, were supposedly moved from the POW camp and the City Cemetery to Oak Woods Cemetery on the South Side between 1865 and 1867, according to the National Park Service. Their elliptical, 475-foot by 275-foot plot, topped by a 30-foot column and a Confederate soldier, was dedicated by President Grover Cleveland and 100,000 onlookers in 1895.

“I am saying they didn’t remove 4,000 people,” Bannos said. “There are stories of empty boxes showing up on the other end. The whole thing sounds like a debacle. The cheapest bidder got the job and was the brother of an alderman.”

Bannos bases the estimate of 35,000 overall remaining Lincoln Park graves on the baseball diamond density of 500 graves, side-by-side, and the capacity of the cemetery, which extended along the lakefront from what is now North Avenue to Webster Street. Between Wisconsin and Webster Streets, however, graves had not been dug.

“It’s the changing times, the growing city, the expanding population, all capped by the Chicago Fire. The park was already being developed. It was the confluence of many things that led to the demise of the cemetery and the birth of our beloved Lincoln Park.”

Bannos makes no historical judgments, but she sees six factors behind the hidden cemetery in the park:

Sanitary concerns Dr. John Rauch was chair of Rush Medical College, a Civil War surgeon and a member of the Chicago Board of Health. Dr. Rauch wrote an informally circulated paper in 1859 (published in 1866) on the dangers of urban burials because of a “miasma” that arose from them, which was harmful to people living nearby. He argued that since the cemetery was below the water table, bacteria from the dead could seep into Lake Michigan and contaminate the water supply. He first called for the removal of the City Cemetery and furthermore, for the development of a park system, because trees absorbed noxious gases and supplied oxygen.

The rural cemetery movement When the City Cemetery opened in 1843 at what is now the lakefront and North Avenue, it was just outside the city limits. However, by the 1860s, the burial grounds themselves were crowded and the city had encroached around them. The first rural cemetery in the U.S., Mount Auburn near Boston, was established in 1831, and the idea of a pleasantly landscaped rural cemetery for repose of the dead had become part of popular culture. Dr. Rauch had even advocated for it.

Further sales of burial lots in the City Cemetery were halted in May 1859 (although burials continued in the potter’s field and grandfathered lots until March 1866). Rosehill, Chicago’s first rural cemetery, opened in August 1859, followed the next year by Graceland Cemetery – farther up Clark Street – and by the Catholic Calvary Cemetery in Evanston. Each of these new rural cemeteries was more than five miles outside what was then the city limits.

Under a special agreement with the City Cemetery, Rosehill took potter’s field occupants for a short while. Graceland received bodies from 1860 to 1881, particularly during evacuation of the Milliman Tract (1866-67) and efforts to convert the cemetery to Lincoln Park (1872).

The desire for a park on the lake The unoccupied northern section of the City Cemetery was established as a park in 1863 at the request of Chicago citizens. In October 1864, Cemetery Park was renamed Lake Park. One year later, after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, the name was changed to Lincoln Park.

The Milliman Tract In 1862, the heirs of the Jacob Milliman family sued the City, on the grounds it had illegally acquired a 12-acre tract within the City Cemetery from them in 1850. The Milliman family had homesteaded in the 1840s, at roughly the site of today’s Lincoln Park Farm in the Zoo, (at about Wisconsin Street).

The mother and father had died by 1850 and were buried there, and their five children were sent to guardians. Attorneys for the children, who were now in their 30s, said that the land was taken from them illegally and the case went all the way to the Illinois Supreme Court, which agreed. Rather than pay $75,000 outright to the Milliman heirs, city officials decided to vacate the cemetery grounds and to return the land to them. In 1867, 1,635 bodies had been removed from the tract.

The development of the Chicago park system The City Cemetery grounds started under the jurisdiction of the Board of Public Works. People who wished to buy a grave went to city hall and recorded the deed as they would any other real estate transaction. There was no system of perpetual care, as exists in today’s cemeteries, and families maintained the grounds or moved the bodies themselves – unless they died off. Records for the potter’s field are more sketchy, since no money changed hands for those graves, Bannos said.

However, in 1869, the Common Council officially transferred financial responsibility and legal jurisdiction from the Board of Public Works to the new Lincoln Park Commissioners. These commissioners intended to convert the older, southern portion of the cemetery into a park, but they did not have the funding stream to pay for the disinterments.

The Chicago Fire finalized the demise of the City Cemetery, as it burned south from the central business district and north along the lakefront to Fullerton Avenue. Various accounts describe people fleeing north and east through the cemetery, displacing wooden and marble markers over graves. Without tombstones, cemetery officials could not be certain where bodies lay. What’s more, the city did not own the land, the individual buyers did.

Over 700 cemetery lots were condemned in 1874, yet headstones remained of individuals who had no friends or family to rebury them elsewhere. Lincoln Park Commissioners wanted to finish the transition to a park, so they moved the scattered marked graves farther north of the ball diamonds. A few years later, these headstones were also removed.

By the late 1870s, the Couch mausoleum was the last visible remnant of the cemetery. Early in the 20th century, however, three Revolutionary War groups collaborated to put a boulder over what was said to be the grave of 115-year-old David Kennison, the last survivor of the Boston Tea Party.

The memorial to Kennison reinforces the idea that contemporary Chicagoans recalled the area as a cemetery, Bannos says. However, in a 1973 essay titled, “David Kennison and the Chicago Sting,” Albert G. Overton wrote that Kennison assumed the identities of other Kennison/Kinnison men to tell his story. He was actually 7 at the time of the Boston Tea Party, saw no Revolutionary War service and was only 85 when he died.

“Hopefully, this publication will….be used as an example of what can be found through proper research efforts, and amuse those who will appreciate the humor of the little old man who conned his way into history and stung Chicago for a most valuable piece of real estate as his final resting place,” Overton wrote.

Ira Couch of the namesake mausoleum had owned the fancy Tremont House, where both Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas launched their U.S. Senate campaigns in 1858. When Couch died in 1857, he left his estate in trust for 25 years. But real estate comprised the majority of his assets, so the Chicago Fire bankrupted them, Bannos said. At the time, it was said that the rivets holding the tomb together were so fused that it would cost $3,000 to move it. “It all ends up being about money,” Bannos said. “In the end, nobody would take responsibility to pay for it.”

Bannos has been told that the Couch tomb was supposed to be her beacon into the project. She acknowledges that everything flowed together for her afterward, from the Freedom of Information Act, to the digitization of the Tribune and being able to read newspaper stories as they were unfolding. She is bemused by stories that appear to be shocked by the discovery of remains in Lincoln Park.

“It’s like a game of telephone. Eventually we lost this history because it wasn’t told properly. It wasn’t indexed.”

The “Unexpected Findings” section of the Hidden Truths website, however, has captured a March 22, 1899 newspaper story that told about Lincoln Park crews who found several coffins and bones while laying a sewer near Eugenie and Clark Streets. An assistant superintendent said that nearly every year, some human remains were exhumed during a public improvement project, “but they are always laid back in the same place.”

Skeletal remains were found in 1932, during excavation for the foundation of the Chicago History Museum; seven more skulls in 1971, while digging for its addition; and 81 more skeletons during construction of its underground parking facility at LaSalle Drive and Clark Street in 1998.

Eleven skeletons, including a mother with a baby in her arms, were found in August 1986 when crews were placing lines for a new drinking fountain near the Lincoln Park South Fieldhouse, west of the ball diamonds.

Bannos has also been able to corroborate the newspaper accounts with Chicago City Council proceedings dating to the 1830s that were presumed lost in the 1871 Fire. They were in a southwest side warehouse. The Lincoln Park Commissioners’ reports were found in a sub-basement under Soldier Field, where the Chicago Park District had its offices.

“All of a sudden, all of this evidence is in front of me,” Bannos said. “All of a sudden, I was able to put it all together and aggregate it and tell what happened to the lost first generation of Chicago citizens.”

During one media interview, a psychic told Bannos that all the skeletons and unmarked graves in Lincoln Park represented restless souls. In gaining them recognition, she laid them to rest.

“I benefit from that, the psychic said. I have good karma from that. I never thought of it that way. I knew I had told the history and recognized them for their humanity, which makes me feel good.”